Nazi-era children's opera adapted for modern theater

BERKELEY, Calif. -- Tony Kushner doesn't mind when critics call him a "political" playwright, a polemicist who mines humor and hypocrisy, and condoles human truths from the rougher chapters in world history.\nBut when he decided to translate a 1938 Czech opera about a greedy town bully who meets his match in a pair of poor children, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Angels in America" knew the project called for restraint.\nAs an allegory on Hitler's rise to power and a story once performed by Jewish children who would eventually be killed by the Nazis, the last thing "Brundibar" needed was a heavy rhetorical hand.\n"What great political art does is marry the personal and the political in a way that one isn't clobbering the other," Kushner says between rehearsals at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where "Brundibar" and another Nazi-era theater piece he adapted, "Comedy on the Bridge," opened Nov. 16. "You don't want people saying, 'Oh, this is a play about Hitler.'"\n"Brundibar" is based on the 2003 picture book of the same name on which Kushner collaborated with his friend and literary hero, children's author-illustrator Maurice Sendak. It tells the story of a brother and sister who need to raise money to buy milk for their ailing mother and are hindered by a hostile organ grinder named Brundibar.\nCzech composer Hans Krasa created the opera for children in a Jewish orphanage in the years leading up to World War II. It was eventually performed 55 times at the Terezin concentration camp and was featured in a 1944 Nazi propaganda film, "The Führer Presents the Jews With a City." Krasa, and most of the children who performed in "Brundibar," died at Auschwitz or other concentration camps.\nSendak designed the sets for the Berkeley Rep production, which moves on to the Yale Repertory Theatre in February and New York's New Victory Theater in April. Euan Morton, who starred as Boy George in the Broadway production of "Taboo," plays the title role. School-age children from the San Francisco Bay area make up the 29-member chorus.\nKushner had done theatrical adaptations before (he is currently at work on a production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage" for Meryl Streep), but never one from an opera libretto. It posed special challenges, including the fact that he didn't speak Czech. And since Krasa's estate still owned the copyright, he could not take many artistic liberties.\n"My problem was to make it sound like it was written from an English text for modern American stage actors," Kushner said.\nEven if there hadn't been that limitation, however, the playwright saw little room to improve on the original by Krasa and librettist Alan Hoffmeister. For a simple, 30-minute fable on the triumph of good over evil, it packs a surprisingly profound punch that becomes almost unbearable with the knowledge of the genocide that would darken the world after it was written, Kushner says.\nOne of those moments comes during a lullaby the two siblings, Aninku and Pepicek, sing with their friends: "Now you are very old, your hair is soft and gray. Mommy, the cradle's cold. Blackbird has flown away."\nIn the Berkeley Rep production, the group performs against a backdrop drawn by Sendak that shows children happily flying through a forest on the backs of oversize blackbirds. The timeless song of loss and love offers an unsentimental view of how bereft parents can feel after their children grow up and leave home, but its historical context colors it for modern audiences.\n"We can't imagine what listening to that song would be like without thinking about the kids in Terezin singing it," Kushner said. "You listen to that and you can't get it out of your head and you shouldn't get it out of your head."\nDirector Tony Taccone, who co-directed the world premiere of "Angels in America" and oversaw three Berkeley Rep productions of other Kushner plays, set the production in an unnamed ghetto instead of Terezin, the setting for the Chicago Opera Theater's 2003 version of the Kushner-Sendak collaboration.\nTaccone made a similarly unsentimental decision when Devynn Pedell, the third-grader who plays Aninku, asked if she could wear the yellow Jewish star her grandfather had worn in a concentration camp.\n"I was the one who had to say 'no,' Taccone says. "I don't want this to be a story only one community has access to."\nMorton, who earned a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of gender-bending 1980s pop star Boy George, was drawn to the Brundibar role partly because of the chance to play a character of over-the-top evil. At Taccone's urging, however, he tempered his temptation to play Brundibar as a caricature of Adolf Hitler by imagining him as a pathetic, selfish boy.\nStill, the 28-year-old actor debated Taccone for hours about how much darkness to bring to the role. Although he wears the same mustache as Hitler, Morton ditched a German accent for his native Scottish brogue. But he won the argument to include a subtle Nazi salute in his movements.\n"I do think it's important not to patronize children," Morton says. "It's something I've been fighting for throughout this production."\nKushner hired a Columbia University graduate student to translate Hoffmeister's libretto from the Czech and spent hours listening to a recording of Krasa's score while he crafted English rhymes to fit the music.\n"It's like being in deep conversation with an interesting writer. You get to discover more and more how they made choices and why they make sense," he says.\nThe result was a very faithful translation, Kushner says. The only change he felt compelled to make was adding a chilling poem Brundibar recites after the happy ending, when he is foiled by the children, stripped of the stilts and imposing uniform he wears, and run out of town in his underwear: "They believe they've won the right/They believe I'm gone -- not quite/Nothing ever works out neatly/Bullies don't give up completely."\nAlthough he wrote a role for first lady Laura Bush in his play, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy" (her character speaks with dead Iraqi children), Kushner says he never felt the urge to draw parallels between past and current world conflicts.\n"The worst thing we could do is make Brundibar look like Bush and strangle the power in the words," Kushner says with a wry smile. "We can all enjoy the expression of our fear and anxiety and get that there is a recidivist, political evil in the land, but there is always a relevance to this kind of allegory."\n"Comedy on the Bridge," which on the surface chronicles the infidelities of two squabbling couples caught on a bridge in wartime, has a similar double meaning that Kushner took pains to expose without squashing. Taccone staged it as musical burlesque, as if Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel were doing "Much Ado About Nothing."\nKushner and Sendak met about a decade ago when "Angels in America" was the toast of Broadway. Sendak read an interview in which Kushner described himself as a big Herman Melvin fan and since he was, too, he requested meeting with the young playwright through a mutual friend.\nThe Berkeley Repertory Theatre production was designed for family audiences. In writing his first theatre piece for children, Kushner says he took cues from Sendak on how to make the anti-totalitarian message clear to adults without giving kids nightmares or being condescending.\n"Maurice has always said to kids, 'Look, you have this incredibly tough job. You have to grow up in a world where safety is not guaranteed, and you are not immortal and you have to face these things."\nBut Kushner will be satisfied if most of the younger people who see "Brundibar" don't immediately "get" what it's about.\n"How much of the Holocaust do you want to tell a 5-year-old? The answer is not much," he says. "At 5 years old, you can't know what went on at Auschwitz and you don't need to know"