Act 2 of the 3-act mini-opera “The Best Life”, about about a competition to choose the best species of life — that’s this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams introduces Act 2 of the mini-opera “The Best Life,” which premiered as part of the 2015 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. This is a recording from that performance:
- The plot of Act 2: [As you’ll hear the narrator, Karen Hopkin, explain:] It’s the day before the contest. It’s the REHEARSAL for the contest. And it’s a GREAT day — a HISTORIC day! Here, today — now!— for the first time, ever, ALL the species of life are gathered together IN THE SAME ROOM. This room! Look around you. There are so many species you can’t even count them. At least TEN MILLION species. Maybe more. Let’s join the two contest organizers, as they take attendance of all the competitors. Of course, this is all about to go very, very wrong. But the organizers don’t realize that. Oh, they will! In this room we have EVERY PREDATOR species, and EVERY PREY species, and everything that eats, and everything that gets eaten, and… Well, nature is going to take its course. Good luck to us all.
- The libretto: The entire libretto is included in IgBill, the printed program that was handed out to all 1100 people who attended that performance. You can download your own copy of IgBill, and read along as you hear the singers sing and the instrumentalists do whatever it is they are doing.
- The creators/producers: The music is by Giuseppe Verdi and Arthur Sullivan, the story and words by Marc Abrahams. The performance was directed by Maria Ferrante, assisted by Robin Abrahams, and costumed by Catherine Quick Spingler.
- The performers: starring Maria Ferrante, Scott Taylor, and Daniel Rosenberg,
with The All-Species Chorus — Delphine Gabbay (chorus wrangler), Erika Hutchinson, Sylvia Rosenberg, Julia Lunetta, Vicki Bloom, Ros (Rosalind) Reid, Natasha Rosenberg, Abby Schiff, Vijaya Sundaram, Rob Hart, Liz Oppenheim, Warren Senders, Ted Sharpe, Nick Carstoiu, et al. The chorus ranks were swelled, in Act 3 of the opera, by addition of Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986), Carol Greider (physiology or medicine, 2009), Frank Wilczek (physics, 2004), Jack Szostak (physiology or medicine, 2009), and Eric Maskin (economics, 2007). The singers were backed by the Concentrated Forces of Nature, a distilled orchestra composed entirely of Harvard Medical School researchers Patrick Yacono and Dr. Thomas Michel. - Libretto plus: The libretto also appears, with photos from opera and juicy details from the entire the Ig Nobel ceremony, in the special 2015 Ig Nobel issue of our magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research. Here’s a photo (by ace photographer David Holzman) from Act 2:
The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.
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