Lincoln assassination plot becomes plot for opera

It's a good thing John Wilkes Booth wasn't bald.

If he was, Hollis Thoms might have had to look elsewhere for inspiration for his new opera, "The Moustache."

The original 90-minute work, which premieres at St. John's College in Annapolis in February, revolves around a fictional meeting between Baltimore barber Cipriano Ferrandini (a Southern sympathizer) and Booth at the Barnum Hotel just before the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Booth goes to Ferrandini, who is associated with a historically debated plot to kill Lincoln in 1861, to get a haircut and have his mustache trimmed, and ends up not...