The Magic Flute was the first opera that Maurice Sendak designed and the production has been a hit in cities all across the country. Sendak created a whimsical, colorful set, covered with paintings of fantastic creatures, temples and even a silhouette of Mozart.

Sendak says The Magic Flute is perfectly suited to his particular talents as an illustrator.

There are many operas that I love that I can't do. I'm not creatively equipped to do that like La Traviata I cannot design a regular ballroom with regular people. That's not my gift, so I have to do some fantastical things. We all have to accept limitations.

Sendak's production focuses on the two young lovers Pamina and Tamino as they make their way through a world where all of the adults have a hidden agenda. Sendak says only the children in the story really tell the truth much like real life. He says kids will enjoy the opera because of the music, the dragon, the magic and the colors. But he thinks they'll also identify with the underlying themes of the story the struggles of growing up, the desire to belong, and the difficulty of separating good from evil.

I so detest this separation of state between what children should like and what adults do like the movies, like the books, like the everything is categorized and put into little slots. And of course it's bad for everybody, grownups as well as children.

Sendak has designed many operas over the past 20 years and they've all been successful. He says he doesn't understand why people think opera is an elitist art form.

And it's just so stupid because opera was to the 18th century what Sondheim is now. It was entertainment. Everybody went and had a good time. And nobody thought this was, like, high class. The classification of opera began in the 19th century when you get Wagner and you have all these people schlepping to Germany and making a kind of fetish out of the thing. And then there are snobs who want to think they're above it all and they use opera as a way of disguising themselves.

Maurice Sendak's production of The Magic Flute plays Sunday at the Detroit Opera House. I'm Celeste Headlee. © Copyright 2012, wdetfm