Brittney Griner holds up a photograph of gamers carrying her quantity, previous to a listening to within the Khimki district court docket exterior Moscow, July 15.
Picture:
Dmitry Serebryakov/Related Press
The case of
Brittney Griner,
the WNBA participant on trial in Russia for drug possession, resonates with me. I used to be about Ms. Griner’s age after I labored within the Soviet Union.
From 1990 to 1994, I composed and performed in three musical theaters for four-month stretches, transferring by way of central Siberia, the Ural area and the Far East. The most effective theater was in Yekaterinburg, then often called Sverdlovsk. I performed Russian orchestras in my very own musical—a lavish adaptation of
Alexandre Dumas’s
“The Three Musketeers”—and within the well-known American musicals “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Sugar,” the 1972 musical tailored from the 1959 movie “Some Like It Scorching.” The Russian title of that final present interprets as “Solely Ladies within the Jazz Band.”
In 2012 I returned to Yekaterinburg—now boasting its pre-Soviet identify—to conduct a manufacturing of Hungarian composer
Emmerich Kálmán’s
“The Duchess of Chicago.” The Sverdlovsk Theater of Musical Comedy’s manufacturing marked the primary Russian efficiency of the 1928 operetta since its Soviet premiere in Leningrad within the Sixties.
Whereas maybe not as frigid as they’re now after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S.-Russia relations have been hardly pleasant in November 1990, the twilight of the Soviet Union. Like Ms. Griner, I used to be a stranger in a wierd land. A summer time crash course in Russian had taught me the Cyrillic alphabet however little else. On our first journey to the Siberian metropolis of Omsk, the manufacturing crew consisted of seven Individuals. Our Russian colleagues jokingly warned of KGB microphones hidden in our lodge rooms. However as a Russian saying places it, “In each joke there’s a grain of fact.” Due to its army factories, Omsk was a zakritiy gorod, or “closed metropolis.” Getting visas to enter the nation was no small feat, though the Omsk Musical Theater’s government producer,
Boris Rotberg,
knew the right way to work the system. We have been finally admitted on a cultural-exchange visa.
Throughout our inventive jaunts in Russia, my American colleagues and I have been at all times on our greatest habits and adhered to the legal guidelines of our host nation. Rising up through the Chilly Warfare, we had learn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
“One Day within the Lifetime of
Ivan Denisovich,
” and gulag was one of many few Russian phrases all of us knew. The concept of casually sampling a contraband narcotic—in different phrases, sharing a joint with an actor—was terrifying to us. The considered carrying medicine into the nation was insane. Not having Ms. Griner’s superstar, and the sense of invulnerability fame so usually confers, was a blessing for us easy theater folks. After we have been tempted to stray—as a few of us inevitably have been—worry stored everybody on the straight and slim.
Whereas Ms. Griner by her personal admission broke the regulation, I hope she doesn’t obtain the disproportionate 10-year sentence she faces. A milder punishment appears becoming for her unlucky error of judgment. Why display such mercy? As a result of Ms. Griner’s state of affairs evokes in me a “There however for the grace of God go I” sense of aid. She performs for the basketball crew in Yekaterinburg, a beautiful metropolis the place I had the good fortune to work. Thirty years in the past, one dumb mistake and that will have been me.
Mr. Opelka is a musical-theater composer-lyricist.
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Appeared within the July 27, 2022, print version.
