We have two weeks of theatre to catch everyone up on before we start our busiest week of theatre going yet!
Week 2:
Our first show of the week was another Krymov piece: “Торги” (The Auction.) This show is based on the Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Seagull,” and “Cherry Orchard.” Only text from these plays are used in this show, but the results are not your typical Chekhov play, of course. Production photos and additional information is available here.
Sunday we saw “МЫкарамозоВы” a Moscow Art Theatre School Diploma Show based on Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamozov. The show was based on studies that the students did on the characters of this iconic novel. The show draws a connection between these seemingly distant fictional characters and the common man using etudes, text and music. Interestingly, the large cast works in an extremely closed in, colorless space very close to the audience which certainly helps achieve the goal of the work that they are doing.
Week 3:
This week we had a very rare and wonderful opportunity to sit in on a run through of GITIS’s newest student show Schiller’s “The Robbers” (Разбойники) directed by Yuriy Butusov. This was a great opportunity for many reasons for us. This cast of five young ladies (yes, this is quite a unique choice for this show) who also study at GITIS were working in the tender stage of the run throughs before an opening in a new space. This is no easy task. Butusov is a very famous director in Moscow and our students are very fond of his work. Before the run through started we had the opportunity to hear directly from him his thoughts on the work. We are so thankful that we were able to experience this show before opening night!
Later in the week we saw Krymov’s “Gorky 10.” This is a very whimsical and absurd farce based on Lenin’s time spent in Gorky 10, the country house of Russian leaders. The show is extremely imaginative. The entire first half is the same scene over and over becoming more and more absurd each time. The audience can never be sure what will happen next. The absurdity is so carefully crafted and perfectly placed to create an extremely interesting and effective piece of theatre.
Saturday afternoon we took a trip to the Fomenko Theatre to see their children’s theatre production of “Алиса в Зазеркалье” (Alice through the Looking Glass.) This is a high budget, high energy show geared for children. The environment is, of course, very different than most of what we have seen in Moscow.We chose this show because we intend to expose our students to all types of theatre. There were many staging choices and special effects that particularly interested our students.
Please do check out the links to the websites for each of these fantastic productions and stay tuned for next week’s selections!