The Play

...The enthusiasm of the American public for Gilbert and Sullivan is as genuine and as vital as the enthusiasm of the Italian public for Verdi or the German for Wagner...

...The Metropolitan is shortly to begin the construction oia new opera house...

...The recent opening by the Opera Players of the Grove Street Theatre, a little playhouse in Greenwich Village, roused hopes that a permanent theatre for operetta and the more intimate forms of opera might at last be in process of formation...

...An operetta singer has to learn to act, and it is well to remember that two of the foremost artists of the Metropolitan began in light opera...

...All that Mr...

...Such works, too, as Pelleas et Melisande, Les Contes d'Hoffman, and even Carmen lose half their charm in a theatre suited to the Wagnerian music dramas and the great spectacles of Verdi, and as for the masterpieces of the lighter forms of the lyric theatre, for the operettas of Offenbach and Lecocq and Suppe, and let us not be ashamed to add the names of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Metropolitan is, of course, quite impossible...

...Moreover, it would undoubtedly preserve for us an art which we can ill afford to lose, and might prove, as well, the birthplace for a strictly American school of light opera...

...But why is it necessary to build only one...

...There remains only our old and often belabored friend, the Metropolitan Opera Companv...

...What wealth can bring wealth has brought us—in every respect but one...

...We need such an intimate opera house...

...The opposite is the case...

...This auditorium will then be equally as unsuited for the more intimate types of opera as the one now in use...

...A Mozart opera at the Metropolitan resembles a tiny though precious jewel set in an enormous hoop of gold—the brilliancy is there but it is largely hidden...

...If the Metropolitan builds but one auditorium there can be no hope of improvement...

...Neither of these singers belongs to the semaphoric school of operatic actors, and the semaphoric method is the method which four out of five of the singers who have appeared only in grand opera adopt and never unlearn...

...That enthusiasm we ought to capitalize, and now that the Metropolitan is about to erect a new home for its activities is the time for it to prove that it is not a mere museum of European art and a rendezvous for the tired rich...

...It would train a company of artists in the presentation of an art which is fast being lost, and it would give the younger singers of the Metropolitan an opportunity of learning practical stage technique, an opportunity which they can only obtain at present by singing in the European opera houses...

...To be a successful operetta singer one must not only possess intelligence but know how to employ it, and intelligence would be a grateful addition, indeed, to the equipment of the average soprano pr tenor who at present considers the alternation of a vertical with a horizontal movement of the arms the limit of operatic acting...

...Maria Jeritza was the queen of Viennese operetta long before she sang Tosca or Elizabeth, and Edward Johnson made his debut in The Waltz Dream...

...The singers themselves, though one or two of them possessed excellent natural voices, were in their present state of development little better than rather promising amateurs...

...We have no theatre devoted to operetta or to those more intimate forms of opera for which the vast spaces of the Metropolitan Opera House prove so inhospitable a home...

...Broughton's utterly uninspired score succeeded in doing was to strip the original poetry of the libretto of every scrap of beauty, and to leave an evening of uninterrupted boredom...

...Dana Skinner, dramatic editor of The Commonweal, who has been ill for several weeks, will resume the conduct of this department in our next number.^-The Editors...

...They did their best, but the best of a group of merely well-intentioned amateurs will never found an intimate opera house such as New York needs...

...That the public would welcome with enthusiasm the establishment of a theatre for the more intimate forms of opera and for operetta there can be no doubt...

...Where now are we to get it ? It would be useless to approach the commercial managers, for there is small chance of such a house proving a paying investment...

...Grand opera is to the American composer something more alien that he likes to admit...

...It was a pity, for much intelligence had been shown in the scenery and lighting, and the theatre itself was charming...

...And even if it did not it would furnish the Metropolitan with a training ground for young singers which today it badly needs...

...So it is that though the Grove Street Theatre is now in being we are precisely where we were before...

...The former type of opera the Metropolitan gives us as well as it can be given in an auditorium utterly unsuited to it, but the operettas we never get at all except when commercial managers undertake some special revival, such as Winthrop Ames has so brilliantly given us with Iolanthe and the Shuberts have recently made with Pinafore...

...Would it not be possible to construct within the same building which is to house the golden horseshoe, a smaller theatre, seating, say, some twelve or fourteen hundred, a theatre where such operas as Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutti, and Pelleas et Melisande could be given by the finest artists of the company, and where at other times operettas and opera bouffe could be given by a special company in conjunction, perhaps, with some of the younger and more sprightly members of the opera company proper ? Such a second theatre would have a double benefit...

...In the variety of plays and operas presented, in their staging, even to a considerable degree in their acting, and certainly in their singing, we no longer need fear comparison with the capitals of Europe...

...It is not in his blood because it is not in the blood of the people from which he springs...

...Grenville Vernon...

...Yet this lack is a serious one...

...The Society of American Singers, which once at the Park Theatre showed signs of vitality in its Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, is no more, and the various existing theatre groups such as the Guild and the Greenwich Village Theatre are interested chiefly in the spoken drama...

...But light opera is another thing...

...It would be ridiculous to argue that a course in Offenbach or Gilbert and Sullivan would unfit a singer for Wagner or Verdi...

...The auditorium of this house will bt Us large and possibly larger than the present one at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street...

...The opera was Rutland Broughton's The Immortal Hour, which for some reason known only to the British public has had considerable success in London...

...Its small size, of course, makes impossible any enormous intake at the box office, but it would probably at least pay for itself once it was fairly started...

...The idea was present and the desire, but, alas, both the choice of the initial offering and the performers of it failed to give basis for these hopes...