Lulu from East Berlin

Like many another East Berliner, famed Komische Oper Set Designer Rudolf Heinrich, 35, and his wife, Coloratura Joan Heinrich, 32, were worried by the rising of the Wall. They thought about fleeing to the West, but there was a lot to keep them in the East. There was Rudolf's politically favored position as star set designer of the Communists' showcase opera house; there was Joan's promising career as one of the house's new but favored singers. Then the Heinrichs heard a rumor that all foreigners in East Berlin would have to surrender their passports; Joan Heinrich, Joan Carroll before her marriage, was a U.S. citizen. Suddenly it was time to run.

Joan put a sweater and skirt over her dress, a fur stole across her shoulders and crossed the border in a friend's car. Her husband had been given permission to make a brief visit to the Hamburg Opera. Heinrich turned the key on the apartment and all their possessions, next morning boarded the Hamburg Express. Last week Heinrich sat proudly in the third row of the Hannover Opera House watching his wife give a startlingly vivid performance in Alban Berg's Lulu. Coloratura Carroll's flight had ended in the beginning of a fine new career.

Fatal Mistake. As portrayed by most singers, Lulu has the morals of an alley cat and the tastes of the Marquis de Sade: in three acts she destroys three husbands before making the fatal mistake of picking up Jack the Ripper on a London street. Coloratura Carroll saw Lulu differently--as a kind of child of nature whose body enslaved her. To make her point, small (5 ft. 4 in.), shapely Coloratura Carroll appeared in some of the wispiest costumes ever seen on a Hannover stage. Her performance was consistently convincing, and her singing--even in the treacherous passages of rhythmically charged speech that stud the opera--was superb. Wrote the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung: "She came, sang, acted and conquered.''

Out of Darkness. Coloratura Carroll had just started to build a reputation at the Hamburg Opera when she met Heinrich, married him and moved to East Berlin. Born Joan Crugman, the daughter of a Philadelphia portrait photographer, she had studied at Curtis Institute, later sang in New York nightclubs ("It's not easy to stand up before a lot of drunks and sing the 'Bell Song' from Lakme"). In 1959 she headed for Germany.

Since the first dark days after their escape to West Germany (when the couple had only $75 between them), both of their careers have soared: Joan will sing at least eight more performances of Lulu, and Rudolf is swamped with more operatic assignments than he can handle.

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