About

My name is Natan Zamansky. I am an dramaturg, director, composer, and critic, with a great, and sometimes irritating, interest in opera. I started this blog as a way to go on about opera without boring my friends to death, and it has since evolved into a place where I post more comprehensive reviews and analyses, with the occasional fun tangent thrown in for variety.

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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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The Cinderella Problem

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This title is misleading, because it implies that there is a problem with the classic Cinderella story. But that would require there to be one definitive Cinderella , which there is not. There are countless variants on the story across many many centuries, independently evolved in many cultures, brought together by convergent evolution, split apart by divergent evolution, and so on and so forth. For this, and other reasons, I would like to take a moment to call out those who snarkily berate Disney and other adaptors for "sanitizing" the "original Brothers Grimm version" to make it more "kid-friendly," usually citing the part in the Disney movie where Cinderella's stepsisters conspicuously do not chop off bits of their feet to fit in the glass slipper. To that I say: The idea that Disney or any other adapter is somehow at fault for changing elements of a story in their adaptation is blatantly untrue. Every adaptation of every story ever by definitio
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The Best Andrew Lloyd Webber Ballad

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I was recently challenged to name what I thought the best Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad was. This is a difficult question to answer because, as everyone even remotely aware of musical theater knows, Andrew Lloyd Webber has, over the course of his career, written an imperial buttload of ballads. (I'm using imperial measures rather than metric because the UK just cannot make up its mind.) Any given Andrew Lloyd Webber musical will contain at least one memorable ballad, often more. Evita alone contains at least three, depending on how you count, all of which became popular enough outside the context of the musical to merit their own individual Wikipedia pages. In fact, more than a dozen Andrew Lloyd Webber ballads have their own Wikipedia pages, and that's just the popular ones. The first song I thought to rank was "Memory" from Cats , which I have always found to be somewhat overrated. I think the popular rating of "Memory" is perhaps somewhat skewed because a
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