Verdi aria for baritone / WED 7-15-15 / Some Deco illustrations / First name in Jellystone Park / Mythical predator of elephants

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME: TOP / ROW (10A: With 66-Across, place on a keyboard to find all the letters in 16-, 28-, 46- and 60-Across) — all the theme answers contain only letters found on the TOP / ROW of a standard US keyboard:

Theme answers:

• REPERTOIRE (16A: Everything you can perform)
• PROPRIETOR (28A: Business owner)
• PERPETUITY (46A: Time without end)
• TYPEWRITER (60A: Apt example of this puzzle's theme) 

Word of the Day:"ERI TU"(42A: Verdi aria for a baritone) —

Fascinating! ... is something I didn't say upon figuring out the theme. I don't get how this even qualifies as a theme. Also, your theme is TOP / ROW and your themers don't even touch the "Q"? Yet you Scrabble-f**k like a maniac in the SW?! No. Hard no. God those themers are boring. Not as boring as the fill, but boring. And the fill—look, I'm just gonna direct you to the SE corner (ATTA ERTES ERST all huddling together for warmth in a tiny little hut...) and leave it at that. Hard. No. The concept here is so thin and the fill so poor that I think we have real cause to worry about future mid-week puzzles. If *this* is passing muster ... yeah, we're in trouble. TYPEWRITER—that is what this whole puzzle hangs on. That is the one winning element of the theme: all its letters are in the TOP / ROW of the keyboard that the TYPEWRITER itself possesses. Nice. But we've gone from the low bar of "if the theme's OK, who cares, good enough" to the lower bar of "if the revealer alone is OK, who cares, good enough." Should've been sent back with the note: "Love the revealer. But you need to do something more interesting and bold with the theme as a whole. Revise and resubmit. Love, person doing his job."


Here's what's good: OPEN MIC! CAMERA CREW! EYESORES sort of! That's about it

Here's what's not (with exclamation points, for added irony):

• Verdi aria!
• Suffix and prefix!
• Cinematic beekeeper of yore!
• Abbrs!
• 4-letter European river!
• Whatever ATTA is!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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