Final Week Wrap-Up and G&S Star Wars

The final blog entry of the semester...it's been quite a journey. There have been a lot of wonderful discussions, and many great laughs, during our travels from Candide to Repo! The Genetic Opera.



We started our final week of discussion classes looking at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an opera based upon the Tom Stoppard play. This brought up a lot of fun memories for me, as the clip we had on YouTube was of the "Questions" scene from the opera. The corresponding scene from the play was something I had competed with during high school acting competitions. My acting partner and I won a regional competition with "Questions" and had a fantastic time doing it.



We also discussed "The Wrath of Kahn: The Opera", a 2 minute Italian opera based upon the second cinematic installment of Star Trek. This lead to a discussion about parodies, and one thing I remembered was a presentation of Star Wars using the melodies of Gilbert and Sullivan songs from H.M.S. Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance and lyrics modified to fit the Star Wars story. The lyrics to many of the songs can be found at the following link:



http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/newsletters/precious_nonsense/star_wars.txt



One of my favorite songs are "When I was a lad", using the tune from Pinafore by the same name. However, in this version you have Darth Vader telling the story of how he became the right-hand man to Darth Sidious, instead of Sir Joseph Port, K.C.B., telling how he rose from a desk clerk to commander of the Royal Navy. The other song I took a particular liking to is "I am the very model of a modern diplomatic droid", sung by C-3PO to the tune of the well-known "I am the very model of a modern major general" from Pirates. Though that is probably the most-parodied Gilbert and Sullivan song, it never ceases to amaze me when patter songs, with their necessity for high syllable counts delivered at a rapid pace, are re-worded in parodies.



It has been an interesting semester, one in which I learned a lot about the direction opera seems to be taking in America. It has also been one of the most enjoyable and informative courses I have ever taken.