Word: impresario
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most advanced stage machinery in the business. The curtain rose on a magnificent performance of Ponchielli's La Gioconda. "In the future," said one visiting New York critic, "Bostonians will no longer come to New York for opera; instead, New Yorkers will be coming to Boston." But Impresario Oscar Hammerstein, then staging grand opera at his Manhattan Opera House in successful competition with the Metropolitan, made another kind of prophecy. He noted that the hulking red brick and terra-cotta pile at the corner of Huntington Avenue and Opera Place was next door to the Boston Storage Warehouse...
Boston Merchant Prince Eben D. Jordan put up $700,000 for the building, agreed to support a company for three years if other nabobs bought $150,000 worth of stock. London Impresario Henry Russell became managing director, hired some of the top singers of the day. In its first 15-week season, the Boston Opera House staged 21 works, and the Transcript commented: "In Boston, grand opera is now endorsed by all the churches, and attendance at the opera places no one's morals under suspicion...
...Impresario Russell was never again so well off. The public was provincial: once, after a performance of Pelleas et Melisande, a crowd demanded refunds because it had expected a double feature such as Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana. The company had its share of low-comedy disasters : one performance of an extravaganza titled The Garden of Allah was broken up by the terrified screech of a diva whose bare back was being licked by a camel imported for the production. Most important, Impresario Russell had a way of juggling his bookkeeping and pressing his stars for salary kickbacks. After its fifth...
...Haven't had so much fun since the old cow had twins"), Dean is, in the words of an associate, "photogenic, amiable, happy-go-lucky and a nipple feeder-that is, he knows little outside his music." Says his manager, Connie B. Gay, who is the chief impresario of country-music shows: "Garroway plays to the box office, Jimmy to the grandstand...
...years as a composer, he has been both a popular success and a daring musical explorer, both a commercial artist unafraid of writing for money on assignment (e.g., his Tango for piano solo, his elephants' polka for the Ringling Brothers Circus) and yet an uncompromising individualist. Says Impresario Lincoln Kirstein: "He heard first for us all. Sounds he has found or invented, however strange or forbidding at the outset, have become domesticated in our ears...