From around the world: Chicago. (North America).(Chicago Opera Theater reviewed)(Opera Review)

Chicago Opera Theater completed its season with an ingenious coupling of Hans Krasa's Brundibar and Bohuslav Martinu's Comedy on the Bridge, two Czech composers' one-act operas born in response to the escalating power of the Third Reich. A Czech-American opera, Kurka's The Good Soldier Schweik, proved extremely successful at COT a few years ago; clearly hoping for similar results, the company offered Brundibar and Comedy in a new production designed by Maurice Sendak, with translations by Tony Kushner, under Thor Steingraber's direction.

Brundibar, a children's opera, was written for and performed by a cast of children imprisoned in the Nazi detainment facility Terezin (Theresienstadt), a "model camp" designed to manipulate world opinion. In reality, shortly after the opera's performances, most of the cast and Krasa himself were among almost 90,000 Jews transferred from Terezin to Auschwitz and killed. COT engaged a talented cast of Chicago-area children; Adam Benkendof and Olivia Doig portrayed the central characters, a brother and sister whose efforts to assist their sickly mother are thwarted by an evil organ-grinder, Brundibar, here played by teenager Peter Hart with a Hitlerian mustache. Rallying their neighbors, the children defeat the villain by singing more loudly than his organ plays.

Sendak's production seemed a children's book brought magically to life. (He plans to publish a picture book based on the designs.) Bathed in Joel Moritz's lighting, a kaleidoscope of shifting drops and mobile set pieces formed a pastiche of naive village images whimsically wrought with primary colors in Sendak's inimitable style.

Musically, things were less ...