WILLEMS HAS ALWAYS BEEN a broader artist than just a writer of picture books, though that task alone is such that he calls it “as easy as describing the history of Byzantium in three words.” Some of his most celebrated characters - who include a venturesome plushie called Knuffle Bunny, the on-and-off best friends Elephant and Piggie, and that insatiable, inimitable Pigeon - had already starred in musicals that he had written before he formalized his long association with the Kennedy Center in 2019, when he became its education artist in residence.

And both forms really have been pushed off to the side of the mainstream, and I think that they have more power that way.” “It’s big emotions,” he added during an interview at the Kennedy Center before the premiere. “The commonalities between what my industry, or my main industry, does and what opera does are incredible,” said Willems, a six-time Emmy Award-winning former Sesame Street writer, who has earned three Caldecott Honors for picture books and reigns as a near-deity in children’s literature. The writer for it all? Mo Willems, who, it turns out, really loves opera! Opera’s great composers have a new librettist, and he is almost certainly the only person who could induce an institution like the Kennedy Center to do something like this, let alone get Renée Fleming to join him in hosting it inspire a quintet of young singers to ham their way through it and persuade Simon, one of the busiest composers around, to crown the show with a 20-minute piece that gives an attention-seeking, picture-book Pigeon the prima donna spotlight it has surely always craved. The Queen’s aria? That’s still about anger, but it now invokes something far worse than the vengeance of hell. “La donna è mobile”? That’s about how milk squirts out your nose if you happen to laugh at exactly the wrong time. Listen closely, and you’ll find that the singer should have shared her cotton candy with her friends, and absolutely will … tomorrow. See, you might think that Carmen is relating her views on love, but no. The other ones: the words, at least, as they are now known to my 6-year-old daughter and the hundreds of children who took grown-ups like me to the Kennedy Center here recently for the premiere of “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,” an experiment, including a short new work by the composer Carlos Simon, in what it might mean to draw a very young and impossibly demanding audience into a life in opera. WASHINGTON - Do you know the words to the Queen of the Night’s stratospheric showcase from “The Magic Flute”? Maybe the Duke’s famous tune from “Rigoletto”? Carmen’s Habanera?

Elephant and piggie i will take a nap