How would you like your politics this morning, sir? "Prokofiev and his World," a seven-week festival at Bard College, kicks off on July 4th, with the sublime--a fully restored version of the composer's 1935 ballet Romeo & Juliet, as written but never before performed (the political angle here being the composer's luckless life, not his source material), and freshly choreographed, on commission from Bard, by Mark Morris. The festival, on the Bard campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, is billed as an opportunity to "rethink the nature of modernism and the connection of music to 20th-century politics and culture in Russia, Europe, and the United States," but actually, on further investigation, sounds like fun. Also on deck are performances of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and productions as disparate as Chekhov's Uncle Yanya (1899), starring Peter Dinklage, and the raucously ridiculous (and painfully apt) George and Ira Gershwin 1931 presidential-campaign satire, Of Thee I Sing (Baby). And so much more. For the full, delightfully innovative program and tickets visit The Fisher Center at Bard website.
