Word: operas
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DIED. JANET COLLINS, 86, elegant, electric prima ballerina for the Metropolitan Opera House, and the first black artist to perform at the Met; in Fort Worth, Texas. She won acclaim on Broadway in Cole Porter's 1950 musical Out of This World, and after her Met debut in 1951--four years before Marian Anderson's celebrated debut there--went on to principal roles in such operas as Aida and Carmen...
Five years ago, Maurice Sendak came across the long-buried opera. He was electrified. "It's a very simple story, the most basic of fairy tales," says Sendak, the 74-year-old creator of the picture-book classic Where the Wild Things Are, but it spoke to a "situation that has been part of my flesh and blood and bones my whole life." The son of Polish-immigrant Jews, Sendak had a childhood marred by a "dense, terrible aura" of the Holocaust, as news of perishing loved ones hung over the family home...
Sendak decided to revive the opera. He asked Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) to write a new libretto. Kushner, immediately drawn to what he calls the opera's "timeless message of the necessity to stand up to bullies," was also enchanted by the appealing staccato of the Czech language and has folded some of its nuances into his new version. In an earlier English version, the names Aninku and Pepicek became Annette and Little Joe, cutting out delicious linguistic details from the piece. "It sounded like a 1950s biker film," says Kushner...
When it opens at the Chicago Opera Theater on June 4, the new Brundibar won't be like a biker film. Nor will it look like an opera about the Holocaust. Sendak has washed the production design with light. He has shifted his color palette from subdued hues to vivid primary schemes. Says director Thor Steingraber: "There are no yellow stars on the children's coats. There's no reference to concentration camps. The set is strictly a lovely Bohemian town...
...government-run Afghan Film Studio in Kabul. When the Taliban took the city, Barmak fled to the north, where he made documentaries for the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was later assassinated by al-Qaeda. Next he escaped to Pakistan, where he starred in a radio soap opera for Afghan refugees. His moviemaker friends from the studio weren't so lucky. Barmak returned to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, to find his former partners broken and dispirited. "I had to find a way to rehabilitate them," he says. "They didn't feel like they were filmmakers...