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