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Child’s Play
The Yale Rep is pulling out all the stops for a children’s opera with sets by Maurice Sendak and libretto by Tony Kushner. It’s a comedy, but with tragic roots.
by Brian Seibert ’97
January/February 2006
Brian Seibert ’97, a freelancer in New York City, writes for the New Yorker.
From February 10 to March 5, the Yale Repertory Theatre is presenting a $600,000 production on such a scale it has required a joint effort with the Berkeley Repertory Theater and Boston’s Huntington. The work receiving this grand treatment, a staging already slated for a May run at New York’s Victory Theater, is—drum roll please—a double bill of Czech light operas from the 1930s. The cast includes no stars, and you probably aren’t familiar with the composers (Hans Krása, Bohuslav Martinů) or the original librettists (Adolf Hoffmeister, Václav Klicpera). It is likely, however, that you’ve heard of the production designer and the man who adapted the libretti into English.
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Art doesn’t come any more freighted. |
The first is Maurice Sendak, the beloved children’s book illustrator and author of Where the Wild Things Are. It was his idea to ask his friend, playwright Tony Kushner, to write an English libretto for Krása’s children’s opera, Brundibar. (Sendak found the existing translations tin-eared.) In 2003, the two turned the story into a children’s book.
But the participation of such heavy hitters isn’t the only justification for the scale of the production. There’s also Brundibar’s history, a big story surrounding the little one. It’s the gravity of this larger story that gives the light opera weight and pulled in Sendak and Kushner. Art doesn’t come any more freighted.
The opera’s story is simple and sweet. Two poor, fatherless children go to town in search of milk for their sick mother. To raise money, they try singing for coins but are chased off by Brundibar, a bullying organ grinder protecting his turf. All seems lost until the children are befriended by a sparrow, a cat, and a dog, who in turn gather an army of children. Together they drive off Brundibar, sing a lullaby, raise more than enough money for the milk, and celebrate their victory. So ends a fable of solidarity against oppression.
And so it may have seemed to Krása when he set the story to music for a public competition in 1938. Or was he thinking of larger turf battles? By May that year, Hitler had drawn up plans to annex Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, the German army invaded. Krása was Jewish. Four years later, his opera premiered in a Jewish boys’ orphanage in the Prague ghetto. Its next performance took place in the Terezin concentration camp, where Krása and the orphans and thousands of Jews, many of them artists and musicians, had been imprisoned. There the opera became so popular it was performed 55 times. Prisoners saw it as an allegory of resistance to Hitler. But there was no happy ending. Krása died in Auschwitz, as did almost all of the children.
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Brundibar always supported multiple meanings. |
Brundibar always supported multiple meanings. During the famous visit that the International Red Cross made to Terezin, a performance of the opera helped convince the inspectors that its residents—spruced up for the occasion—were being treated kindly and given culture. A Nazi propaganda film about Terezin, Hitler Gives the Jews a City, also included footage of Brundibar. Adorable children singing—what could be wrong with that?
Since Brundibar is short, Kushner proposed pairing it with Martinů’s Comedy on the Bridge. In the latter opera, the bridge in question lies between two towns at war, and an absurdist comedy arises when two bickering couples, hemmed in by the bureaucratic literalness of the sentries who guard the borders, get trapped over the water. As in Brundibar, the story ends happily—the highly destructive war ceases—but the easy resolution is ironic: the war was pointless.
For Rep artistic director James Bundy, much of the double bill’s appeal lies in its contemporary resonance. “Both operas are set in a world at war, and one is a story about how to respond to oppression,” he says. “These are both timeless issues, but also uppermost in the minds of many people today.” In addition, Bundy notes, Kushner and Sendak’s contemporary re-imagination of the obscure 70-year-old operas “raises questions of artistic practice” for the many drama school students who are helping to mount the production. Yale students haven’t designed this show, of course (though many Rep productions are entirely student-designed), but they take on all the backstage roles: company manager, lighting board operator. And in New Haven, drama school student Joe Gallagher takes the stage as Brundibar, joining a cast of Broadway veterans. (The actor who played the part in Berkeley, where the production premiered in November, had a scheduling conflict.) Since Gallagher had professional experience before coming to Yale, taking on the title role hasn’t caused him to worry much, except for when he learned he would be playing it on stilts.
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Also joining the cast in New Haven are 30 local schoolchildren. |
Also joining the cast in New Haven are 30 local schoolchildren as the bully-defying army. In the story, the army is gathered by anthropomorphic animals; in life an open casting call did the trick. And if, as Bundy says, the double bill’s combination of serious purpose and accessibility gives the Rep an opportunity to reach young audiences, casting local children can only help. Exactly what children in the audience will see, however, is a point of controversy.
For Sendak, the opera cuts close to the bone. As a Jewish teenager in Brooklyn during the forties, he grew up with photographs of cousins his own age who didn’t survive the Holocaust. The children who performed in Brundibar were also his contemporaries. So when he discovered the opera a few years ago, the identification was overpowering: there but for the grace of God went he. His view of the story is that “everybody dies and that victory is a dream.” The child performers at Terezin, he believes, knew what fate awaited them, and their singing in the face of that fate shows a courage he admires, even as their victory anthem breaks his heart. When an earlier production of Brundibar was mounted in Chicago in 2003, Sendak was confirmed in his belief by an audience member, a Holocaust survivor who had played the cat as a child in Terezin. Almost the same age, Sendak and the woman watched the opera together and cried.
Kushner, also Jewish but decades younger, takes the opera less personally. He sees it as “good Central European socialist propaganda for children” and finds his historical poignancy in the fact that European progressives didn’t band together against Hitler. In recent interviews, Kushner has also been careful to point out that there’s no mention of Nazis or concentration camps in the show, and that children will experience it quite differently from historically aware adults, finding “a lesson that applies to the next recess period on the playground.”
Kushner’s fear of scaring off audiences isn’t baseless. The question of how much children can take lies at the heart of all of Sendak’s work, and the courage of children is his great theme, a courage he honors by never sugarcoating the truth as he sees it. But there’s a tension between his idea that children’s courage comes from their innocence—from their ignorance of how evil the world can be—and his conviction that they “always know what they’re in for,” that they know better than adults do. Brundibar is the ultimate test case. In his introduction to The Art of Maurice Sendak, Kushner writes that he and Sendak worried over these questions while working on the book: what are children to be told? At what point does the awful truth become unsuitable for them?
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Sendak’s drawings are brought to the stage as wonderful pop-up-book sets. |
In the book, the ominous resonances surface mostly in visual details, allusions that children are unlikely to catch. Several of the villagers wear yellow stars; a banner reads, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” as did the gates of Auschwitz. Other correspondences are purposely blurred. Brundibar has a nasty little mustache, but his hat is Napoleon’s. On the wall of the mother’s shack hangs a crucifix; the protagonists aren’t Jewish. Sendak’s tragic sense of history comes across most obviously on the last page, a coda to the story in which Brundibar, like a horror movie villain setting up a sequel, writes a note announcing that he, and others like him, will return. The note is written on an invitation to a performance of Brundibar at Terezin.
In the opera, Brundibar still has the last word, but the historical allusions are fainter, more overwhelmed by the vitality of Sendak’s drawings, brought to the stage as wonderful pop-up-book sets by Kris Stone ’98MFA. The animal helpers are costumed, singing adults—funny stock figures of children’s theater. Brundibar on stilts is a charming cartoon villain, overbearing but easy to topple. Still, when that toppling occurs, at the hands of the child army, the mob violence makes for a moment of Sendakian wish-fulfillment: the wild things of New Haven let loose. And, even as the children sing their lovely lullaby about babies growing up and flying away, the darker shades of Sendak’s sensibility are clearly present in the enormous blackbirds on the backdrop, hovering like Fate.
Kushner’s lyrics emphasize his socialist moral, but gently—calling the children “comrades” and having Brundibar brag about his monopoly. Mostly, the text is fun, an enormous improvement on earlier translations, written in fluent and clever rhymed couplets. His skepticism is more on display in the opera he chose to fill out the bill. Comedy on the Bridge isn’t a children’s opera, though. (In fact, its sophisticated interplay of voices might have young audience members echoing the child in Brundibar who comments, “The music grown-ups like is weird.”) The two works are bound together mostly by Sendak and Stone’s stunning designs. In Comedy, sharp-fanged fish walk in the river, and an officer flies onstage in a giant cardboard dirigible. At the end, a ragtag army has also been added, the local children brought out again to sing the finale.
Adorable children singing—what could be wrong with that?  |
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