Outdoor AIdas

Outdoor Aidas

Summer operagoers are informal, easygoing. For them there should be staple fare, easy to look at as well as listen to. All the better if the impresario can jumble onto his stage spear-carriers, dancing girls, supernumeraries by the score. If possible, let there be animals! Could there be camels in Carmen? Elephants in Pelleas et Melisande? Hardly. Of all operatic staples, Aida does best outdoors. Consequently, Aida's familiar tunes ring sweetly every summer in many a U. S. stadium. Biggest and most pompous ever was Cleveland's last summer, in which more than 1,000 performers (including the animals) figured (TIME, Aug. 10). Washington had an Aida last fortnight, presented by that seasoned Aida-man, Maestro Alfredo Salmaggi. In New York's big Polo Grounds Maestro Salmaggi presented successive null at $1 top price, culminating in 1930 with one in which there were elephants as well as camels and horses (TIME, July 28,1930). Aiming to exploit music "on a basis consistent with the dignity of grand opera but with the ballyhoo that will bring its appeal to the proletariat," Maestro Salmaggi planned for Washington a performance with 500 supers from the local unemployed, horses from Fort Myer, elephants and camels from National Zoological Park. After two postponements Aida was performed in Washington by a troupe including Soprano Leonora Corona, Baritone Pasquale Amato and members of the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. The animals had dwindled to eight riding horses, prancing nervously at the sides of the proscenium. The same company will be heard in Baltimore's Oriole Park July 10, Atlantic City's Steel Pier July 17, Chicago's Soldier Field July 31 and ten days thereafter.

In New York's Polo Grounds one night last week, Aida the slave girl stood near the home plate, sang of her love and terror, was at last pent up to die with her soldier lover. There were no animals at all, the supers were ludicrously spindly-shanked and awkward, the scenery an arrangement of posts and draperies which seemed often to confuse the performers. Nonetheless many a Manhattanite had journeyed tediously to 155th Street to see the second U. S. operatic performance of lissome, dark Helen Gahagan, Belasco actress (Tonight or Never) turned singer. New Jersey-born, Brooklyn-raised, Actress Gahagan has been called by Colyumist Heywood Broun "ten of the twelve most beautiful women on the American stage." She made her operatic debut in Czechoslovakia, sang first in the U. S. during Cleveland's opera last summer. Last week's audience admired her dusky acting, applauded lustily when Impresario Maurice Frank thanked her for coming from Hollywood to sing at this benefit (Girls' Service League, Boys' Club of New York). They found her voice sweet but thin, lost in the vast Polo Grounds. More at home were Mezzo-Soprano Carmela Ponselle (sister of Rosa) and Baritone Giuseppe Martino-Rossi. Soprano Gahagan announced she would return to California at once, sing in Jerome Kern's mellifluous The Cat & the Fiddle.

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