Word: stagehand
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...about his city's place in operatic history, Viennese Music Historian Marcel Prawy said last week: "Where is there a house in which the orchestra plays from scores that carry the personal annotations of Mahler, Richard Strauss and Herbert von Karajan? Where is there a house where each stagehand and stage technician has undergone an apprenticeship under masters whose teachers themselves form an uninterrupted chain through four generations? And where else is there a house where ushers greet each lady or gentleman by saying 'Küss" die Hand [I kiss your hand]' with a deference that...
...girls, members of the American Guild of Variety Artists, are demanding a 40% raise in salary over the next three years; the management is offering only a 15% hike. A first-year Rockette currently makes $99 a week, or $26 less than the lowest-paid Music Hall stagehand. That breaks down to $4.12 a performance or roughly 20 a kick. The dancers must rehearse 120 hours without pay for the nine new extravaganzas mounted every year at the Music Hall, perform four shows daily for 21 consecutive days followed by six days off. Even then they are on call...
Sneaky Beer. Many singers continue their eating and drinking while performing, following the tradition of Soprano Giulia Grisi, who, whenever she had to fall onstage, always landed near a trap door so that a stagehand could sneak her a glass of beer. In the Metropolitan Opera's current production of Electra, Birgit Nilsson's search for Agamemnon's ax is really a quest for a ginger ale stashed under a rock...
...Sake. Opera lore is rife with stories about sopranos whose contracts provide for dressing-room lovers -a stagehand, perhaps, or a house fireman who donates his services for art's sake. Soprano Gemma Bellincioni made no secret of the fact that she made love in her dressing room right before a performance. If she ran overtime-and she often did-her understanding Italian audiences waited patiently. One shapely U.S. lyric soprano was notorious in the 1940s for sabotaging her leading man by seducing him shortly before going onstage; audiences loved her, hated...
...started his days with an assault on a pyramid of mail, meanwhile giving orders over his intercom system and fielding rapid-fire phone calls: "Hello. Yes. No. Tomorrow. Fine. Goodbye." Then, dictating memos over his shoulder, he would go off on his rounds, turning up onstage to admonish a stagehand ("Don't smoke on our stage, please"), switching off the lights in sub-basement storage rooms, climbing into the uppermost rafters to check on a special staging effect...