Super Brother Act

Headquarters for one of the biggest entertainment enterprises in the U.S. are two crowded cubbyholes at the back of Super Cut-Rate Drugs on Seventh Street, N.W., in downtown Washington. The men who run it are two brothers from Hagerstown, Md., Irvin and Israel Feld, who opened the store in 1939 and spread out into music with the ease of an Alka-Seltzer foaming through a glass of water.

It started when Irv and Izzy decided that their lunch-counter customers might be in the mood for music. In the rear of their store, somewhere between notions and prescriptions, they put in a record department. That started an extraordinary chain reaction: the records sold faster than hot cakes, so the boys eased up on hot cakes and expanded the record department. As they found need for more room, the brothers set up separate Super Music City stores (three of them by now). When they did not have the right records to sell in their stores, they set up their own recording firm, Super Disk (which now releases through M-G-M Records), and their own record warehouse for jukebox operators, Super One-Stop Record Service. In 1949 they set up their own booking service, Super Attractions, and a year later went in for staging their own shows.

One memorable Super Attraction was the wedding the Felds threw in 1951 for Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Negro singer who warbles spirituals with a howling hep-cat beat. The Felds took over Washington's Griffith Stadium for the ceremony, for which 20,000 people paid from 90-c- to $2.50. The big spectacle included $5,000 worth of fireworks displays of a duck laying eggs, a naval battle, and of Sister Rosetta herself. The Superfelds, whose bookings now range from Charleston, S.C. to Pittsburgh, also have sponsored more conventional types of entertainment, e.g., Guy Lombardo, Billy Eckstine, George Shearing, and such road-show stage favorites as Don Juan in Hell, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and John Brown's Body.

What the Felds may attempt next is impossible to predict, but last week they presented a fine Gilbert & Sullivan production at Washington's Rock Creek Park.

Before 2,800 in Carter Barren Amphitheater, a company called the American Savoyards gave a frisky performance of The Mikado. During the next three months a lot of Washingtonians will spend plenty of time in the amphitheater, watching such Feld-sponsored attractions as the National Symphony Orchestra, the Ballet Theatre, Sopranos Dorothy Kirsten and Roberta Peters, Violinist Mischa Elman, Spanish Dancer Jose Greco (ticket prices: $1.25 to $3.00). While most other summer-music producers -- largely civic --have to beg for contributions to keep going, Irv (35) and Izzy (39) stand a good chance of making it pay. For them summer music may make a respectable contribution to their total income, boost record sales. Their estimated 1954 Super-gross: $2,000,000.

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