Kiwi is such a big baby
QUESTION What animal produces the largest baby relative to its size?
LARGE animals do not always produce babies as big as you might expect. A blue whale calf, for example, may be the size of a family car and weigh 6,000lb but its mother is 30 times bigger.
Hippos and rhinos produce babies of 100lb, and elephants 300lb, but giraffes and horses are the only large animals that give birth to babies a tenth of their own size. A baby giraffe is already 6ft tall and a horse giving birth to a foal has been compared to a human mother carrying a tenpin bowling ball. Compared with the offspring of some larger animals such as pandas, kangaroos and Bengal tigers, even human babies are large, averaging 7% of their mother’s body weight.
Some of the world’s smallest creatures produce the largest babies relative to their own size. Australian lizards known as shinglebacks give birth to live young a third of their body weight, often including twins and triplets.
But perhaps the toughest mother is New Zealand’s kiwi, which lays an egg containing all the yolk needed to sustain her baby during the first few days of life. It is half her weight.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION Have any plays in New York or London closed on opening night?
OSCAR, a musical celebrating the life of Oscar Wilde, leads the way when it comes to West End failures. It opened and closed at the newly renovated Shaw Theatre on October 19, 2004, despite being scheduled for a month-long run.
The show was written, directed and produced by former BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read and was intended to commemorate 150 years since the author’s birth.
Theatre veteran Peter Blake took the lead but even he couldn’t save the show.
It was badly miscast, the sound effects were shocking, the scenery tacky with plastic flowers and fake palm trees, and the songs were poor, peppered with weak rhyming couplets: ‘I understand his situation, but I feel such isolation.’ The presence of Read’s friends in the audience, stars such as Alvin Stardust and Cliff Richard, could not save the show.
One critic described it as ‘bilge’, another as ‘two hours of leaden dross’ and a show ‘of exquisite awfulness’. Since only five out of a possible 500 seats were sold for the second performance, it was summarily axed.
The prize for the shortest run of all time goes to The Intimate Revue, which lasted for just half a performance on March 11, 1930, at London’s Duchess Theatre. The play was written and produced by, and starred, Oscar Asche, an Australian actor and director.
The show was a catastrophe, with scene changes taking up to 20 minutes and arguments breaking out between actors and stagehands. As one viewer put it: ‘Each time the curtains parted, squads of scene-shifters might be seen in action or in horrid precipitate flight.’ Several scenes were scrapped and the show closed without being completed. Debbie Edwards, Salisbury,
Wiltshire. IT IS not that unusual for shows to close after a single Broadway performance. Typically shows are developed in a regional theatre and if they play well, transfer to an off-Broadway or Broadway theatre. New Yorkers’ tastes a differ from those elsewhere in the US.
For example, Nick Blaemire’s Glory Days, a musical high school reunion, premiered at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, and was well received. It transferred to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre and bombed, both opening and closing on May 6, 2008. George M. Cohan’s original 1904 musical Little Johnny Jones was a big hit, introducing such standards as Give My Regards To Broadway and The Yankee Doodle Boy. The Goodspeed Opera House company in Connecticut revised and updated the piece, and Donny Osmond was recruited for the Broadway transfer. Nevertheless, its move to the Alvin Theatre was not a success and it opened and closed on March 21, 1982.
Here’s Where I Belong, a musical based on John Steinbeck’s East Of Eden, closed on Broadway after 20 previews and one official performance on the third of March 1968. The disaster was memorably profiled in William Goldman’s book The Season. It lost backers $604,000, which Goldman called ‘the most expensive one-night stand in Broadway history’.
Mr N. R. Steward, Keswick, Cumbria.
QUESTION When Hitler and Mussolini met, could one converse with the other without interpreters?
HITLER had little knowledge of foreign languages. He had a limited education and, apart from fighting in the north of France as a soldier in World War I, had not travelled in his youth.
Mussolini, on the other hand, was a teacher as a young man and lived in Switzerland for two years (1902-04) to escape military service. He was fluent in English, French and German, and able to translate excerpts from German philosophers Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant. He did, however, speak each language with a strong regional Romagna accent. He spoke German privately to Hitler but when in meetings, the two men used Hitler’s interpreter.
Hitler’s best-known interpreter was Dr Paul-Otto Schmidt. However, it was Dr Eugen Dollmann (1900-1985) who served as his chief Italian interpreter. Dollmann attended the Munich Conference of 1938 and was present at several important meetings between Hitler and Mussolini. He also interpreted for Heinrich Himmler during his visits to Rome. On July 20, 1944, Dollmann was the official interpreter at the final meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair), just hours after the July 20 plot had failed to assassinate Hitler.
Gareth Wilson, Pembroke.
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