What Sol Wrought

"Stop them!" cried portly Impresario Sol Hurok to his flabbergasted pressagents. After 35 years of trying, Hurok had finally signed Moscow's famed Bolshoi Ballet for an epochal eight-week U.S. tour, and now he was issuing a frantic order: tell newspapers nothing more about the Bolshoi--not even its repertory. Was Hurok mad? Not at all. As the Bolshoi opened at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House (see Music) last week, he was merely the center of the fiercest ticket crush in recent memory.

So great was the anticipation that Hurok gave first crack to a select list of 38,000 steady customers. By return mail, the elite bought nearly all 100,000 available seats for the Bolshoi's 27 Met performances. Clawing for seats, the general public drove scalpers' prices up and up, finally to $150 a ticket. Many people sent to Hurok's office signed checks with the amount to be filled in. The impresario wangled five additional Bolshoi performances at Madison Square Garden. It only stirred the demand. Near nervous collapse, three Hurok telephone operators quit their jobs; an office girl was mobbed in a public library when she incautiously mentioned her connections.

Then it got sticky. New York's License Commissioner Bernard J. O'Connell charged that the 25 organizations that had bought tickets and were reselling them were doing so in violation of the law. None, apparently, had filled out affidavits as charitable or educational groups. But by the time he got around to serving summonses, says O'Connell, all but three of the groups had already sold all their tickets. The three: the Americans for Democratic Action, the National Lawyers' Guild, the National Council for Soviet-American Friendship. Of particular interest was the Soviet-American outfit, long cited by the Justice Department as a Communist front. It turned out that the N.C.S.A.F. was less interested in theater parties than in promoting its own left-winging ends. It was selling customers as many as ten choice seats apiece, and at box-office prices--plus a contribution to help "the circulation of information concerning life and activities in the Soviet Union."

When Commissioner O'Connell slapped all three organizations with summonses for selling without a license, Impresario Hurok got back about 60% of their tickets. It helped not in the slightest. After selling more than 100,000 tickets, Hurok was left with demands for 900,000 more. In the end, even Hurok was carried away. Spotting a weary woman with two small daughters on the Met's S.R.O. line 20 hours before curtain time, Sol Hurok impulsively gave them three good tickets, marched off as the waiting line pealed hopefully: "Hurrah for Hurok! Hurrah!"

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