Word: trapdoors
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Midway in Jacques Offenbach's frothy operetta La Perichole, a trapdoor opens slowly onstage; from the depths of a subterranean dungeon emerges a doddering old prisoner. He has been digging through various walls for twelve years, and now he is ready to escape. He lasts no more than four minutes onstage before he is forced to flee through the trap again. But to Offenbach fans at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, the sequence is one of the comic highpoints of the evening. The man responsible: Italian-born Tenor Alessio de Paolis (pronounced: Pow-o-lees...
...however, are the trap door, the secret between-floors passage and the hidden room which date back to the 1800's and Professor of Latin Charles Beck. Beck, it seems, was an ardent abolitionist. It appears that he had these devices constructed for the Underground Railway. The trapdoor leads to a secret chamber at the end of which a laddered well descends to the basement. During the twenties this apparatus constituted great fun and games for freshmen and section men who used to climb up an down the shaft. Unfortunately, the passage was subsequently boarded up as a safety measure...
...informer's tip, green-bereted paratroopers of the Foreign Legion rushed into the Casbah and smashed in the door of No. 3 Rue Caton. As Paratrooper Lieut. Colonel Jean Pierre and one of his sergeants broke in, Yacef and his girl friend Zohra scrambled through a trapdoor into a secret chamber above the stairwell of the house. Before he slammed the trapdoor shut, Yacef cut loose with a burst of machine-gun fire, then tossed down a hand grenade that went off in the paratroopers' faces but did not seriously wound them. "Surrender, Yacef," shouted the French officer...
...basement, directly below Faust's vocal soul-struggles, Mephistopheles (Basso Nicola Moscona) paces nervously, dressed in evening clothes, redlined Inverness cape, with top hat and cane. Three grips stand ready at the trapdoor platform. Another maestro, with a score on his lap, sits near by. Mephistopheles clears his throat, begins la-la-la softly. The maestro, straining to hear the orchestra, says, "Ready!" and Mephisto steps onto the platform...
...which sends flame-colored paper streamers upward into sight of the audience. The basement maestro makes an abrupt pronouncement: "Up with him!" The stagehands lift the platform and Mephisto into the air. The audience first sees him sitting on the arm of the chair that screens the trapdoor, nonchalantly swinging his foot and cane. Meanwhile, behind the rear study wall. Marguerite (Soprano Nadine Conner) is climbing a narrow set of stairs to a platform, aided by a stagehand...