By Deanna Isaacs
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Bill Fosser was born on the west side of Chicago 71 years ago. He was an asthmatic kid with a lot of forced downtime. His twin obsessions came into his life early on, thanks to an aunt who gave him a book on puppetry and took him, at the age of seven, to a performance of Il trovatore at the Civic Opera House. “That did it,” Fosser says. “I fell in love with opera and the staging of opera. I never got over it.”
Kungsholm’s puppet opera originated with another Chicago youngster, Ernest Wolf. An opera buff and record collector, Wolf built a copy of the Civic Opera stage in his basement and began producing shows performed with rod puppets. His puppet opera went to the 1938 World’s Fair and on a national tour before Chramer hired it in ’41. Chramer and Wolf soon parted company, but the puppet opera remained a fixture at the Kungsholm, where Fosser gleefully worked until his parents forced him to quit because his grades were falling. He would return for two more stints there: one in the 1950s and another (as artistic director) a decade later, after Chramer died and the restaurant had been sold to the Fred Harvey organization. Chramer’s arrangement with Harvey stipulated that the opera continue as it had under his ownership, but by the early 70s both the opera and the Kungsholm were closed.
