LIKES 'MERRY WIDOW'

Evening Star, Issue 23237, 10 April 1939, Page 13

LIKES 'MERRY WIDOW '

HERR HITLER'S FOURTH VISIT When Herr Hitler wont to a gala performance of ‘ The Merry Widow ’ in Munich his Gestapo and secret police were among the audience, backstage, and outside the theatre. Behind the scenes they watched the actors and supers. They even listened when the supers chatted with each other off stage. Some of them inspected the dressing rooms to make sure that Hitler was safe from both sides—the public and the cast of 1 The Merry Widow.’ It was his fourth visit to ‘ The Merry Widow ’ in six weeks. “ Germany’s beauty dancer,” Fraulein Dorothy von Bruck, was recalled from Berlin to do her act in the show —a dance in which she wears nothing but transparent butterfly wings attached to her arms. Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, Field-Marshal Goering, 50 other members of the Reich Government, and the staff of Hitler’s mountain villa at Berchtesgaden were Hitler’s guests. Marion Daniels, an American acrobatic dancer from Chicago, who joined ‘ The Merry Widow ’ as an extra number, and the prima ballerina girls of the Berlin State Opera, the Hoepfner Sisters, were in the special performance. As a finale to the Bavarian month’s carnival Hitler invited his guests io his “ Artists' House,” the meeting place of Nazi actors, musicians, and authors, after ‘ The Merry Widow ’ performance. Soloists from the show performed again for the guests.