Now that Strunk & White’s Elements of Style has been reborn as a song cycle, and Broadway appears to have finally run out of all original ideas (see Movin’ Out), Dominic Papatola says that it may just be time for the theatre world to embrace the great English language reference books as inspiration. “The three-volume Columbia Gazetteer of the World sits on my bookshelf at home, and, I’m telling you, you can’t beat it for sheer drama. If Richard Wagner could make a 15-hour opera out of the story of some doofus dwarf and a ring, I see no reason the epic tale of the Encyclopaedia Britannica couldn’t be made into an heroic-scale grand opera.”