As Jenn and Fran and I prepared background information for the show, the question occurred to us: This "operetta" the guys were writing, what was the title of it? A stint of research revealed that and much more:
The firm of Turai and Mansky
It was 1892 and Budapest was marking Francis Joseph’s twenty-fifth year as king when two young, unpromising actors met in a back-street coffeehouse. Algernon Mansky, who affected an English accent to go with his aristocratic name, had been dismissed from Barólyi’s Follies for compulsively bowing from the waist; Sandor Turai, in the last week of an engagement as dog-wrangler, offered a commiserating slice of cake. Over that cake was born a partnership that, for the next third of a century, would bring the world a glissando of operettas, a stateroomful of farces, and a good many comedies.
With the sweets and coffee, Mansky and Turai recalled sketches they had played on the variety stage. For every lecher of Turai’s, Mansky offered a strutting fool or a tarnished maidservant; Mansky’s loving couples reminded Turai of rooms with secret panels; if one told of comic blackmail, the other recounted an elaborate hoax. The two saw that if they pooled their stolen plots, they had material for a long career. A simple handshake created the most durable firm in the world of semiserious, adult, Hungarian-language theater.
Mansky and Turai burst on Central Europe with a one-act farce written (under the pseudonyms "Anton Chekhov" and "Henrik Ibsen") as a curtain-raiser for a romantic comedy by Geraldy. Turai, many years later, remembered only one scene from the debut: A decrepit butler, laden with trays of hardware and fruit, falling down the stairs of a castle. It was, confirmed Mansky, "a smash, as I wrote in one of my notebooks."
The Chekhov-Ibsen piece opened doors throughout Europe, getting the playwrights into houses from Rostov to Rochester. It did little for Mansky and Turai, however, and the partners, to keep the pot boiling, had to turn out gags for ethnic comedians on the Carpathians circuit. Then came the fateful golf weekend.
Since the ’80s a Budapest bank had maintained close ties with a London counterpart, and in 1899 the challenge went out: a forint a hole, losers to pay for Austrian champagne in the clubhouse. Mansky signed on to supply Slovak jokes for the after-dinner speaker, a part-time writer named P. G. Wodehouse. In a 1932 interview, Wodehouse stated that he had "no memory of a person of that name, though I must say he sounds an engaging chap." He may have suffered a memory lapse, for many of his stories dating from 1900 to 1903 contain Slovak jokes.
Mansky gained from the exchange too. He and Turai created, in 1900 and 1901, a series of golf sketches that they later worked up into a revue called After the Ball, or Cuthbert in the Rough, with music by R. De Koven. The partnership finally made it to the big time when István Almady cast himself in the title role and scored a triumph in the 1902 season, moving on to Vienna the next year.
Almady never pretended to like Turai but could not resist the firm’s material. In 1904 he tried to split up the team, inviting Mansky alone to summer at his lakeside cottage. But the partners were finishing their first operetta, Naughty Maddalena, and went to an inn at Fured where they could work undisturbed except by the landlady’s infant daughter in the next room. Two years later, Almady fell out with Mansky, too, and canceled a production of the comedy The Secretary’s Nerves. It was the pair’s big break: the suddenly available property was snatched up by Count della Riviera, the eminent Italian producer, and presented to a delirious public in Rome and Milan. From that day Mansky and Turai were in constant demand for new plays and operettas, their shows sold out the best theaters, and touring companies crisscrossed Europe. Their song hits became popular favorites from Minsk to Madrid.
The year 1910 was pivotal for the firm. Almady announced a production of the historical play Citrons for Citizen Mell—without crediting Mansky and Turai, who successfully brought suit. The show went up, triumphantly, but it was the librettists who gathered the royalties and Almady who found himself reduced to acting in matinées and giving voice lessons. It would be sixteen years before he and Turai spoke again.
Now the great times began for Mansky and Turai. They would work six months to prepare a new book, spend two on scoring and rehearsals, and travel in their mammoth touring car for four. Some years, instead of an operetta, they wrote legitimate works, including detective dramas, romances and moral tragedies. Their efforts met with success almost every time: Princess in Pantaloons, Sascha’s Mustache, Death of a Dragoon, Bringing Up Bernadette, and the historical drama Attila! all belong to this period.
By 1926 both partners considered that they had made a very good thing of writing plays, and they thought to take a season’s rest. But then an old woman from Miskolc introduced Turai to her orphaned grandson, a composer of great promise and great naïveté using the obviously false name Albert Adam. Mansky, always the calculating member of the firm, saw Adam as the last stepping-stone to an enormous success, the crown to a great career. Though he appeared to have some feelings for Albert, Turai held his counsel. By July the three had completed their operetta By the Waters of Balaton. It was at the Act One readthrough in April that Adam met little Ilona and the real events of the summer began . . .
but you already know that story.
| Previous image | Image index | Next image |
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Texts/images