An opera, with the lyrics taken directly from the transcripts of the Alberto Gonzales hearings on the U.S. attorney scandal, will be performed this weekend in Philadelphia.
The “Gonzales Cantata,” playing at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, is a 40-minute work made up of songs such as “I Don’t Recall,” “You Don’t Recall,” “What Is One To Think,” and “This Is Not About Alberto Gonzales.”
You can listen to all the songs on the opera’s Drudge Report-themed web site. The piece was written by Melissa Dunphy when she was an undergrad at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
“This is not a partisan piece. … It’s about a man who made some mistakes and is facing the music. It’s also an exploration of how a man could so brazenly politicize the Department of Justice without really standing up for the reasons he went into politics in the first place,” Dunphy told the Wall Street Journal.
“I see Gonzales as a tragic figure who’s also simultaneously irredeemable,” she said.
Gender roles in the opera are flipped, with women playing all the male figures. Dunphy said she wanted to draw attention to the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee is predominantly male.
Dunphy said she sent a copy of the opera to Gonzales, but hasn’t heard back. She did, however, contact former Attorney General John Ashcroft about using his song, “Where The Eagles Soar,” as “sort of a companion piece.” He declined.
