Tuesday, March 09, 1999
Opera audience in growth spurt
BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Well sure, we know opera's all about passion and flared nostrils and all, but this is out of hand.
Meaning the baby boom: Three of Cincinnati Opera's 19 staffers — one-sixth of them — are pregnant.
“We take our mission of building future audiences very seriously,” says public relations director Evelyn Stubbs, due April 17.
Megan Loughney, education and outreach director, is due to deliver a boy April 26.
And Kim Crail, director of corporate and annual campaigns, was supposed to deliver March 3, but she's on hold.
The baby boom has opera general manager Patty Beggs tearing her hair out. Seems March-July is the busy season when everyone's getting ready for the summer festival.
“Really,” Stubbs says, “I wouldn't have wanted to be the third one to go in Patty's office and break the news.”
Stubbs and Crail will be back in time for the four-opera summer season (it opens June 17); Loughney will take a little extra time off.
HAPPY FIRST: In other baby news, there's this comforting thought for parents who are all the time complaining that their toddlers outgrow clothes as fast as they can buy them: Be glad your kid's not an elephant.
Like Baby Ganesh, the first elephant conceived and born in Ohio in 10,000 or so years. Born March 15 at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, he weighed in at a strapping 213 pounds and stood 36 inches.
Today, he's a much more strapping 1,020 pounds and 48 inches. And it's only his first birthday.
Which calls for a party like the one you throw for your kids, except on a larger scale.
The cake, for example: Two sheet cakes, each 11/2 by 2 feet. The yellow cakes are spiked with applesauce, bananas, apples, grapes, pears and carrots. Instead of a candle, it's a banana “because Ganesh can't blow them out,” says keeper Cecil Jackson.
Jackson also has no illusions about Ganesh's table manners: He expects him to go in feet first.
Cards, homemade and store-bought, are coming in at 10 a day with the date still a week off.
The celebration is 1-3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Both parties end with a bath because, well, you know kids and cake.
UP SOON: Oh my, isn't that artist Chris Payne looking like an Easter Island stone icon, gazing over the hills of Cincinnati?
And isn't that Kurt Weill and Noel Coward with him?
Yep. It's the last installment of the massive mural Payne is doing for the Dr. Stanley and Mickey Kaplan Lobby at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
That would be the 100-foot job full of caricatures of folk who figure into Playhouse history. Like George Bernard Shaw and Gary Sandy; Will Shakespeare and Agatha Christie.
The first installment — 14 by 40 feet — went up in December. The second, 60 by 10 feet but tapering to 3 feet, goes in Monday for a March 18 unveiling.
Some panel that, all full of Payne's witty and weird vision. Like the Easter Island motif. Or playwright Lillian Hellman digging in to a pile of ribs. Or playwright Keith Glover with a bowl of Graeter's ice cream.
Plus playwright Moliere; composer Stephen Sondheim, Dracula, Dorothy, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.
None of which has come quickly: Payne guesses he and caricaturist Craig McKay have worked 1,100 hours on it.
Psst! appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Have an item to report? Call Jim Knippenberg at 768-8513; fax: 768-8330.
Psst! appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Have an item to report? Call Jim Knippenberg at 768-8513; fax: 768-8330.
KNIPPENBERG ARCHIVE
