Have Ice, Will Travel

New Delhi National Stadium bulged last week with Indian families in traditional saris and dhotis, but that was as far as tradition went. As the stage lights snapped on to illuminate a blindingly white rectangle of ice--50 ft. wide and 100 ft. long--bedazzled spectators found themselves plunk in the middle of a late model U.S. ice show. A line of leggy chorus girls jazzed across the frozen stage, acrobats jumped, buffoons rocked, swayed and tumbled.

Producer of the show: Holiday on Ice Inc., a Minneapolis outfit which has four companies touring all over the world (one in the U.S.). Indians, who had never seen a major ice show in their country before, fell for it like novices on their first pair of single-runners. Even the anti-U.S. Shanker's Weekly called it "stupendous," argued that "good American show business is worth more than guns and butter." Delhi's citizens jammed the 8,000-seat theater nightly. Among the spectators: Prime Minister Nehru.

Cool Bucks. Despite Holiday's success, one production official complains that "putting on this show in India has been more frustrating than in any other country we've ever been in." Frustration began on the docks of Bombay, where $1,500 worth of lighting equipment was light-fingered away, continued apace when the New Delhi arrival of Old Betsy, Holiday's 20-ton icemaking compressor, was delayed ten days by a flood. Manager Carl Snyder found the stadium grounds awash in mud, although the monsoon was well over; municipal engineers eventually located a broken water main, while elegant opening-nighters tippy-toed to their seats on temporary wooden planking.

What keeps the managers of Holiday on Ice from throwing up their hands and going into the plumbing supply business is the fact that, for all its loony complications, the show turns a cool buck. Holiday Inc. grossed more than $10 million (more than half of it overseas) with six companies last season, expects to do $9,000,000 with five troupes this year.

Enter Old Betsy. The kind of expensive, splashy icetravaganza mounted in the mudflats of New Delhi last week was launched in 1936 when Professional Skaters Oscar Johnson and Eddie and Roy Shipstad teamed up in the Ice Follies, were followed the next year by Sonja Henie in Arthur Wirtz's Hollywood Ice

Revue (which died of atrophy two years ago). In 1939 along came the Ice Capades, now the nation's largest, with two separate companies touring the U.S. (last year's gross: about $10 million). When Minneapolis Restaurateur Morris Chal-fen bought tiny Holiday Inc. in 1945, the Big Three had successfully tied up all major U.S. ice palaces.

Chalfen commissioned an engineering company to design the progenitor of OkU , Betsy, a truck-sized monster that forces a brine solution through five miles of intricate piping, can ice up a 5,000-sq.-ft surface in a day. No longer dependent on U.S. theater dates, Iceman Chalfen sent his first troupe off to South America in 1949, another to Europe the following year, a third to the Far East in 1953. When the U.S. wanted an ice show for a July showing at the U.S. exhibit in Brussels, Holiday Inc. was ready and waiting with the same troupe that is now in India. Holiday now employs 300 skaters (the other U.S. ice shows use a total of about 280) from an apparently inexhaustible supply of eager youngsters skilled at figure eights. As long as Holiday can find replacements for skaters who suddenly decide to get married and settle in Buenos Aires, the show will skate anywhere in the world and bring its own ice.

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