Within a fortnight of the time this issue of GOURMET appears on the newsstands, the thoughts and footsteps of a good many interested and interesting people will be turned toward Denver and, eventually, toward Central City, fifty miles out of the Queen City in the Colorado Rockies. For the evening of Saturday, July 6, will see the curtain go up on one of the most glamorous of re-revivals America will see in the postwar era, when pioneer days are recreated, not by actors or impersonators, but by people who in some cases actually participated in them and to all of whom such days are but a single generation removed.
Heaven knows, there is hardly a community in the land where Pilgrim times or Plantation days or Gold Rush nights are not the subject of communal pageantry and the donning of outmoded garb by the ladies of the D.A.R. and the local dramatic society. But Colorado, through the agency of Central, has never been satisfied with a skirmish with history accomplished by the high school cadets repelling the rascally redskins, both sides inflamed to bloodthirsty excess by the absorption of powerful quantities of vanilla pop on the village green.
Central City's annual opera revival before the war was something apart from such naive endeavors and was accomplished with all the gaudy panache, alcoholic fury, and de luxe devisings which characterized life in Eureka Street when the Boston mine was producing, literally, millions a year in gold and silver and when Haw Tabor, John Morrisey, Tom Walsh (father of the Hope Diamond), and Baby Doe were living people in the Teller House bar and were tossing gold double eagles on the stage at the conclusion of performances by Modjeska and Lotta Crabtree, Mansfield, Barrett, and the elder Barrymore.
Even in its palmiest days in the seventies and eighties, Central was never a violent, powder-burning community in the tradition of the cattle towns of Texas and Kansas or the California hill towns of '49 and '50. It was orderly, hard-working, and ingenuous. It was also stinking, wonderfully, unbelievably rich and it wanted, in the lonely fastness of the winter Rockies, all the frills and elegances, all the terrapin and champagne that were available in far-off Delmonico's, and it wanted the girls from Tony Pastor's and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It got them in 1870 and it is still getting them today.
Central City, a deadly day's drive up from Idaho Springs over the incredible Canyon Road or half as long by the narrow-gauge Palace cars of the Colorado Central from Denver, was a miniature metropolis. The suites at the Teller were every bit as elegant and filled with ormolu and cloisoné as those in Denver's famed Windsor in Larimer Street. The spitoons in the Teller bar were, if anything, bigger than those in Haw Tabor's beloved Saddle Rock in Leadville. The tailcoats were by the best cutters in Boston, and even in the barber shop of the Palmer House, so it was reported by travelers who had made the grand tour to Chicago, it was impossible to get a finer trim on your whiskers than in the stylish Count Murat's Tonsorial Parlors. Every miner sported a gold Albert watch chain, fit to chain up ore cars with if you pulled a drawbar, and the society doings of the community were punctiliously chronicled in the local press.
Today, during the revivals of the Central City Opera House Association, a handsomely endowed foundation operating in cooperation with the University of Denver, the same scenes are recreated in a modern setting and with very much the same feeling and manner. Denver's first citizens, the Verners, Reeds, Browns, Boettchers, MacFarlanes, Evanses and, of course, the Penroses from Colorado Springs, most of whom own cottages in Eureka Street or overlooking Gregory's Gulch of the Glory Hole which they open for the opera season. House servants, town cars, the best silver and gold plate, linen, and cut flowers are sent up in advance. The Teller House, now the property of the Association, is opened, and its museum pieces of furniture, lovingly collected from all over the West by Justin Brierly, come out from their dust clothes. The Baby Doe suite is occupied by Evalyn Walsh McLean or Governor Carr or some other notable. Celebrities fly in from both coasts. Evening clothes and sparkling wine are universal, and Central City is really en gala, an orchid-scented page out of yesterday's past.
The occasion for all this de luxe Morris dancing and donning of fancy attire is the very distinguished series of revivals which was started in the early thirties with Robert Edmond Jones's production of Dorothy Gish in Camille and which was followed every year until the war by a cast of notables from New York's Metropolitan and the most distinguished dramatic circles in an established classic of the period when Central City was in its original flower. This year the revival will open with Traviata, conducted by Frank St. Leger and with sets by Broadway's Donald Oenslager, which will alternate with performances of an as yet unnamed lighter piece throughout the season.
The revivals are managed by Polly Grimes and Frank Ricketson, Jr., a local film distributor and the possessor of one of the finest cellars in Colorado. Central has never been a church festival. The bar of the Teller House has been almost as profitable a source of revenue as the box office itself, and to this day, on opening night, traffic is routed down out of the mountains in one direction only to prevent a recurrence of the troublesome accidents of other years when bemused motorists, under the impression they were driving the Deadwood Coach, contrived to drive over the edge of the Canyon Road, which is two thousand feet high in spots.
There were until just before the war, and may well still be, old-timers around Gilpin County who remember Central City long before anyone ever thought it would become, perhaps in partnership with Nevada's Virginia City, America's most celebrated “ghost town.” Mayor John Jenkins, who is no graybeard, still keeps a set of gold scales in his cast-iron safe and a supply of fuse and blasting caps behind the cannon ball stove in Jenkins' Hardware Store. A minstrel who turns up now and then under the name of “Powder River Jack” is said by students of the internal evidences of his ballads to be an authentic sourdough. Billy Hamilton, caretaker of the Opera House, was caretaker before the turn of the century. The past and only yesterday are just around the corner from Williams' Livery Stables and they can be and are once a year invoked by the fiddles in the musicians' gallery of the Teller House playing “Oh, Susannah” and “Clementine,” and the voice of Dr. Louis Shaw, the dancing master, calling “Choose your partners!”
On Broadway the theater season went into its last lap before the accustomed summer slackening of tempo with one of the few resounding surprises of the year and this time one which had to be inscribed on the debit side of the ledger. Woman Bites Dog had in prospect every earmark of a hit of smash proportions. Out-of-town notices were good; its subject, dealing as it did with a dynasty of American newspaper publishers known for their patriotic zeal and humorous personal characteristics, seemed propitious, its authors, Sam and Bella Spewack, are noted for their capacity to inflame audiences to hysteria with such comedy as that of Boy Meets Girl. But Woman Bites Dog, for all its moments of superb slapstick and others of vitriolic ridicule of pretentions in high places, got only a mixed bag of reviews and closed three nights after it had opened. Nobody but the management quite knew why, and the reporters who were less than enthusiastic about its possibilities could be discovered, at Jack and Charlie's, wondering very quietly among themselves if perhaps they hadn't done to death an innocent bit of merriment which might have prospered had they given it encouragement.
The front which the drama reporters of the moment present again against a frankly suspicious public is neither unified nor particularly literate, and the better informed in their numbers are more than usually sensitive of criticism and anxious to avoid controversy. Their ranks shorn by the mutations of time of the urbanity of Brooks Atkinson, the murderous wit of Percy Hammond, and the scholarship of John Mason Brown, it has been remarked by Wolcott Gibbs that there are not three first-raters in the aisle seats today, and less charitable folk incline to believe that he was extraordinarily liberal in his count. There is a school of thought which holds that Mr. Gibbs himself alone combines sound taste, background, and an urbane ferocity in the proportions which make for top-drawer dramatic criticism and that only his own modesty inclined him to include, at the least, two other drama critics in his catalogue of virtues.
The spring show which, to the date this goes to the print shop, aroused almost universal acclaim despite some very weak moments indeed was a revue written by Harold Rome and produced by Melvyn Douglas under the title Call Me Mister, which dealt with the rediscovered delights of civilian civilization by members of the armed service. Atoning for slack and witless interludes by the almost excessive vitality of its performance and some entirely enchanting satire such as its heavenly burlesque of the rhumba, “South America, Take It Away,” Call Me Mister is reasonably sure to be available for some time to come. It avoids by a wide margin the possible bitterness which could impregnate any show devised and portrayed by an all-ex-service cast and yet contrives to embrace a great deal of valid satire and robust wit.
For its cast, the revue has distinct assets in Betty Garrett and a superb comic previously unknown to this department—Jules Minshin—who can even do a parody of Maurice Evans, which is by way of being a lily-painting achievement if ever there were one. A few weak and ineffectual sketches and songs are completely overwhelmed by such hilarious moments as the year's funniest ten minutes on any stage called “Off We Go” and an all-time job on the Noel Coward comedy heroics of a gilded group of the A.A.F.