SOURCE: Review of Brundibar, by Tony Kushner. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 44 (3 November 2003): 72.

In the following review, the critic comments that the main story in Brundibar is ultimately one of hope, although it includes a darker subtext.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Kushner adapts this allegorical tale from a Czech opera created by Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister in 1938. [In Brundibar,] a doctor wearing the Star of David on his jacket dispatches siblings Aninku and Pepicek to town to find milk for their sick mother. Sendak, in a mix of fantasy and reality elements reminiscent of his In the Night Kitchen (especially the cameo appearance of a baker), thrusts the siblings—and readers—into an exotic backdrop of stone buildings topped by spires and turrets, but with familiar details such as a horse grazing behind a picket fence and a field of flowers. The two try to earn money to buy...