A Musical Analysis of Kander and Ebb's Steel Pier

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The Many Mary Mallons

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This is a story about a sanitary engineer who made a career tracking and preventing epidemics -- especially epidemics which stubbornly refused to be tracked and prevented. This is also a story about checking and verifying sources, which features:  A 1903 typhoid fever outbreak at Cornell University and a conspiracy to cover up its cause. An abandoned hospital on a deserted island, where human entry is now forbidden. A mysterious casting change to a 1913 Broadway play. A conspiracy to falsify the results of an autopsy which never happened. Things that were cut from this story because it is already very long include: A 1912 preacher's calls to ban certain kinds of dancing. A 1908 study about the air quality of subway systems around the world that uses the brightness of meteors to estimate the height of the atmosphere. A speech inexplicably given by Alexander Graham Bell to the Biological Society A 1917 musical that probably made the aforementioned preacher very angry. ...
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So, nobody dies in Aida . How's that for a hook? Definitely a good tagline for an opera, "Nobody dies!" isn't it? I'd go see that opera. But really, think about the plot of Aida  for a moment. Set in ancient times, there's a king of a country near northern Africa, and he's fighting against a certain people to whom go our sympathies. This king's daughter is involved in a love triangle with a member of said people and a conflicted third party with interests in both factions. The members of the love triangle are a soprano, a mezzo, and a tenor, but not necessarily in that order. Anyway, through some shenanigans, the conflicted third party is sentenced to death, but don't worry, because member of fought-against-people-to-whom-go-our-sympathies and conflicted third party both survive the Act IV curtain, and presumably live happily ever after. Oh, also, there's a famous chorus in the second scene of some act or another that has people singing abo...
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1. Introduction Sooner or later, most fans of Gilbert and Sullivan become aware of the infamous “Lozenge Plot” that was the source of some of the duo’s quarreling in the later years of their collaboration. The story, as popularized in the 1999 film Topsy Turvy goes that in 1884, in the wake of the relative failure of Princess Ida , Gilbert proposed to Sullivan for their next opera a plot about a magic lozenge that transforms whoever consumes it into whatever they are pretending to be. Sullivan rejected the plot out of hand, for two primary reasons. Firstly, that the premise bore at least a superficial resemblance to that of The Sorcerer , and he did not want to be seen as repeating himself. Secondly, that at this point Sullivan was tiring of Gilbert’s zany, unrealistic plots, and wanted to set “a story of human interest and probability.” The lozenge plot was something Gilbert was clearly intent on doing at some point though, and he periodically floated it again in various forms and g...
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