David Gockley
"What I want to do is to fill the theater and maximize the revenue and interest the donors and pursue the grand tradition of the San Francisco Opera, the tradition of international glamour and excitement and luminousness." (story)
ANOTHER OPERNING NIGHT AT SF OPERA
Opening Night was back to its peacetime atmosphere of full formality. The evening repeated a pre-curtain script played and played over the years with little variation, but much fanfare, plenty of civic pride and lots of journalistic clichés, although the Chronicle’s Vincent Mahoney was in inspired form when he wrote: “No one was let down. It was a collector’s experience – the grandness of a bygone age kept alive by a complex and fascinating city. It was humanity with almost no suggestion of human dreariness, and that is a multiple dream walking.”
During the fairly frantic half hour before the first note sounded, the action was, as usual, most lively in the hallway by the Carriage Entrance on the north side of the house. The socially prominent, and some who are just ubiquitous. First Nighters, enter there. Photographers collected their quota of shots to fill a page or more in each of the next day’s papers, and society and fashion writers scampered around taking names and making notes on (sounds wrong) the gowns, which were, of course, stylish and impeccable in the San Francisco tradition.
Meanwhile, the central foyer was populated to the crushing point. Pity the man who tried to cross the mass of boiled shirt and ermine with any speed. And outside the glass from doors and those by Carriage Entrance, faithful groups of relatively impecunious citizens came to press their noses, sometimes literally, against the barrier and see the “show.” Singularly friendly, these assemblages sometimes suggest operatic choruses drifted through time, perhaps from a scene in Boris Godounoff.
The writers of color stories return with colorless stories because nobody provides a really good scandal. True, once there was a lady of questionable repute who wore a full-length cape of fresh carnation petal. Another patron of the fair sex “hung herself,” as one opera chronicler remembers, with diamonds. And a gentleman came to the opera in white tie, tails and a ten gallon hat. But, these were exceptions to conformity.
The men who brought transistor radios one Opening Night and listened to a crucial Giants game in the pennant race may be pardoned. But not the backstage employee, who turned the lights up after a “Ritorna Vincitor” and sent a segment of the season’s least informed audience toward the lobby at the wrong time./ Bloomfeld - Fifty Years of San Francisco Opera |
