Opera in Central City

A Colorado ghost town last week heard more real grand opera than any other U.S. city will hear this summer. Central City, onetime bonanza town in the mine-scarred mountains west of Denver, had come briefly to life during the annual Play Festival in its 63-year-old, stonewalled Opera House. This year the festival is operatic. The summer's operas, scheduled for 25 performances, are Gluck's classic Orpheus and Eurydice and Rossini's comic Barber of Seville.

Bernhardt, Modjeska, Booth, Salvini, Joseph Jefferson once declaimed and strutted before Central City's miners and bonanza kings. When General Grant came to town, a street was paved with $12,000 worth of silver bricks. Then the end of the mining rush left Central City nearly deserted. Its resurrection began when descendants of the original builder gave the Opera House to the University of Denver. The theater was refurbished, its hickory chairs restored, and the curtain went up on Lillian Gish in Camille, designed and directed by Robert Edmond Jones.

Still on the job was Mr. Jones when the Barber of Seville opened last fortnight. A vociferous audience moved him to this curtain blurt: "We're bringing great art here. Our grandfathers did. We hope you like it."

Orpheus, with eye-filling Jones settings, gave a comparative youngster, yellow-haired Contralto Anna Kaskas, a chance to let loose as the hero. Lofty and noble was Orpheus, but not too much so. Said Music Director Frank St. Leger of the English translation: "We got the Goddamned twaddle out of it."

Afterwards there was carousing in the Teller House, wide-open gambling elsewhere. Lucius Beebe, the Herald Tribune's syndicated exquisite, was among those present, at one time running about in stocking feet, exclaiming in an interested manner that he had lost his underpants.

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