Word: seasonal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hair on the Chest. Singing so that back-row listeners could actually heaf was another problem. But this season plenty of top-rankers were on hand to try. On the nights when the Metropolitan Opera's Ferruccio Tagliavini sang Tosca and Lucia di Lammermoor, there were few empty seats; fans gladly paid double prices to hear once-barred (for alleged collaboration) Tenor Beniamino Gigli sing the operatic twins "Cav" and "Pag" (Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci) with popular Soprano Maria Caniglia and Baritone Tito Gobbi. Even 60-year-old Tenor Tito Schipa was on hand...
Last week, with a robustious performance of Rigoletto, the Rome Opera's 1949 summer season came to a close. Many of the 200,000 tourists who visited Caracalla found performances full of more swaggering and hair-on-the-chest acting than they were accustomed to; also, the vast distances sometimes provoked more screaming than singing by Caracalla's puffing stars. But most could agree that they had never seen such a striking setting or such magnificent staging...
Broadway stirred last week in the first chill of autumn and looked around for the start of a new season. It was hard to find. At the end of a muggy summer, only 15 shows still ran in its 30 playhouses (half as many as were running in London), and all of September promised only one new arrival. Symptomatically, it was not even the product of a Broadway rehearsal stage, but Los Angeles' long-running revue, Ken Murray's Blackouts...
...hard fact seemed to be that Broadway's production roster, which had shrunk from 224 in 1928-29 to an alltime low of 70 last season, was going to shrink further still. The modest wartime boom was really over, but high production costs remained. Producers looked in vain for the freehanded angels who had gone with the boom. Reported Variety last week: "Nearly all [producers] have to ... flail the underbrush for money...
...there any hope for more activity as the season grew older? Optimistic producers thought that the first few hits to come along would spread the old fever of investment among the angels. That was the way things usually worked out, but in last week's gloom, they were working in reverse. One producer, plugging away at raising money for a new musical, reported that one man turned him down "because he said it wasn't as good as South Pacific," the biggest hit in town...