Show in house slippers

Moscow theater award “Highlight of the Season” awarded

The crystal “Highlight of the Season” (for some reason hammered into a crystal ball) is being awarded for the eighth time, and the festive ceremony of this presentation, held in the spirit of a theatrical skit, has always been considered the most fun and informal of all awards for stage workers. At one time, these skits were farmed out to young people - students, young actors of the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, etc., but in recent years they have been composed and directed by director Konstantin Bogomolov and actor of the Vakhtangov Theater Sergei Epishev. And their light, cheerful show is increasingly drifting towards a very impartial satirical review, in which the laureates sometimes have the time not to rejoice, but to be offended. So it is this time: the presenters spent so much venom laughing at the love of the public and critics for Yevgeny Mironov, his theater, and above all for the awarded performance of Alvis Hermanis “Shukshin's Stories” that it was already beginning to look a little like envy. And the whole parody episode about foreigners “understanding the Russian soul” and Bob Wilson, who was allegedly invited by the Theater of Nations to stage Rasputin’s “Farewell to Matera”, looked like a mockery of a theater award dubious from the position of a redneck spectator. However, to hell with the complaints, there really was a lot of funny stuff in the ceremony, and there were so many stories that Bogomolov and Epishev wanted to mock that the show lasted almost twice as long as promised. But the audience, laughing non-stop, had no complaints.

Having announced that in terms of effects and glamor of the modest STD ceremony of Russia it is difficult to compete with the heavyweights, Bogomolov and Epishev decided to take it with intimacy and sincerity. And they staged a show in their slippers - they put chairs, a wardrobe, a refrigerator and even a bathtub with a doll's head sticking out of the foam on stage, and they sat down in white bathrobes to drink vodka with salted tomatoes from a jar. The “Highlight of the Season” is designed in such a way that its five laureates are known in advance - they are chosen by an expert council of capital critics. The only intrigue is which of the five winners the competition jury, headed by STD Chairman Alexander Kalyagin, will call the main one, the “big crystal nail.” Well, since the main part of the ceremony - the distribution of “Nails” - takes place without any exciting envelopes with names, then the presenting authors could have fun recklessly and allow themselves everything.

Preceding the award with the play “Seasons... of the Year...” by Ivan Popovski at the Kamburova Theater, they pretended to drop the “Nail” owed to him from the cabinet and break it. Then they joked about women - the directors of theaters, of which there are only eight and a half in Moscow, and, while listing them, they forgot Yanovskaya, but pleased the audience by calling Viktyuk their other half. They also made a good joke in relation to Popovski about the “hammer and sickle” with the clarification that he was not a Serb, but a Macedonian and not very young, but that’s all the same. Before they began presenting the prize to Adolf Shapiro’s play “Children of the Sun” at the Maly Theater, they parodied a letter from the artists of the Stanislavsky Theater with complaints about the new chief director Galibin (this collective message, published in Litgazeta, is the subject of heated behind-the-scenes discussions of late). And then, in the same spirit, they composed a letter from supposedly Maly oppositionists, dissatisfied with the conservatism of their leadership (here, of course, there was a lot of scope for jokes). When presenting the prize to the Et cetera theater directed by Alexander Kalyagin (the musical “Producers” directed by Dmitry Belov), they began to joke about avatars (they say that producer David Smelyansky is Kalyagin’s avatar, acting when he sleeps), at the same time they said that Dmitry Medvedev is an avatar Vladimir Putin, they showed a piece of Cameron’s film as a secret Kremlin filming, etc. It is unknown how the small ballet of the famous Nacho Duato “In the Forest” from the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater was included in this drama award for a long time, but for a long time they amused the audience with a parody of the broadcast network of Ivan Demidov’s supposedly new TV channel “Golgotha-TV” with the slogan “first Orthodox”.

Overall, the evening was a success. In the finale it turned out that the largest “Nail”, by decision of the jury, was sent to the Maly Theater for the play “Children of the Sun”, which was especially pleasant because this performance was not at all nominated for the “Golden Mask” award, which will be awarded very soon in Moscow. nominated.

Dina GODER