Music: Barber on a Bus

Charles L. Wagner is a U. S. impresario who looks like Jim Farley in a toupee and who long ago exchanged his flat Illinois drawl for rapid-fire Manhattanese. Fifty years ago he gave up collecting celebrities’ autographs, began collecting them on contracts instead. Since then Impresario Wagner has barnstormed up & down the U. S. selling such big-time figures as William Jennings Bryan, John McCormack, Galli-Curci. Mary Garden, Walter Gieseking to the public.

Last year, when inconvenient railroad schedules in New England and the South annoyed him no end, Barnstormer Wagner got a new idea for barnstorming tours. He decided to take opera to smaller U. S. cities by the busload. Picking Rossini’s oldtime Barber of Seville as the most portable opera (two scenic sets, chorus optional) that he could think of, he chartered a big, shiny Greyhound-type bus, remodeled its roof to accommodate a ten-foot pile of scenery, and started signing up a busworthy crew of singers from Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. He called his new venture “Opera a la Cart.”

Last week, complete with ten singers, a conductor and assistant, two rehearsal pianists, a stage director and a driver, Impresario Wagner’s operatic bus fumed out of Manhattan on the first lap of a 5,000-mile run which will take it as far south as Birmingham, Ala., as far north as Pittsfield, Mass. By Friday, when it hit the Lafayette College gymnasium at Easton, Pa., Metropolitan Singers Hilde Reggiani, Armand Tokatyan and John Gurney were complaining of the Cuban cigars smoked by fat Conductor Giuseppe Bamboschek in the back seat. But the 550-odd college students who jammed Easton’s gymnasium thought the bus-toted Barber was swell, spent ten minutes bellowing and pounding for curtain calls. When it was over, huge Driver Tim Ward loaded his flats and backdrops with an eye to low bridges, trundled his busload of opera on to Huntington, W. Va.