This is my first diary, so please be gentle. I've been wanting to post this for awhile, but only got the relevant materials just yesterday. My wife, krsbar, and I spent the month of October in Albuquerque NM working on a production of Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus. Follow me below the fold to see how we tried to sway public opinion in our own small way.
I was conducting the production (as part of the creative team at Opera Southwest), and my wife was stage managing. For those of you who don't know the story, the part that's relevant to this diary comes in the 2nd act which takes place at the residence of Prince Orlofsky (a Russian ex-pat living in Austria).
During one of our orchestra rehearsals one of the 1st violins passed me a note saying: "do you think he [Orlofsky] can see Alaska from his house?" Immediately my wife and I started brainstorming a way to get that line into the opera somehow. I should explain that we did this in an English translation (which is pretty standard fare for a lot of light operas in America), so first it was a matter of deciding whether or not it should be in the dialog that separates musical numbers, or in one of the musical numbers. We finally decided to embed the idea into Orlofsky's 2nd act aria, "Chacun à son gout." Deborah Domanski (our Orlofsky) was a rock star, and it got the biggest laugh line each performance. I hope you enjoy our final goodbye to Sarah Palin. I know we did: