Shoestring Opera

The famed Edinburgh Festival was bottom-heavy with big-name performers --the Royal Philharmonic and Boston Symphony orchestras, the Hamburg State Opera and Sadler's Wells Ballet--as well as big-name composers--Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Mozart. But hidden in a corner of the old city, not officially part of the festival, was a tiny, six-member U.S. troupe putting on three tiny U.S. operas in the Y.W.C.A.'s Gartshore Hall (capacity: 165). The troupe: Manhattan's After Dinner Opera Co., out to show Europe what could be done on a shoestring.

Last January, when Edinburgh's new Director Robert Ponsonby invited the After Dinner group to come, the company scoffed. It would cost a cool $20,000, even cutting corners, they estimated, and who had that kind of money for small-scale, modern opera? Then a fat check arrived from one admirer, and the company eagerly plunged into commercialism to raise the rest. Singers Jeanne Beauvais, Norman Myrvik, Francis Barnard and Musical Director Lucille Burnham gave all the concerts they could. Stage Manager Beth Leibowitz made and sold ceramics, while Company Manager Richard Flusser hopefully entered a TV quiz show named Tic Tac Dough (he won a watch, but no dough). By last month they were so nearly solvent that they embarked.

The Y.W.C.A. auditorium assigned them in Edinburgh proved frustrating: it had no dressing rooms, a poor piano, and the lighting system did not fit American plugs. Nevertheless, opening night last week saw an eager audience. On the program: three examples of a relatively new and typically American type of musical theater--the small, intimate, mostly humorous opera. First came Gertrude Stem's In a Garden, with music by Manhattan's Meyer Kupferman, a Steinishly childlike spoof on royalty that was the success of the evening. ("Redolent, that's the word for the music," approved one Edinburgh matron. "It was the essence of nostalgia.") Next came Sweet Betsy from Pike, by Manhattan's Mark Bucci, a horsy mock-western. The bill closed with The Pot of Fat, by Massachusetts' Theodore Chanler, a Grimm parable about a cat and mouse who married and then found out about their incompatibilities. The crowd clapped the company to the rafters.

The press came away divided. The Scotsman found that, "as advocates of modern American music, they are lacking in discrimination," but the Daily Express called the production "lively and enjoyable." The Daily Mail was jolted, said the company came "to instruct us in a kind of musical entertainment which is almost startlingly novel . . . Their show is slick and professional, yet informal."

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