Since Chekhov's writing has often been compared to musical composition, it's understandable that Wendy Kesselman (author of the Tony-nominated dramatization of The Diary of Ane Frank) opted musicalize her vision of this story about the power of a fableed Black Monk to feed into the talented Andrei's hallucinatory bent. It was highly praised by the then regional New York Times critic Alvin Klein, when it premiered at Yale Repertory in 2003 and starred Sam Waterston but seems not to have been produced since at least not anywhere where it has crossed my radar. Nor are you likely to have seen David Raabe's adaptation. You'd probably have a hard time getting hold of a 1991 Finnish movie adaptation. But she is the first to turn it into a musical. Wendy Kesselman is not the first to be drawn to this fable about a man of extraordinary talent and emotional fragility who falls under the spell of a legendary figure known as The Black Monk. That includes a novella, The Black Monk, which showed Chekhov to understand bipolar behavior long before it had a name. But Chekhov also wrote prose, including a number of stories dealing with mental health. Most people know Anton Chekhov as a playwright, whose greatest works ( Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters and The Seagull) continue to be revived by leading theater companies.
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