The Opera Tattler

On Super Tuesday I heard a segment on the BBC NewsPod dealing with some controversy over a Spanish musical about Anne Frank. Apparently it took 10 years for the producer, Rafael Alvero, to get the musical off the ground, and the Anne Frank-Fonds still has not granted Alvero rights. Board member Christoph Knoch spoke about how the life of Anne Frank is an  inappropriate subject of a musical. The Anne Frank Stichtung, which runs the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, approves of the musical.

Timothy Muller, a BBC journalist and composer of the musical Blair on Broadway was interviewed as well for this story, and he theorized that people would not have a problem with an opera about Anne Frank. It seemed quite likely that such an opera already existed, so I did a little research and noticed that not only has Grigory Fried written an opera entitled The Diary of Anne Frank, it is being performed by the Long Beach Opera on June 4, 5, and 8, 2008 in two parking garages in Los Angeles County.

I would be tempted to go if it were only San Francisco Opera were not putting on Das Rheingold just around that time. Note that none of the dates actually conflict, the Wagner opera will have performances on June 3 and 6.

The musical El Diario de Ana Frank: Un Canto a la Vida opens at the end of February at the Teatro Calderon in Madrid, and is set to run through the end of March.

BBC Article |El Diario de Ana Frank | The Diary of Anne Frank