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Sheldon Harnick's musical, Dragons, will play at the Power Center in
Ann Arbor through Sunday.
'Fiddler' Co-Author
Premiers Play Here
•
KENNETH JONES
Special to The Jewish News
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FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1989
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A
quarter century after
synthesizing Sholom
Aleichem's short
stories into the songs for Fid-
dler on the Roof, lyricist
Sheldon Harnick is working
on a much different musical
based on the work of another
Russian writer.
Dragons, enjoying its area
premiere through Sunday at
the Power Center in Ann Ar-
bor, is based on Soviet writer
Yevgeny Schwartz's The
Dragon, a play written during
World War II as a "disguised
plea to the Russian people to
do something about the dic-
tatorship under which they
lived," says Harnick.
The 1942 play and the new
musical both concern a
knight named Lancelot — a
distant relation to the famed
Lancelot — who wanders in-
to a village terrorized by a
three-headed dragon. After
Lancelot slays the creature,
the mayor of the village
assumes absolute control and
threatens the community.
"In my version wht it boils
down to is, how do you deal
with the problem of power?"
says Harnick, 64. "The
metaphor is that power turns
people into dragons."
Harnick, who lives in New
York, saw the English-
language premiere of
Schwartz's play in 1963 dur-
ing the period when he and
then-collaborator Jerry Bock
were still working on Fiddler,
which opened in 1964. The
Bock and Harnick partner-
ship broke up in the early
1970s.
He says he was struck by
the charming fairy tale quali-
ty of The Dragon, but he was
baffled by its incoherent se-
cond act, which dealt with
totalitarianism.
"The only way Schwartz
could get it produced was
heavily disguised as an inno-
cent and harmless fantasy-
•
'The metaphor is
that power turns
people into
dragons.'
adventure," says Harnick.
"The whimsy got thicker and
thicker in the second act. The
point of it was so disguised
that many of us who saw it
lost the thread of it."
When the play opened in
the Soviet Union in 1943,
government censors quickly
saw through the piece as anti-
Nazi, but also anti-
totalitarian, and thus, critical
of Stalin's Soviet regime. The
production was shut down.
Despite his early misgiv-
ings, Harnick eventually
viewed The Dragon as a
potential musical, and allow-
ed his ideas to brew during
the period when he wrote
lyrics to Bock's music for such
shows as The Apple Tree and
The Rothschilds. The team
also wrote the scores to
Tenderloin, She Loves Me and
the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Fiorello!
"When I began to work on
it over the years, I had to
4