Seven Veils in Chicago

As the swish Metropolitan opened up (see above), Manhattan's common-man's opera ($3 top) shut down. Last week the New York City Opera Company went out on the road, and in Chicago got the kind of ermine-and-top-hat opening it never gets at home. It was the only opera Chicagoans would see all year. But if Chicago and the visiting opera company liked each other, they might form a partnership.

Smart Director Laszlo Halasz has little money to work with. On his last night in Manhattan's City Center, he put on Richard Strauss's Salome as a dress rehearsal for his Chicago opening. He wasn't worried. Said Director Halasz: "My kids are like soldiers. They wait for their cue, and then when it is time they sing. They know if they don't sing there will be trouble tomorrow."

But in the huge $22 million opera house that Chicagoans call "Insull's Folly," his tiny orchestra (he brought 37 musicians with him, added 25 Chicagoans) had to saw and blow hard to be heard; and his singers, fearful of losing themselves--and their voices -- in the 75-ft.-deep stage, hovered close to the footlights. When it was over, some veteran operagoers who remembered Mary Garden's Salome thought that Brenda Lewis' striptease with the seven veils was a bit corny. But one listener, as taken with Brenda's figure as with her singing, reported: "Salome had the best voice I ever saw."

Bringing New York's crackerjack little company to Chicago was largely the idea of the Chicago Tribune's caustic critic Claudia Cassidy, who had insistently trumpeted, "Why doesn't Chicago have something like it?" Claudia deserved some of the credit for the opening-night success (though the house was not sold out) and a subsequent Carmen (which did sell out). Wrote she: "If we are to have opera on a budget, either visiting or in residence, we may as well know immediately what it is like. Salome indicated that it is vivid, effective, sometimes brilliant, and that it has great promise ... It was a welcome assurance that opera without a Maecenas is not necessarily opera without adventure."

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