FROM AROUND THE WORLD: CHICAGO.(Review)

He's "the kind of fellow that fellow-men like" sings a narrator at the beginning and end of The Good Soldier Schweik, Robert Kurka's setting of Jaroslav Hasek's classic novel, Dobry Vojak Svejk (1922). And it would be hard to imagine a more eminently likable production of this neglected American opera from 1957 than the revival by Chicago Opera Theater (seen March 21). Rarely are the composer and librettist of a modern musical adaptation in such complete communion with the original text. This initial vision was shared fully and brought to life lovingly by conductor Alexander Platt, stage director Harry Silverstein, set designer John Conklin and costumer Kaye Voyce. In tenor Jason Collins, the production boasted a young actor--singer who looked, sang and inhabited the title role, a hapless, roly-poly Czech conscript who marches to his own tune while Austria--Hungary goes down in the conflagration of World War I.

That this work has a Chicago connection only made COT's triumph greater. Composer Kurka was born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1921 and, as a the son of Czech immigrants, had a lifelong familiarity and fascination with Hasek's picaresque satire. Largely self-taught as a composer, he came of age when others, such as Blitzstein, Copland, Thomson and Bernstein, were trying to discover a distinctively American operatic voice, one that might acknowledge both progressive European influences and such native developments as the American musical theater. Kurka completed an orchestral suite based on Svejk while in his mid-thirties. With librettist Abel Meeropol (writing under the name Lewis Allan), Kurka was in the process of completing a two-act ...