The brain is a funny thing...

I never really knew anything about opera past the little bit the operations of an opera house are shown in The Phantom of the Opera. But recently I was able to watch a few of the classic Italian buffa (comic) operas with some extremely helpful English subtitling. And someone pointed out to me that Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, like the Pirates of Penzance, are essentially English opera, which had never occurred to me. I haven't had any ambitions of writing a musical since I was in high school and realized music composition was one art I just didn't have the raw ability for. Yet this evening I took a nap and woke up with an opera having mostly written itself in my head, and characters singing their dialogue. I have no idea what to do with this sort of inspiration - I'm not sure I can do anything with it - but it amused the heck out of me, so I thought I'd share.

BTW if anyone wants to recommend other funny operas and musicals, the non-English ones I've seen so far were:
Don Giovanni (not exactly a comedy, it's really funny at the beginning but gets progressively more serious)
The Barber of Seville
The Marriage of Figaro
The Elixir of Love

I don't think I could list all the English musicals I've seen over the course of my life; Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is the best recent one though. And A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To the Forum is one of my favorite classics.

Wow, that's a great anecdote. I'm not sure that was an ethical thing for the director to do, but it certainly was dramatic.