Operas target 'tsar' Putin

Protest against the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin now extends to the country’s leading opera houses, as productions of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Golden Cockrell” at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre are updated with scenes of riot police and missiles on parade.

The operas’ stories of strife in tsarist times are easily updated: “You can take any epoch in Russia and bring it to modern times and it will be the same thing. That’s what happens in Russia – it’s the same thing, over and over again,” Kirill Serebrennikov, director of the Bolshoi production, tells The Guardian’s Miriam Elder:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/31/protests-vladimir-putin-boris-godunov-opera