Central City, 1937

For most of the year Central City is a scraggly little Colorado mining town (pop. 572) asleep in the memory of an ancient glamor. But for two or three weeks in the summer it is crowded with well-dressed visitors, most of them having a fine time and many of them tipsy. Last week the town was crowded and the focus of festivity was the Central City Opera House.

In 1878, the year the opera house was built for the fun of pretentious gold miners, Norwegian Dramatist Henrik Ibsen sat down to write a play about Nora Helmer, a pampered, naive little wife who commits forgery to get money when her husband is sick, gets such a taste of the world that she leaves home to find out what life is really like. This play, A Doll's House, was presented in Central City's old theatre last week. Nora Helmer was played by sly, small Comedienne Ruth Gordon, who scored a huge personal success last year in a revival of William Wycherley's bawdy classic, The Country Wife. Sam Jaffe played the blackmailer, Nils Krogstad; Walter Slezak was the husband and Dennis King took the part of Dr. Rank. Instead of the stilted, outmoded language which mars most Ibsen translations, the play was given in modern idiom supplied by Thornton Wilder. Producer Jed Harris (Broadway, Coquette, The Front Page, The Green Bay Tree) worked in collaboration with Producer Richard Aldrich, who is this year's festival manager.

Visible among the babbling throng of spectators were the 44 1/4-carat Hope Diamond and its wan owner, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean. Also on view were the New York Herald Tribune's fashionable chitchat columnist, Lucius Beebe; Ward Morehouse of the New York Sun; Dr. Kingsley Roberts, Manhattan Surgeon; Mrs. Paul T. Mayo of Denver, her sister Mrs. Stanley Harris of Washington, Mrs, William McKinnon of Paris, Eloise Staats of Greenwich, Conn., who raises horses on her Colorado ranch, and a host of other socialites. There was so much alcoholic garrulity in the packed house that the first two acts were hardly audible, but the audience calmed down during the third act and erupted in thunderous acclaim at the final curtain. The play will run at Central City for three weeks. Producer Harris is pointing it for Manhattan this autumn, believes he has a smash hit.

As at Austria's music festival in Salzburg (see p. 37), the main performance is not the whole show at Central City. There are saloons and gambling halls with oldtime atmosphere and Sheila Barrett doing impersonations in a nightclub. On the schedule this year are trips through the gold mines, a hose-cart race by the volunteer fire department, a rock-drilling contest for Colorado miners.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.