Puccini on the Rocks

A miner stepped up to the local bar, slapped down a silver dollar, and warbled: "Set 'em up for everybody!" Although lovers of Italian opera might wince at the line (more traditionally rendered as "Whisky per tutti"), audiences in Colorado's Red Rocks Theater last week happily lapped it up. Occasion: a Colorado Centennial production of Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West, staged in the natural sandstone Red Rocks amphitheater with all the flamboyance of a wide-screen western.

Casting about for a suitable centennial opera last winter, Denver Symphony Conductor Saul Caston latched on to Puccini's "drama of love and redemption" in a California mining town, chiefly because it went well with Red Rocks' rugged mountain setting. Director Herbert Graf altered all references to California to read Colorado, hired Soprano Eleanor Steber to sing the role of Minnie the barkeep. To help fill his cavernous outdoor stage, he hired a covered wagon and a troupe of horses from a 4-H club. And to avoid frequent scene changes, he transferred the action in Acts I and III to the outside of the Polka saloon, constructed a typical Hollywood false-front street--all of it heavily anchored down to prevent the set from blowing away in the waspish mountain winds that swirl into the amphitheater every evening.

Conductor Caston could hear the soloists only through a set of earphones, which went dead during rehearsals. Soprano Steber walked out of the dress rehearsals after trying to sing over howling winds, and the chorus of miners, recruited from local choirs and glee clubs, groped for entrance cues. In the waning hours before the curtain, carpenters hustled about frantically shoring up scenery. But on opening night, Puccini's grand old horse opera went off with scarcely a hitch, moved a capacity audience to reverberating applause. The heroes of the evening, in the eyes of Director Graf, were without question the Western quarter horses. "They don't sing, they don't argue, they take directions," said he, "and they act very well."

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