On June 16 Kyiv’s House of Officers will host a show of the rock opera Herod: The History of a Passion. It is the final part of a trilogy by Oleksii Kolomiitsev, a Ukrainian theatrical producer, director of the Lviv Lesia Ukrainka Drama Theater (the play was written by Oleksandr Vratariov to the music of Ihor Poklad), i-pro.kiev.ua reports. The main character is Herod, a tyrannical king of Judea, who was, above all, thirsty for power. In the end, he even kills the ones he loves and goes mad from loneliness. The trilogy’s first part – the live movie Vivisection – is a performance about daily evil. It is also the presentation of a tragic situation, so much topical for Ukraine, in the person of an ideological murderer dictator, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The second part is The Little Anti-Formalistic Paradise, or Stalin Was, Stalin Is, Stalin Will Be? by Dmitry Shostakovich. This production is about Joseph Stalin, a mid-20th-centuty European dictator, who wrote his name with blood-stained letters into the history of more than one country. It is a cry from the heart about faith, hope, and global extermination of Stalin-type insane ideological dictators.
