In June of 2017, I directed a triple bill of Eyes And No Eyes, Pretty Polly, and The Carp with the University Of Michigan Gilbert And Sullivan Society (UMGASS). Each of these works presented its own challenges and hurdles, and for The Carp, one of the biggest was that Alfred Cellier's original score was lost. So I wrote my own.
PRETTY POLLY
EYES AND NO EYES
THE DYBBUK OF THE OPERA
In summer of 2019, as part of the New York Public Library's Across A Crowded Room program, I composed the score to a fifteen-minute musical entitled The Dybbuk Of The Opera, with a book by Eric Grunin and lyrics by Bill Dyszel.
THE GARDEN OF ALLA
The following year, in the same program, I composed the score for The Garden Of Alla, with book and lyrics by Jacob Iglitzin
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. ...
(All historical background is from Look I Made A Hat, by Stephen Sondheim) Circa 1953, Stephen Sondheim took an interest in a book by Alva Johnston entitled The Legendary Mizners, a biography of brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, an architect and con man respectively (among other things) who caused the Florida real estate crash of 1925/26. Sort of kind of maybe. It's all pretty sensationalized, but historical accuracy is of no concern for a theatrician. Sondheim attempted to obtain the rights to adapt the book into a musical, but was beaten to the punch by David Merrick and Irving Berlin. A few years later, while working on Gypsy (so, circa 1959), the Mizner brothers musical had not come to fruition, and Sondheim asked Merrick what had happened to it. It turns out that everyone involved lost interest, and Merrick had let his option on the book lapse. Between 1960 and 1990, Stephen Sondheim was pretty much continuously working on other projects. In 1993, having just ...
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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