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 via central Siberia, the Ural area and the Far East. The finest theater was in Yekaterinburg, then often known as 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 Hot.” The Russian title of that final present interprets as “Only Girls in the Jazz Band.”
In 2012 I returned to Yekaterinburg—now boasting its pre-Soviet title—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 Nineteen Sixties.
While maybe not as frigid as they’re now after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S.-Russia relations had 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 season 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 staff consisted of seven Americans. Our Russian colleagues jokingly warned of KGB microphones hidden in our resort rooms. But as a Russian saying places it, “In every joke there’s a grain of truth.” Because of its army factories, Omsk was a zakritiy gorod, or “closed city.” Getting visas to enter the nation was no small feat, though the Omsk Musical Theater’s govt producer,
Boris Rotberg,
knew the way to work the system. We had been finally admitted on a cultural-exchange visa.
During our inventive jaunts in Russia, my American colleagues and I had been all the time on our greatest habits and adhered to the legal guidelines of our host nation. Growing up in the course of the Cold War, we had learn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
“One Day within the Life 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 movie star, and the sense of invulnerability fame so usually confers, was a blessing for us easy theater people. When we had been tempted to stray—as a few of us inevitably had been—worry saved everybody on the straight and slim.
While 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? Because Ms. Griner’s state of affairs evokes in me a “There but for the grace of God go I” sense of reduction. She performs for the basketball staff in Yekaterinburg, an exquisite 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.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared within the July 27, 2022, print version.
Source: www.wsj.com”