I ENTERTAINMENT I Wishing Our Customers and Friends A Happy and Healthy Passover OYSTER BAR & GRIME i MLA MIL /%10/ 29110 Franklin Rd. • Southfield • SALVATORE 357-4442 Margery Gray Ha rn ic k N SCALLOPINI's Next Door to Norm's Oyster Bar 29110 Franklin Rd. • Southfield • 3 5 7-88 7 7 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 ETON STREET STATION Family Gathering Place 245 S. Cton • Binningfuun. • 647-7774 1403 S. Commerce Road. Walled Lake. Michigan HONEY TREE AT TALLY HALL 31995 ORCHARD LAKE RD. at 14 Mile • Farmington Hills — GREEK FOOD • SOUVLAKI • SPINACH PIE • GREEK SALAD • BAKLAVA • RICE PUDDING CARRY-OUT & CATERING 855-4866 AND ATHENIAN CAFE AT EASTLAND MALL FOOD COURT & PORTSIDE, TOLEDO PLUS HONEY TREE AT TALLY HALL, ANN ARBOR Wish Everyone A HEALTHY & HAPPY PASSOVER CLOSED WED., APRIL 19 AT 3 p.m. AND REOPENING FRI., APRIL 28 AT 7 a.m. ENJOY A HAPPY L HEALTHY PASSOVER 624-6660 Wishing All Our Customers and Friends A Healthy & Happy Passover NEW 1-EAS 313 MONROE 961-5544 You can prevent mental retardation Contact the Association for Retarded Citizens for free information. JARC DELI and RESTAURANT VA DINNERS OR TRAYS Free Delivery Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner ... Mon.-Fri. 7 a.m.-8 p.m., Sat. 7 a.m.-3 p.m. 21754 W. 11 MILE AT LAHSER • HARVARD ROW 88 FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1989 352-4940 28366 Franklin Rd. Southfield, MI 48034 (313) 352-5272 Help build Association for Retarded Citizens 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