Rhinestone Horseshoe

No one has denounced the high price of opera more eloquently than New York City's operatic Mayor Fiorello H. La-Guardia. Last week he began practicing what he had preached, sponsored a highly promising opera company of the City's own. He had been itching to do so ever since two years ago, when the City inherited a massive masterpiece of Turkish-bath rococo, formerly known as Mecca Temple, which had succumbed through tax delinquency.

Mayor LaGuardia renamed it the City Center of Music and Drama. City Center opera was popularly priced at a $2.20 top. The roster of its horseshoe glittered not with Astors and Vanderbilts, but with such noted figures as ex-Police Commissioner George V. McLaughlin, National Maritime Union President Joe Curran, International Ladies Garment Workers' President David Dubinsky, and Jacob Rosenberg, president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.

To handle the musical end, Mayor LaGuardia imported a fiery Hungarian-born conductor named Laszlo Halasz, from the St. Louis Grand Opera. Halasz brought some St. Louis scenery, auditioned hun dreds of singers, rehearsed like mad for twelve weeks.

When he was through he produced a Tosca, a Martha and a Carmen that set a new standard of quality in the popular-priced operatic field. Critics rated Tosca (with Soprano Dusolina Giannini and Baritone George Czaplicki) a notch higher than the Metropolitan's recent job (in which Soprano Grace Moore and Baritone Lawrence Tibbett substituted U.S. ham for Italian salami). The City Center's Carmen featured one of the best Carmens in a decade: dusky Jennie Tourel. Daughter of a traveling Russian fur merchant, Jennie Tourel, once a prima donna of the Paris Opera-Comique, now lives with her Latvian artist husband, Leo Michelson, in a four-room Manhattan apartment. Her Carmen (a role she claims to have sung about 200 times) was full of Gallic spice and neat as a championship billiard game. The City Center's Martha, a bid to the Broadway trade, looked and sounded more like musical comedy than opera. So did its star: dark-haired, convent-bred Ethel Barrymore Colt (daughter of Actress Ethel Barrymore and the late Russell Colt of Bristol, R.I.), who had arrived at opera after a fling at Broadway drama (L'Aiglon, Cradle Song) and the nightclub circuit (Spivy's Roof).

Halasz's audiences talked through his overtures and drowned his finales with spontaneous applause. In the last act of Tosca the guns of the firing squad failed to go off, and the hero was obliged to drop dead in silence. In Carmen a soldier tried desperately to get his sabre into his scabbard the wrong way.

But most of Halasz's singers sang well and some of them very well. Its rows packed with enthusiasts including Du-binsky's garment workers and Curran's seamen, the City Center bulged with sold-out houses. But by week's end Mayor LaGuardia's marked-down opera found itself in a situation familiar to its high-priced rival, the Met: it had lost substantially at the box office.

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