Word: salmaggi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...greatest producer of second-rate opera in the U.S. is Alfredo Salmaggi. He moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan last week, set up his scenery and props in 55th Street's Turko-Egyptian Mecca Theater, led off with a roof-raising performance of Traviata. Competition from the Metropolitan Opera House bothered Impresario Salmaggi not a whit. "My singers," he averred with a lordly shake of his shoulder-length hair, "are mucha better than the Metropolitan...
...Impresario Salmaggi gives his public its money's worth. His 28-piece orchestra drones out Verdi's melodies like possessed hurdy-gurdies. His tenors and sopranos bellow lustily. His triumphal scenes contain not only singers and ballet dancers but live donkeys and horses, sometimes elephants and camels. In a fit of showmanship a few years ago he signed up Jack Johnson, Negro heavyweight emeritus, chained him to an Egyptian chariot, plastered Manhattan with billboards advertising "Jack Johnson...
...Salmaggi also likes to brag that 24 of his singers have later landed at the Metropolitan. When plump Contralto Bruna Castagna made her U.S. debut with Salmaggi at Manhattan's Hippodrome a few years ago, first-string critics acclaimed her as the foremost Carmen of her generation and the Met snapped...