These shows will slay you!
QUESTION Has a horror novel ever been made into a musical?
Sweeney TODD first appeared as the villain of the Victorian penny dreadful serial The String Of Pearls in 1846.
A barber from Fleet Street, he murdered his customers with a cut-throat razor before handing their bodies over to Mrs Lovett to turn into meat pies.
The story was the basis for Stephen Sondheim and Hugh wheeler’s 1979 musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street.
Another example is Andrew Lloyd webber’s globally successful 1986 musical The Phantom Of The Opera.
It was based on the 1910 novel by French author Gaston Leroux in which Christine Daae, a young soprano, becomes the obsession of a disfigured and murderous musical genius who lives under the Paris Opera House.
There have been less successful attempts at horror musicals, such as Frankenstein — A new Musical, in 2007, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, with music by Mark Baron and book and lyrics by Jeffrey Jackson.
Dorian The Remarkable Mister Gray: A Portrait In Music was a stage musical version of the 1890 Oscar wilde novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, with music and lyrics by Randy Bowser.
we Have Always Lived In The Castle was a 2010 musical adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s unsettling 1962 novel by the playwright Adam Bock and composer Todd Almond.
It’s the story of a teenage girl, her older sister and their aging uncle who have isolated themselves in their new england home after members of their family had died from poisoning. The musical was described as ‘thin gruel’ by one critic.
The made-for-stage horror musicals The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1973 and Little Shop Of Horrors in 1982 were far more successful.
Horror is a staple in the opera world. Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur in 2008, Charles Gounod’s Faust in 1859 and Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth in 1847 all qualify as horror stories.
Henry James’s 1898 psychological novella The Turn Of The Screw, in which a governess takes on a new job tutoring two children at a remote, lonely mansion, was turned into a compelling 1954 opera by Benjamin Britten.
Claude Debussy loved 1839’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher, edgar Allan Poe’s story of corruption, insanity and unnatural love, along with its horrifying portrayal of a premature burial.
He completed the first draft of the score in 1917, but the opera was incomplete when he died in 1918.
Diane Little, Uttoxeter, Staffs.
In THe 1990s, we had fun starring in a school musical called The Dracula Spectacular: A Spooky Musical with lyrics by John Gardine and music by Andrew Parr.
The immaculate Miss nadia naive and her three pupils Marvin, Luke and elvis make a school trip to an irrepressible elvis-like Count and his gruesome acolytes at his Transylvanian castle.
Characters included Dr nick necrophilic (the Van Helsing character), Father O’Stake, Master Landau the coach driver and Dracula’s henchman Genghis.
I played Raff, one of the out-patients of Karloffia Sanatorium for Glublick addicts on day release. The others were Clod, Looby, Bogie, Scrub, Boots, Scratch, Dregs, Riff and Booze.
Memorable tunes included Rhesus negative Rock, Super Rat Like Me, The Ceremony Of The Fang and Fly Transylvanian Airways.
Charles Smith, Malvern, Worcs.
QUESTION What is the average age of the world’s population?
DUe to statistical modelling and the accuracy of data collection, median rather than mean (average) is the accepted measure of large populations.
Roughly speaking, the median splits data into two halves.
The global median age was 29.6 years in 2015 — meaning half of the world’s population was older than 29.6 years and half were younger.
Japan was the nation with the highest median age at 47.3 years, Britain was 40.5 and the eU was 42.9.
The youngest was niger at 14.9 years. There are more than 30 countries with median ages under 20, mostly in Africa or the Middle east. The global median has increased dramatically since 1950 when it was 23.6, mainly because of declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy.
A. N. Simons, Exeter, Devon.
QUESTION After a major fire, British Nuclear Fuels renamed its Windscale reactor as Sellafield. Are there any similar rebrandings?
THE British nuclear reactor formerly known as windscale is remembered for the accident that occurred on October 1957. The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout that spread across europe. In 1981, British nuclear Fuel’s windscale and Calder works was renamed Sellafield.
Over budget and overhyped, the Millennium Dome opened for business on January 1, 2000. The exhibition was lampooned and received only half the expected number of visitors. It was reopened as The O2 in June 2007 as an excellent concert venue.
In 2003, Philip Morris Companies, the world’s largest tobacco seller, changed its corporate name to the Altria Group.
The oil tanker exxon Valdez, which spilled ten million gallons of crude oil into the ocean off Alaska in 1989, was renamed Sea River Mediterranean, which sounds like a cruise liner. Sold to a Chinese company and renamed Dong Fang Ocean, it was scrapped in 2012.
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which was notorious for its treatment of prisoners, first by Saddam Hussein and later by the U.S., was reopened in 2009 as Baghdad Central Prison. It closed in 2014 and since then Saddam era mass graves have been discovered. Lee Marks, Blackpool, Lancs.