Of all the school boys who have read Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, few have been more impressed than was Charles Robert Walsh, a shy, 13-year-old student at Saint Joseph's High School in Philadelphia. Charles Walsh thrilled so deeply to the tales of Revolutionary bloodshed, to the heroism of Sidney Carton, that he undertook to dramatize the story, labored on it for weeks.
Charles Robert Walsh, now 27, is professor of public speaking at the Law School of St. John's College, Brooklyn. He is still shy, scholarly and a Dickens enthusiast but he does not take himself so seriously as he did at 13. The Tale of Two Cities, he decided not long ago, might make a good operetta if the plot were juggled around a bit. Charles Darnay might become a conventional villain, Sidney Carton could escape and go back to Lucy, sedate Miss Pross could become a comedienne called Prossie. . . . He proceeded haltingly to pick out tunes on the piano.
Professor Charles Robert Walsh is capable at elocution, tennis, bridge. He knows little about music. Nevertheless when his operetta Lucille was given a recent amateur performance (no better, no worse than average) by St. John's students, the tunes were such hits that the first-night audience stayed applauding for 15 minutes after the final curtain. Last week it was decided to repeat Lucille, twice in Brooklyn (April 24 and 25), once in Germantown, Pa. (May 13) where Professor Walsh used to live; once in Atlantic City.
Tonic Weather
Damp or sultry weather may be uncomfortable for audiences at open-air concerts but it is the ideal condition for having well-balanced musical tones, according to an observation by Dr. Vern Oliver-Knudsen, acoustic expert at the University of California. In ordinary weather, low tones carry much better than high ones, which have less energy. In humid air the high tones ride on the particles of suspended moisture, helping the hearer to perceive the complete orchestration.*
Wigman v. Traffic
German Dancer Mary Wigman does her athletic prancing and lunging because she feels herself "one with the elemental things, the primal things" (TIME, Jan. 5). But the reason for her large following lies in the fact that the gymnastics she teaches are simple, far easier to master than formal dance steps. There are thousands of Wigman dancers in Germany. The cult is growing fast in the U. S. among women who find the exercises exhilarating to mind and body. Still another reason for Wigman dancing was advanced last week in Manhattan by Dancer Erna Wassel, pupil of Dancer Wigman. It will help women pedestrians with their traffic problems, she said, and forthwith initiated a course of stop & go steps. Pupils must learn to come to an abrupt stop in the midst of a run, to leap suddenly in the midst of a leisurely walk.*
Garden for Manhattan
Clarifying a dozen or more rumors, Manager Herbert Morris Johnson of the Chicago Civic Opera Company definitely stated last week that Mary Garden was through with opera in Chicago. Coincidentally it became known that Mary Garden is planning to form and head an opera company of her own in Manhattan next year.