a musicological comedy
Story by Kristin Mueller and Alex Eddington
Written by Kristin Mueller
Additional writing by Alex Eddington
Music by Alex Eddington
Lyrics by Kristin Mueller
Starring Alex Eddington and Kristin Mueller
Directorial assistance by Linda Rubin
Publicity photos by Maya Jarvis
Performed at the
Edmonton Fringe Festival
August 19-28, 2005
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Adieu, Friedrich Lips is a sad story told by a funny man.
Dr. Cyril Chichester Sinclair (Alex Eddington) is an eccentrically verbose British ex-pat musicologist who has been teaching Music Theory 100 at the fictional University of Lloydminster for the past 30 years. Unbeknownst to his colleagues and students, Dr. Sinclair has devoted decades of research to the life and music of Friedrich Lips, a (fictional) 18th-century German composer/accordionist who has been deservedly lost to history. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Dr. Sinclair has come to believe that Lips was a tragic hero and the greatest musical genius of all time. Adieu, Friedrich Lips takes the form of the lecture-recital from hell in which our Musicologist, high on ego and wishful-thinking, wielding an accordion and a thick sheath of overhead transparencies, reveals his findings to a stunned University (the audience), and is ultimately brought down – hard – by a frightened young voice professor, Nicole Burrow (Kristin Mueller), whom he has roped into his unethical rewriting of music history. Hilarity ensues as musical Academia chokes on its own bowtie.
Adieu, Friedrich Lips is the Amadeus for a much less worthy composer.