Connecticut opera program featured Nelson & Jeanette

“MERIDEN – When opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti completed his rendition of “Giorgio,” nearly 50 people at the Augusta Curtis Cultural Center watching the videotaped performance stood and cheered.

That was the reaction that Valerie Bubon, secretary of the Rosa Ponselle Fund, was hoping to get from her program, “Love in Bloom,” Sunday afternoon as she passed on her passion and knowledge of opera to area residents as part of the center’s monthly Sunday cultural series.

“My premise is you don’t need to know about opera to enjoy it,” Bubon said. “I want them to open their minds and their hearts to the music. The singing is beautiful and I want them to be able to enjoy that, that’s the most important goal.”

Starting with the silent film era, Bubon took her audience through a walk through 20th-century opera using examples such as the Broadway hit, “The King and I,” duets with 1930s stars Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald and classic performances from singers such as Pavarotti.”

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Choreographer Anya Flesh worked with Jeanette

“Flesh was born in Seattle in 1933. Her mother, Kaye Brinker, was an actress on radio soap operas. Her stepfather, Manfred B. Lee, was the creator and co-author of the Ellery Queen mystery novels, radio and TV shows and movies. She fell in love with dancing after seeing a performance as a child.

At 17, she got “this harebrained idea to go to Paris to study ballet. My parents let me go, but I didn’t study a lot,” she recalled.

She learned enough to win a position with what was then called Ballet Theatre, and she later became part of the corps de ballet for the Chicago Lyric Opera and toured in the DeMille shows with such stars as Zero Mostel, Barbara Cook and Jeanette MacDonald.

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“Gidget” author wrote “Three Daring Daughters”

Frederick Kohner’s daughter talks about being “Gidget”, her father’s best-selling book and his screenwriting career.

“Kohner was a screenwriter in Hollywood. In 1939, he was nominated for best writing original story in ‘Mad About Music,’ in which a young woman at a boarding school in Switzerland writes herself letters from an imaginary explorer-adventurer father.

His credits include numerous stories such as ‘Bride for Sale,’ ‘The Men in Her Life,’ and ‘Three Daring Daughters’ that were made into films starring some of the greatest leading ladies of the day, including Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald and Rosalind Russell. His style of writing about spunky women was perfectly suited for ‘Gidget,’ and the book became a national bestseller, reaching seventh on the chart, above Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’:

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