Salman Rushdie has adapted Haroun and the Sea of Stories into an opera playing at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center from Oct. 31 to Nov. 11. Haroun is a fabulist children’s tale, more accessible than his usual work, but still layered with allegory:
Haroun narrates the fate of the story-teller, who loses his ability to tell tales. His son then sets out on a journey to save his father’s skills. Rushdie had intended the book as a gift to his son Zafar… to make the son understand his father’s plight… [T]he book reached out to audiences uncomfortable with the complexities of Rushdie’s other novels…
Rushdie found the process of adaptation taxing:
S.R. ItÂ’s a strange book, Haroun. This was the one that came with the greatest fluency—it took me less than a year, and itÂ’s now taken ten times that long to adapt, so you know this is a much larger achievement… C.W. ThereÂ’s a practical reason for that. Its brevity makes it a little bit more manageable. I mean, I have my eye on The MoorÂ’s Last Sigh… S.R. Yes, that would be a very long opera.
Rushdie’s last stage adaptation was the excellent, albeit rushed, Midnight’s Children in London and at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He’s also working on a film version of his short story The Firebird’s Nest, in which he’s cast his inamorata Padma Lakshmi.
Update: Amardeep Singh has more.
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