Space Opera - The Musical Synopsis

We are in an unspecific future, much like our own save that spaceships traverse a universe filled with alien life, much as ships nowadays cross the oceans to exotic foreign destinations. Dame Isabel Grayce, Secretary Treasurer of the Opera League, is a wealthy, aristocratic and eccentric grande dame. She is impressed by the exotic music performed by the Ninth Troupe of the Rlaru Ballet, exhibited by Captain Gondar, a Space Captain, haggard, haunted and piratical. At the supper party after the ballet Bernard Bickel, eminent authority on symbological euphonics, famed space traveller and rackety raconteur, decries the possibility of Earth people understanding alien music or vice versa. The Rlaru ballet troupe mysteriously disappear. Dame Isabel suspects Gondar of knavery and trickery but determines to take an Earth Opera troupe to perform to the aliens, as a matter of honour and cultural enlightenment. Roger Wool, nephew to Isabel, a likeable but foolish young fop, is horrified to discover his aunt intends to waste the money he hopes to inherit on such a venture, and is confounded when Bickel, the man he hopes will dissuade her, instead accepts from her a lucrative appointment as tour guide. The spaceship 'Phoebus' is chartered, fitted out with a crew, a stage and loaded with the finest opera singers and orchestra.