Pieces of the music had clearly been stolen from Bender’s Trillian, as might be expected with Gallendrace in charge. The orchestra was short a flutist, his place taken by a rather aggressive whistler. (In fact, the entire orchestra sounded like the “scrittling, scratching brittlings of a skeleton crew,” as one wag put it.) A few holes in the floor of the stage—apparently there had been no time to repair them—resulted in Sophia’s ghost at one point pitching headfirst into the orchestra pit, much to the delight of the audience, which stood and clapped. (We might have been glad to have an opera during wartime, but that didn’t mean we had given up our essential nature as Ambergrisians.)

The (almost) corresponding holes in the curtain made scene breaks tantalizing, and scandalous, in that the audience could see the flash of thigh and buttock in the frenetic thrashing of costume changes. The set changes proved much less dramatic, as Gallendrace had chosen to use the set to suggest rather than illustrate, letting unpainted wooden boxes and other unconcealed objects serve as placeholders for the imagination.

Still, it was a passable attempt at an opera. The orchestra lurched on even after Sophia fell on top of them. The singers had good voices—they had convinced the great retired baritone Samuel Rail to make a short appearance. However, the hole in the ceiling, even clogged with fungus, changed the acoustics in such a way that sometimes those voices came to us profoundly curdled or twisted; at times, I felt as if I were hearing the voices of gray caps, not human beings at all.

Halfway through the second act, my legs beginning to fall asleep, I turned in my seat and looked back. Some ten rows behind us, I caught a glimpse of Bonmot with some of the teachers from Blythe Academy. I waved; he waved back. I was inspired for a moment to go talk to him, perhaps even join them—after all, Duncan had his Mary and Lacond had his Duncan, and Sybel was too busy being angry about the depiction of his people to be of much use to me. But it was then that Sophia fell into the orchestra pit, and as I turned back to watch the ensuing chaos, the moment was lost. By intermission, Bonmot had left for some reason (along with several others in the audience!), although not before Mary had made a great show of going over and talking to him, abandoning Duncan for several minutes. (She didn’t do it to hurt me, Janice, but to help me. She worked hard to try to repair the rift, thought that a ceasefire for the warring Houses might also mean a ceasefire for House Bonmot and House Duncan, but it was not to be.)

After intermission, the set design devolved even further, and the plot became ever more ludicrous, featuring a plethora of ghosts, and even an appearance by a wingèd fairy—a device so pathetic I thought violence might break out. The singers desperately tried to cover for these faults with stellar, sometimes over-the-top performances, voices drowning out voices, dissonant not in their individual talents, but as a group.