SUSAN ABROAD Theatre In The Round In San Francisco

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29952, 13 October 1962, Page 2

SUSAN ABROAD Theatre In The Round In San Francisco

One of the most gracious and hospitable cities in the world, Washington was very hard to leave behind. Perhaps it was just as well that on my last day there so many things combined to make me think of home and hurry me along the more willingly.

I spent the morning at the National Gallery of Art. which I had been haunting all week for concerts and lecture tours, and had a last look et lovely Mary Graham--Gainsborough's companion portrait to the full-length one in Edm burgh, of which we have a print at home. I have been quite unable to find a coloured reproduction of this Washington portrait which s.»ws her only to the waist end without a hat, and wonder if anyone can help me. Across the perk I popped in to the Natural History Museum to see something J had always missed before, the Hope Diamond. And although I am not ordinarily fcupers'jfcious, I was not altogether disappointed to find that this notoriously unlucky etone had eluded me again end was on loan to France Anyway. I was more than compensated to discover in the same hall of gems a marvellous great boulder of finest quality New Zeeland greens one. with a wafer-thing eliver sliced out of the middle and mounted against a panel ©f light. Not only that, but in the same building I saw a moa. In the afternoon Mrs George baking, charming Wife of our New Zealand Ambassador, took me to a Commonwealth tea party at the Pakistan Embassy. The hostess and many of the guests wore their exquisite ■rcjirrial costumes, and a delightful feature of the etrty was a genuine Bismilh ceremony, in which an adorable little Moslem girl received gifis and offered prayers to mark the beginning of her forma] education.

Then in the evening the Ambassador and Mrs Laking were hosts at a very grand and distinguished reception in their beautiful home and garden for Sir Edmund and Lady Hillary. This was a wonderful opportunity to meet many celebrated diplomats. including the British, Canadian. Nepalese, Chilean, Ghanaian and Russian Ambassadors. and also some famous Himalayan and Antarctic explorers and hterarj colleagues of Sir Edmund Hillary. After the formal reception a few of us. mostly New Zealanders. stayed behind for a more intimate buffet dinner. Everyone relaxed, good talk flowed freely, and thoughts turned irresistibly to home. It was quite fascinating to hear Lady Hillary speaking wsth a strong American accent—probably the only accent her children answer to now. Glass Lift Next morning I took wing again. flying through a violent and spectacular electrical storm, but still enjoying a good dinner, on the way to San Francisco, where every New Zealander seems to feel at home.

Huge and sprawling though San Francisco may be, take almost any section of it barring Chinatown—and you have Auckland, or Wellington, or Napier, or Dunedin—and with cable cars yet And every breath you take has that same salty smell of the broad Pacific as does the air we breathe at home. Miss Alison Pearce, New Zealand vice-consul in San Francisco, was kindness horself. took me home to dinner in the good old New Zealand way and joined me in a bout

of old-fashioned nostalgia.

But she gave me much good advice about San Francisco, too, and one tip I can pass on is that the new thing to do is to ride up to the tower of the Fairmont Hotel in the glass elevator. What a thrill this was, both, night and day, to travel up the outside of this soaring skyscraper in a glass cage attached to the outer wall, with a breathtaking view, every inch of the way, over San Francisco's glorious bay. But it was the Top of the Mark, next door, that had the warmer memories for me. and while I was up on Nob Hill I went up there, too, in an ordinary old indoor elevator this time, but with the same enchantment at the top.

My last night on the Mainland was a memorable one, for I spent it at the Garden Court dinner theatre at the historic Sheraton - Palace Hotel, in Market street. The Garden Court is one of the world's famed and fabulous restaurants, with its domed glass roof, its pink porphyry pillars, its pink and gold crystal chandeliers, its delicate ferns and pot plants —and, of course, its superb food, notably seafood and scrumptuous desserts. The square stage was set up in the middle of the huge restaurant, with the whitestarched tables all around it. First came a candlelit cocktail hour—Dubonnet on the rocks for me—while a quiverful of excessively romantic violinists wooed us with music of our own choice—“La Vie en Rose" for me. Then dinner was served, fingered over, fussily cleared away by solicitous, bluejowled. softly swearing Italian waiters. My selection, to complete the personal details, was seafood cocktail, veal cutlet Cordon Bleu and Peach Melba.

Then at last came our gay, noisy and altogether beguiling “musical comedy in the round”—Cole Porter’s “CanCan,” with a saucy Parisienne named Lilo as La Moire Pistache.

What a test of all the artists’ skill —the open stage, the vast glass-domed room, the well-fed audience. All the props had to be raced up the aisles and on to the stage in the dark and the flayers made their entrances between our tables, the girls romping up the ramps in their high heels, the singers doing their best to face a 360-degree audience all the time, the dancers high-kick-ing and doing the splits in all directions.

Perhaps because they all had to be so acutely aware of the audience, this “CanCan” was intimate, exciting and very much alive.

“Theatre in the round” they call it—not a bad name for the sort of journey I was just concluding: not a bad name for life itself.