On the first non-observing night, “Count Dracula the Opera” will be presented in the “Valley of the Dobs”.
Sir Rob said that the modest lighting requirements for the performance can easily be met by the usual contingent of laptops, DSC's and red torches around the Dobs which generally would, in combination, be sufficient to cater for night baseball.
This opera, by the foremost Transylvanian composer of the 18th Century, Trad Opus, has never before been performed outside the boundaries of Romania.
Composed because of a twenty guilder bet with the young Mozart with whom he shared lodgings in Paris during the traumatic period following the death of Mozart's mother, it commences with the funeral dirge he had composed for Mrs Mozart's burial service and celebrates the life of a true Transylvanian hero.
Sir Rob explained that Count Dracula had taken an unfair beating from Hollywood during the 20th Century.
True, he had his political opponents and anyone else he didn't like skinned alive, boiled, decapitated, hanged, impaled, strangled, burned, buried alive etc but this is routine stuff for many a third-world country today and nothing half the politicians in the Western World would not do if and when they could get away with it.
It seems that the Vampire bit and his affinity for nocturnal activity was all a misunderstanding. The Count, or Vlad, Prince of Wallachia to his bosom friends, and quite nice if you lived long enough to get to know him, was actually an amateur astronomer and spent many a night on the upper turret of his castle using a 6-inch Gregorian telescope fashioned by Pope Gregory himself and presented to the Count in recognition of his role as defender against the heathen Turk.
His black observing cloak for those cold central European nights, and nocturnal habits at a time when most of the peasantry went to bed at sundown, coupled with his red observing lamp shining atop the castle sparked wild rumours.
These rumours were accentuated because the Count, like most amateur astronomers, was something of a boozer and commonly was seen with considerable amounts of the finest Romanian Shiraz which the yokels thought was blood dripping down his face, while legends of virgin sacrifice promoted a great deal of defensive promiscuity in the region which continued even after his assassination in 1746 by his ungrateful surviving subjects.
Alas, his observing notes, star charts and orbital elements of the several comets he had discovered and rumoured (pre-Herschel) discovery positions of Uranus were lost when incinerated with the Count on a rather large funeral pyre.
Auditioning for the principal singing roles will be held in the auditorium adjacent to Starsend Observatory at Limpia Crossing in the week preceding the Texas Star Party while music will be provided by the massed banjo band from Deliverance, Four Corners.