Music: Culinary Contralto

Manhattan playgoers last week saw Vickie (by S. M. Herzig; produced by Frank Mandel) do a bad job with a good idea. A satire on U.S. women's war activities, it attacked the funny bone by way of the eardrum, failed as farce because it was never funny.

More interesting than anything else in the play was the appearance in a bit part (an opera-singing cook) of Margaret Matzenauer—one of opera's fallen giants. For Contralto Matzenauer, who had been a diva in the days when Caruso and Toscanini were fellow Metropolitan headliners, Vickie might be...

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