| Enterprise "Bal-Ast" revived "Jolly Fellows" Over the past five years, directors have been chewing and reliving the plots of the 30s of the last century in different ways, turning them over in musicals, plays, and films. At the same time, television creators diligently cultivated the ideas of “accessibility” (Petrosyan’s shows are multiplying at a cockroach’s speed; those who don’t watch are not with the people, and even if we buy a good film, we’ll put it on at three in the morning) and fed the swelling imperial ideology. “Merry Fellows,” once made by Grigory Alexandrov with the idea of “outdoing Hollywood” and in its apotheosis containing a rollicking solo by a grimy peasant woman on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater (“chug-chug-chug-chug, our iron has flared up”), simply had to be resurrected. We were resurrected - in an unexpected version of the New Year's fairy tale.
I can’t imagine how the “Bal-Ast” enterprise will perform the show of Maxim Dunaevsky (he added more than half of the songs to the play, using his father’s famous songs) and Victor Kramer after the country comes back from the holidays and drags out the skeletons of Christmas trees in the trash. But until this happens, it makes sense to take the child and go to the theater for a funny, uneven and amazingly beautiful hybrid of a children's matinee and a New Year's pop concert.
The action, as expected, begins in the village. But Yuri Kharikov is not keen on the specifics of the design - the stage is bordered on three sides by light panels hanging from the grates and a huge white ball hangs in the center. The light plays on it - and it seems that the ball is rotating. And from above on this ball (well, yes, on a rotating globe) the main character Kostya Potekhin, a collective farm shepherd who will become a jazz musician, marches with a cheerful song. His cows gather below.
When the cows appear, your child will freeze, his mouth half open. (Wait, maybe it will happen in the second act, when the animals descend into the hall!) They are huge, they are furry (just some kind of yaks), they are multi-colored. Pink furry cow. A cow, part of which is white and part of which is blue. The cow is spotted, white-yellow-purple. The cow is white and orange. And everyone is dancing.
The design is the most spectacular part of the performance. The main color is white; rare black spots (conductor's tailcoat) and bright cow fur. Visiting celebrity Leopoldo Fraschini, with whom Kostya Potekhin is confused, wears a robe from newspaper reviews. (Apparently, they were enthusiastic.) The mother-of-pearl piano is made, naturally, from shells. When the action moves to Moscow, another white ball, smaller, hangs over the “globe” - from its snowy surface the domes of churches stick out like boletus mushrooms. And in Moscow itself (in the alcoholic dreams of Fraschini, stunned by hospitality?) Polar bears, skiers and the inevitable worker and collective farmer are marching.
Clips? Of course, the clips, no one hides this. The performance is clearly divided into episodes, and each has its own solution, unrelated to the previous and subsequent ones. Matinee? Of course, it’s a matinee, it’s not for nothing that the “heroines” walk through the hall so that the children can touch them. But the text is clear and not vulgar, the general drive does not disappear even after unsuccessful episodes (the fight of the orchestra members turned into some kind of running in a circle with a huge piece of white fabric), and the plot that suddenly cuts through the “Alexandrovsky” plot is absolutely Hollywood (it was there, of course, it was simply covered up with all sorts of Soviet nonsense) the plot about the conquest of the capital. “Farewell, our little world,” the heroes sing, dreaming of success in Moscow. That is, the directors did not submit to the old text, but pulled out something that was alive, not vulgar and not scary. It’s just a pity that it turned out to be more of a concert with “pictures.” But good pop concerts are also rare. Anna GORDEEVA |
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