Fact #196667
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The official opening of Scott Joplin’s first opera, A Guest of Honor, is aborted because the score and costumes have been confiscated. Joplin's manager, Frank W. Meiser, had absconded with funds needed to pay a boarding house bill. The opera, with a cast of thirty, is believed to have been about Booker T. Washington’s dinner at Theodore Roosevelt’s White House, and was scheduled to be performed in fifteen towns and cities.
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