Romp at the Met

"I have been asked by the management to say officially that I am the only performer who has ever been engaged by the Metropolitan Opera in spite of his voice." So writes Cyril Ritchard in a Met program note. At any rate, the Met hired him to stage and star in its new production of Jacques Offenbach's La Perichole, and Manager Rudolf Bing has rarely had a better idea. Actor Ritchard's singing may only be an educated guess ("My voice has four legitimate notes," he says, "the rest is just growl"), but he makes up for it in agility, style and wit.

La Perichole, never before done at the Met and rarely seen in the U.S. anywhere, replaced Die Fledermaus as the Met's showpiece operetta and special New Year's Eve attraction. The score is second-rate Offenbach, first performed in 1868, well after the glories of La Belle Helens (1864) and Orpheus (1858); but it is still the work of a master in his field. The libretto is by two hacks of genius, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, who vaguely based it (as they did their celebrated book for Carmen) on a work by Prosper Merimee.* As a pretty street singer who ditches her poor but honest boy friend (Baritone Theodor Uppman) for a viceroy of Peru, Soprano Patrice Munsel does some discreet bumps and grinds, rides an ass, and prettily sings the operetta's best-known tune, a farewell aria to her sweetheart--one of those lovely, almost-convincing pieces of lyricism that Offenbach turned out along with his musical ironies. In addition to the ass ridden by Soprano Munsel--a beast named Amos, rented at $30 a night--Actor-Director Ritchard has assigned himself a black charger for a grand entrance as the viceroy. This constitutes something of a concession by Manager Bing, who in recent years has severely cut down on the use of animals in opera--once as many as eight for Carmen, now nary a neigh. (When Amos was late for dress rehearsal, Bing sent around a sharp memo to the effect that "henceforth, no ass is to be late for rehearsals or performances.")

Apart from the animal motif, Ritchard has staged the affair with the wit of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan romp and the style of a top-drawer fancy-dress ball. Bouncing about like a tall, elegant puppet, he lives up to the excellent settings by Rolf Gerard (including a hilarious-looking Dungeon for Recalcitrant Husbands) and he delivers the lines and lyrics of Playwright Maurice Valency's able English adaptation with skilled gusto. In fact, Ritchard is guilty of only one flaw. He has included a cancan that is danced by the corps de ballet in more or less classic white ballet costumes--and a cancan without flashing garters is like a violin without a G string.

New Roseland

When a public dance hall named Roseland opened on Broadway in 1919, smart young people had recently deserted the waltz for the foxtrot, were just beginning to master the delicate nuances of the shimmy. Sam Lanin and his Ipana Troubadours were on the bandstand, thumping out such Ziegfeld Follies hits as Mandy and You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea. Since that distant New Year's Eve, generations of stag-line Romeos and their girls have bunny-hugged Lindy-hopped, Charlestoned, big-appled black-bottomed and jitterbugged under Roseland's star-studded ceiling. At 1 o'clock one morning last week the stars winked out for the last time; the following night Roseland reopened in glittering new quarters, billed as "a magnificent metropolis of melody and merriment."

Family Entertainment. Although professional nostalgics lamented the demolition of the old Roseland building as the end of an era, the dance hall had actually been changing its function for a long time. It started as a refuge for the "poor young clerks" Scott Fitzgerald wrote about; it evolved into a place of family entertainment. From the beginning, Founder Louis Brecker, a onetime Philadelphia accountant, was determined to put Roseland in a class beyond the average taxi dance hall. He publicized it as the "home of refined dancing" and installed two continuously playing orchestras (practically unheard of till then). He spotted and hired the comers in the dance-band world: Vincent Lopez, Harry James, Louis Armstrong, the Dorseys and Glenn Miller, brought in such headliners as Ted Lewis, Paul Whiteman and Duke Ellington.

Owner Brecker spiced Roseland's entertainment with female prizefights, yo-yo exhibitions, sneezing contests, and dozens of highly publicized jazz weddings, uniting couples who had found romance in Roseland's violet twilight. His finest inspiration, until it was banned by the police, was the dance marathon. To avoid the wrath of Mayor Jimmy Walker, he once carted a truckload of still-dancing marathoners to an excursion steamer and took them out beyond the three-mile limit, where they all became violently sick at the rail.

But for years Roseland's most popular commodity was its hostesses. Brecker chose them, he said, for their refinement rather than their looks. In theory they were forbidden to date the customers. Charging 11-c- a dance or $1.50 a half-hour, they became something of a legend in the '20s and '30s. Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald and John O'Hara put them in their stories.

New Clientele. As it grew older. Roseland became even more decorous. In the '30s Brecker banned jitterbugging, and the number of hostesses steadily dwindled, finally (in 1950) disappeared. Tuxedoed bouncers (politely known as "housemen") prowled through the crowd to keep order. Last week's grand opening of the new Roseland (at 52nd Street, west of Broadway) suggested that henceforth it might be tougher to keep order.

Opening night was riotous even by Broadway standards. Housemen and city cops had a hard time handling the shoving, yelling crowd fighting to get in. The new Roseland--a former roller-skating rink--cost $2,250,000 to build, can accommodate 5,000 people (more than twice the former capacity), and offers a purple-and-cerise tentlike decor that creates a definite harem effect. However, the emphasis is still on good dance music (next attraction: Xavier Cugat); rock-'n'-roll is banned, and Owner Brecker hopes to move on to a whole new type of clientele. The old Roseland was advertised only in the tabloids, but the new establishment will run regular ads in The New Yorker, where, presumably, they will appeal not only to the "poor clerks" but to the college prom trotters, eggheads and exurbanites as well.

* Whose play, in turn, was based on a real character, Micaela Villegas, a celebrated actress in 18th century Peru who became an aging viceroy's mistress and lived in a dazzling palace he built for her. Her end is shrouded in legend. In his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder relates that her beauty was so marred by smallpox that she never afterwards left her mansion, except when she sought solace in a convent. Her nickname, La Perricholi, is supposedly a combination of chola, which in Peru means a woman of mixed birth, and perra, which means bitch.

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