TEODORA: A Musical Drama

TEODORA is the story of a woman of unbelievable strength. The main character is Teodora Verbitskaya. The onstage interviewer, an official of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) frames the story for us with his questions.
The time is 1948. We meet Teodora in Bremerhaven, Germany, in the general boarding area of the U.S.S. General Sturgis. This is the ship that will take refugees from the Displaced Persons camp in Bremerhaven to Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada. The Displaced Persons program is in full swing, sponsored and supported by the Allies and the United Nations.
The story unfolds as the UNRRA official questions Teodora. Her responses are in song and trace her struggle for survival from her life with Dimitri and their two young children under Stalin and his forced starvation program, Holodomor, to her desperate efforts, without her husband, to keep her children safe under Hitler’s plan to dominate the world and the resulting Holocaust.