The chances are that Frank Ricketson, Jr., president of the Association, wishes to high heaven he had never mentioned the word "modernize" because he has committed his organization to a program which may very well prove suicidal for Central and the end of its twentieth-century boom for all time. Opponents of the desecration of the premises maintain, and with some reason, that to modernize Central City will be to make it just one more summer theater festival and an inaccessible one at that, and that if the place hasn't burned down in three quarters of a century, the chances are against its happening now.
Led by Caroline Bancroft, a local historian of standing and determination. Colorado patriots are making life miserable for the Opera, and Aspen, a rival Rocky Mountain resort town with a Victorian building code which strictly interdicts any modernization of any structure whatsoever within its municipal limits, is setting its miner's cap for the tourist trade which will in all probability be diverted from Central if the word gets around that the place is no longer the atmospheric McCoy.
Colorado generally has done itself no good by letting the relics of its spacious youth disappear. The famed Tabor Opera Houses of both Leadville and Denver are gone, and every so often some civic nuisance law is invoked in an attempt to destroy Denver's magnificently Victorian Windsor Hotel, which any other community would endow as a local shrine. The commonwealth has allowed most of the little mountain railroads which provided so much atmosphere and charm to be abandoned for the preposterously infantile reason that they were losing a little money each year, the last example of this stupidity being the abandonment of the narrow gauge division of the tremendously wealthy Colorado and Southern that ran up Clear Creek to Georgetown and Black Hawk.
One of these days, when the last of its authentic attractions stemming from the legendary past has vanished, Colorado will discover that its last asset for the promotion of intelligent tourists has gone with it and that without them it will be on the level of competition with any number of other communities on a purely scenic basis. There are people by the thousands who would travel from far places to Colorado to ride a narrow gauge train or sleep in Haw Tabor's bed or drink in the bar of the Vendome at Leadville who wouldn't step across the street for all the ski slides on earth. Colorado, however, is hell-bent on eliminating everything even vaguely savoring of the old times, and it will at the same time contrive to eliminate its only attraction for numberless people.
There is little enough to report from the fringes of Broadway since this department's most recent monthly bulletin, save the almost total debacle achieved by the executive committee of the League of New York Theaters in its attempt (quite without the majority support of the members, incidentally) to forbid the playhouses on opening nights to members of the press other than the actual critics themselves. The aim was to bar all but one member of the staff of each paper, which meant paragraphers, Broadway columnists, drama editors, drama-news reporters, interviewers, and feature writers, and to give the seats they had occupied for years to interested persons, probably actors and other ringers, who could be counted on as a claque to applaud wildly even the cheesiest presentations.
When the consequences of such arbitrary folly became apparent to the majority of League members, who realized that they were delivering a gratuitous kick in the teeth to the best sources of glamour publicity possessed by the stage, the matter was hastily reconsidered, and the old first-night list restored almost in toto. Individual members of the League went on public record as wholly disowning the idea or any support of it so that, by process of elimination, it was possible for the actual sponsors of the plan to be known. It is reasonable to suppose that these will have occasion to regret their alienation of the reporters for some time to come.
Ironically enough, the turmoil over first-night seats ebbed and flowed during several weeks when there were no openings of sufficient consequence to bring out any but third-string reviewers and copy boys. The only presentation of even mild pretensions to meet this department's dead line was the amiable and sprightly but somewhat diffused "theater party" starring Grace and Paul Hartman called Angel in the Wings. A few years ago this would have been known as an "intimate revue" and that was what most people who saw it believe it to be. The Hartmans, who have made fun of pretentious dancing everywhere from the Plaza and the Waldorf right through the Blackstone to the more elegant ballrooms on San Francisco's Nob Hill, are wonderful when they are on stage, but the pace drags when they are not. No matter how enthusiastic you may be about the principals, it is difficult to see in Angel in the Wings any successors to the Little Shows, The Band Wagon, or even One for the Money.
Pinterest
