Last night, for my mother's sixtieth birthday, we took her to see Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak's adaptations of Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar at the Yale Repertory Theatre. It was an amazing double bill, and a show I was very glad not to have missed.*
I had never heard of Comedy on the Bridge and, once I had, didn't expect to like it half as much as I did. With its literal stone bridge between two fictional Central European countries temporarily agreed on a cease-fire and the two implacable sentries at either side, it reminded me of a lighter, more absurdist take on Menotti's The Consul, as the catch-22 of entry and exit visas strands one character after another on the bridge: a beautiful girl with undisclosed business on the enemy side of the river, her smooth-talking employer at the brewery, her hotheaded boyfriend, the brewer's suspicious wife, and finally a schoolteacher slowly losing his mind over a riddle the enemy captain asked him some weeks ago. (A deer is grazing in a courtyard. The walls are so high a pigeon can't fly over them, so it stands to reason the deer can't jump them. How does the deer get out?) With each new arrival,** tempers climb, bombs fall, divorces are demanded, the scenery blows itself apart, and suicidal lovers are deterred from leaping into the river only by an immense, toothily hopeful fish that patters onstage on little blue-clad feet and invitingly opens its mouth. The misunderstandings are romantic. The characters are caricatures. It's like a farce by Jacques Offenbach—but one that's gotten trapped somehow in the war-torn wrong century. The resolution of the story, like the solution to the schoolteacher's riddle, is inextricably appropriate to Czechoslovakia in 1935.
The history of Brundibár should be well-known: a children's opera written for an orphanage, performed at the "model ghetto" of Terezín (Theresienstadt), immortalized through the Nazi propaganda film Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City). The conductor and director, the lyricist, the composer, and nearly all of the children involved in the original performances died in Auchschwitz. In the basement of the University Theatre, the Yale Rep had assembled a small exhibit about the opera and the people involved in its creation; most of the information can still be found online, and I recommend it. It's not a cheerful story. But the opera itself is—however shadowed by history and, in the libretto itself, warily qualified—all about the strength of children, and how good can defeat evil after all.
Pepíček and Aninku's mother is sick. The doctor has declared that she needs fresh milk, but the children have no money with which to buy any-and the grown-up world of the marketplace gets you nothing for nothing. Inspired and a little daunted by the hypnotic music of the organ-grinder Brundibar— whom all the adults seem to love, even if Aninku and Pepíček have to cover their ears—the children attempt to sing for their supper, but are driven off by the enraged organ-grinder, who loathes children and screams for their arrest. Aided by a sympathetic cat, dog, and sparrow, however, Aninku and Pepíček band together with the three hundred other children of the town and sing a haunting lullaby that moves all the adults who have heretofore ignored them to drop sheaves of cash into their empty milk bucket, infuriating Brundibar and winning the milk that will save their mother. All together, the children remind the audience that friends are what makes us strong.
For all its fairy-tale aspects of evil organ-grinders and talking animals, Brundibar is an oddly, harshly realistic story. This is a world where children are on their own: their only allies are the natural world and one another. Adults are either threatening, like Brundibar, or simply no help at all. As the local policeman announces, if you don't have money, you might as well die. But it's also a world designed by Maurice Sendak, so the sun peers down on Pepíček and Aninku with a confident, curious grin and the moon holds their mother's face. The city in which the children wander looks more than a little like a hand-drawn ghetto. The first scene is a graveyard, full of mist and shadows and the white-faced figures of children who, in their costume kerchiefs and tricorn hats, might be the ghosts that once originated these roles. Blackbirds fly away with children and their mothers bury their faces in their aprons: are they grown-up or gone for good? Both the sets and the story were full of echoes, and never overdone.
Joe Gallagher's Brundibar was a near-perfect villain for a children's opera: a tatterdemalion bully in an oversized uniform, clanking with medals and swaggering like a showman, who confesses to the audience that the reason he hates children is that he was once a child himself: small and picked on, beaten up and easily drowned out; but like every good bully, he's grown up to be the loudest and largest and meanest of them all. He's simultaneously laughable and frightening and pitiable. When he cranks out his tunes, the crowd literally sways to his music; mimicks his every move. His organ-grinder's monkey wears a little spiked helmet from an earlier war. Bitten by the dog, clawed by the cat, stripped of all the trappings he's used to make himself larger than life and reduced to his too-big boots and red long johns, Brundibar scrambles ignominiously offstage only to snarl his parting shot from the catwalk: "They believe they've won the fight / They believe I'm gone—not quite / Nothing ever works out neatly / Bullies don't give up completely / One departs, the next appears / And we shall meet again, my dears / Though I go, I won't go far / I'll be back! Love, Brundibar . . ." Still, the children have the last word: life may never be as simple as the fairy tales or wishful heroics, but this time at least, good has won.
There's a tribute to Maurice Sendak from Tony Kushner here, and a transcript of a conversation between Bill Moyers and Maurice Sendak here, both of which touch on the picture book Brundibar from which this adaptation took many of its cues. Reading through the book afterward, I was amazed at how closely the set design and costumes had followed Sendak's original illustrations, and how often the narration was the same as Tony Kushner's libretto. The book is a little more sharply slanted toward the politics of the time and the historical frame in which the opera is embedded, but still. They're worth experiencing together.
I'm very glad we we saw this show.
*My mother has just informed me that Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar are going to New York City after New Haven. The last show was today, but I'm hoping that the New York production keeps the cast we saw: they were all phenomenal. I'm also hoping someone made a recording, even if I never get to hear it. Either way, you should all go see this opera!
**I was particularly charmed by William Youmans' Professor Ucitelli, a black-coated, bespectacled, heronlike personage given to flights of Latin and extravagant gestures with his bowler hat, who avoided pedantry through sheer zaniness.
I had never heard of Comedy on the Bridge and, once I had, didn't expect to like it half as much as I did. With its literal stone bridge between two fictional Central European countries temporarily agreed on a cease-fire and the two implacable sentries at either side, it reminded me of a lighter, more absurdist take on Menotti's The Consul, as the catch-22 of entry and exit visas strands one character after another on the bridge: a beautiful girl with undisclosed business on the enemy side of the river, her smooth-talking employer at the brewery, her hotheaded boyfriend, the brewer's suspicious wife, and finally a schoolteacher slowly losing his mind over a riddle the enemy captain asked him some weeks ago. (A deer is grazing in a courtyard. The walls are so high a pigeon can't fly over them, so it stands to reason the deer can't jump them. How does the deer get out?) With each new arrival,** tempers climb, bombs fall, divorces are demanded, the scenery blows itself apart, and suicidal lovers are deterred from leaping into the river only by an immense, toothily hopeful fish that patters onstage on little blue-clad feet and invitingly opens its mouth. The misunderstandings are romantic. The characters are caricatures. It's like a farce by Jacques Offenbach—but one that's gotten trapped somehow in the war-torn wrong century. The resolution of the story, like the solution to the schoolteacher's riddle, is inextricably appropriate to Czechoslovakia in 1935.
The history of Brundibár should be well-known: a children's opera written for an orphanage, performed at the "model ghetto" of Terezín (Theresienstadt), immortalized through the Nazi propaganda film Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City). The conductor and director, the lyricist, the composer, and nearly all of the children involved in the original performances died in Auchschwitz. In the basement of the University Theatre, the Yale Rep had assembled a small exhibit about the opera and the people involved in its creation; most of the information can still be found online, and I recommend it. It's not a cheerful story. But the opera itself is—however shadowed by history and, in the libretto itself, warily qualified—all about the strength of children, and how good can defeat evil after all.
Pepíček and Aninku's mother is sick. The doctor has declared that she needs fresh milk, but the children have no money with which to buy any-and the grown-up world of the marketplace gets you nothing for nothing. Inspired and a little daunted by the hypnotic music of the organ-grinder Brundibar— whom all the adults seem to love, even if Aninku and Pepíček have to cover their ears—the children attempt to sing for their supper, but are driven off by the enraged organ-grinder, who loathes children and screams for their arrest. Aided by a sympathetic cat, dog, and sparrow, however, Aninku and Pepíček band together with the three hundred other children of the town and sing a haunting lullaby that moves all the adults who have heretofore ignored them to drop sheaves of cash into their empty milk bucket, infuriating Brundibar and winning the milk that will save their mother. All together, the children remind the audience that friends are what makes us strong.
For all its fairy-tale aspects of evil organ-grinders and talking animals, Brundibar is an oddly, harshly realistic story. This is a world where children are on their own: their only allies are the natural world and one another. Adults are either threatening, like Brundibar, or simply no help at all. As the local policeman announces, if you don't have money, you might as well die. But it's also a world designed by Maurice Sendak, so the sun peers down on Pepíček and Aninku with a confident, curious grin and the moon holds their mother's face. The city in which the children wander looks more than a little like a hand-drawn ghetto. The first scene is a graveyard, full of mist and shadows and the white-faced figures of children who, in their costume kerchiefs and tricorn hats, might be the ghosts that once originated these roles. Blackbirds fly away with children and their mothers bury their faces in their aprons: are they grown-up or gone for good? Both the sets and the story were full of echoes, and never overdone.
Joe Gallagher's Brundibar was a near-perfect villain for a children's opera: a tatterdemalion bully in an oversized uniform, clanking with medals and swaggering like a showman, who confesses to the audience that the reason he hates children is that he was once a child himself: small and picked on, beaten up and easily drowned out; but like every good bully, he's grown up to be the loudest and largest and meanest of them all. He's simultaneously laughable and frightening and pitiable. When he cranks out his tunes, the crowd literally sways to his music; mimicks his every move. His organ-grinder's monkey wears a little spiked helmet from an earlier war. Bitten by the dog, clawed by the cat, stripped of all the trappings he's used to make himself larger than life and reduced to his too-big boots and red long johns, Brundibar scrambles ignominiously offstage only to snarl his parting shot from the catwalk: "They believe they've won the fight / They believe I'm gone—not quite / Nothing ever works out neatly / Bullies don't give up completely / One departs, the next appears / And we shall meet again, my dears / Though I go, I won't go far / I'll be back! Love, Brundibar . . ." Still, the children have the last word: life may never be as simple as the fairy tales or wishful heroics, but this time at least, good has won.
There's a tribute to Maurice Sendak from Tony Kushner here, and a transcript of a conversation between Bill Moyers and Maurice Sendak here, both of which touch on the picture book Brundibar from which this adaptation took many of its cues. Reading through the book afterward, I was amazed at how closely the set design and costumes had followed Sendak's original illustrations, and how often the narration was the same as Tony Kushner's libretto. The book is a little more sharply slanted toward the politics of the time and the historical frame in which the opera is embedded, but still. They're worth experiencing together.
I'm very glad we we saw this show.
*My mother has just informed me that Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar are going to New York City after New Haven. The last show was today, but I'm hoping that the New York production keeps the cast we saw: they were all phenomenal. I'm also hoping someone made a recording, even if I never get to hear it. Either way, you should all go see this opera!
**I was particularly charmed by William Youmans' Professor Ucitelli, a black-coated, bespectacled, heronlike personage given to flights of Latin and extravagant gestures with his bowler hat, who avoided pedantry through sheer zaniness.
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