I was poking around the internet today and discovered that my favorite series, the Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake were made into a "fantasy opera" at some point. They were already made into a BBC miniseries in the early 90s, which I strongly recommend to people looking for something a little different and slightly uncomfortable, but I thought I'd put this out there (not that any of us will probably have the opportunity to ever see it..) Looking through the images and listening to some of the [sort of boring, typical-sounding] music (which you can listen to here) it seems like it could either be very interesting (as Peake definitely gave them enough to work with) or... not really worth anyone's time (like that production of Faust I saw last summer...) Not to give the impression that I'm much of a theatre person anyway.

But all of you should read the books. I discovered the site through an interesting path actually - I was reading about the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which I'm now very curious about and saw the term hysterical realism, which sounded interesting, and read that Peake's work could be described as such. Also in there is a mention of Moby Dick, which I'm currently [slowly] reading - and I'd recently noted was similar in style to Gormenghast. Go me.

~ Cat