Word: salmaggi
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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...
Mandolin to Management. Salmaggi's methods of financing are a mystery even to his closest associates. He has made enough money to own a huge 19-room villa in Brooklyn, where his wife cooks gargantuan spaghetti dinners for the 300 relatives of the Salmaggi family who visit in droves of 40 or 50 at a time. An imposing 6-ft. figure, Salmaggi stalks Manhattan's streets in spats., a hat two feet in diameter, sporting a glittering diamond-studded lapel pin and a silver-headed cane that once belonged to Caruso. But in 1932 Impresarío Salmaggi...
...when Manager Salmaggi's Baritone Interrante, as president of G.O.A.A.A., showed up for the hearing last week, he sang a softer tune. Dropping his charges that Associated Actors & Artistes had been '"scheming" with the Guild, Baritone Interrante agreed to a face-saving compromise by which the two unions would be merged under the name of the newer and more successful one. The Guild agreed to lower its dues from $25 a year (for voting members) to a sliding scale of from $12 to $100 a year, depending on income, so that G.O.A.A.A. members could all remain...