Music: The Beach Boy of Opera

High atop a scaffold, a small boy floats out a paper plane. Below a woman in a man's white shirt, braces and pearl gray trousers walks up and down rapidly in a diagonal course. Her head and hands twitch programmatically. Another figure, bent like a discus thrower, balances on one foot and listens raptly to a conch shell. A man dressed like a mechanic, a red wrench protruding from his hip pocket, obsessively chalks mathematical equations in the air. A handsome gray steam engine chugs into view. From the pit a chorus raises a...

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