Pushkin/Prokofiev 'Godunov' finally realized

PRINCETON - Academia is the best home for the impossible. Such was the task at hand for the provocative, extravagant Princeton University-produced  Boris Godunov  - not the famous opera, but the Alexander Pushkin play as it might have been rendered by legendary director Vsevolod Meyerhold with music by Sergei Prokofiev.

The project was being rehearsed and the composer completed 55 minutes of music in 1936 - the year Joseph Stalin squashed Shostakovich's hit opera,  Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,  in a single stroke. Meyerhold canceled his project, whose  Macbeth -like parable of changing dictators would have proved a magnet for trouble.

It lay dormant until Thursday at the Berlind Theatre here (and closed Saturday), in a pungent, streamlined translation by Antony Wood and an intelligent student production directed by Tim Vasen with Prokofiev's music, Meyerhold's notes, and good instincts about how this kind of theater operated. ...