Shocked the "blue beard"

At the St. Petersburg Theater of Musical Comedy, the premiere of the opera-buff Jacques Offenbach once the once St. Petersburg Muscomedia Theater shone: it was erasal productions like the famous “Crechinsky’s wedding” to the music of Kolker and the mass of classic operettas. The place was visited and popular. But the time passed, the leaders were replaced, the troupe was chirled and old, the building dilapidated - and soon the theater turned into an art ruin, a dead and inert institution with a dull repertoire set.

After the end of the long -repair -restoration, stretching for decades - both under Alexander Belinsky, and after it - the theater slightly rose, opened the doors of the two halls - large and chamber - and, by the way, acquired the new authorities. The musical director and chief conductor of the theater was the young Andrei Alekseev; The main director is Alexander Isakov. The first swallow, which would announce a qualitative change, was the first premiere of this year, the “blue beard” of Jacques Offenbach - the opera -buff of the brilliant king of the French operetta from the time of the Second Empire. Director Yuri Alexandrov was invited to the production. He brought his team: the artist Vyacheslav Okunev and choreographer Gali Abaidulov. Together they made a performance light, witty, diverse in the applied theatrical techniques and quite intricate in composition. The action proceeds in two dimensions - on the stage of the theater and behind its scenes, and the difficult tread of our time now and then invades the gallant and conditional world invented by the directors.

The choice of the name for Aleksandrov was directly a gift of fate: the nature of his specific, smart-brutal humor turned out to be perfectly corresponding to the Bufffon-comic atmosphere of the Offenbach creation. In this fairy tale, the Libretto Mellyak and Galevi skillfully mixed the eroticism of situations and the unexpected insidiousness and cruelty of the main characters: cruelty and despotism are non -subservative, parody reduced and therefore not terrible. The old story about the nightmare maniac, killing his wives, is re-intoned and firmly, transferred to the parody-ironic plane of Offenbach himself: Alexandrov only remains to bring his creative vision to the performance. In the opera, all six wives in the final come to life (it turns out, Popolani, a servant of a knight, did not even think of killing them) and find their husbands - former propaganda ministers. And the Blue Beard himself (Nikita Zakharov), realizing his mistakes, swears in eternal love to his seventh wife, the brisk of the Payzanka Bulotte (Tatyana Taranets).

The action takes place in the interiors of the luxurious old theater: lush balconies of lodges, paphos baroque frescoes on the tent ceiling are hanged over the scene, the quadriga is proudly offered, akin to the one that flaunts on the Bolshoi Theater. Apparently, the building is actively in the building - a transparent hint of the reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater is actively undergoing. Even Anatoly Iksanov was bred: a character at a tie, in a strict gray suit holds a theater’s model in his hands and meets high guests, which, apparently, depends on funding. Later, this character is transformed into the comic king Babesh (Victor Krivonos), putting on a tall wig and camisole embroidered with gold.

The spectacle begins with a typical cabbage dummy: to the sounds of elegant overture, a flock of “white swans” is carried out on the stage and depicts the second act from the “Swan Lake”. They are seeding along the stage in white packs, diligently cringing and spreading their hands, and the evil genius Rotbart (later a servant of Popolani who later turned out to be predatory). And then suddenly a heavy stone ball flies into the column on a scale - exactly, as in the “rehearsals of the orchestra” of Fellini - and crush openwork structures, showering the “swans” with fragments of brick and stone crumbs.

Further, life on stage and life behind the stage flow in parallel, in grotesque polyphony. While Floretta (Alina Alekseeva) sings pastoral duets with a lovely friend, swaying a graceful head from a huge skirt -club, in a swapped room behind the stage - where the fire extinguisher hangs and stands a light remote control, on the soldier the sofan, the worker in the helmet is amused with the painter. The act of seduction goes into hard sex, and then into a horror movie: the worker bite the jaws of the victim’s body. After a couple of scenes on the same sofa, a maniac in an orange robe will shred the next girl with a tesak: and on the main stage at that time, coffins with dead wives will open and a terrible skeleton will perform its Dance Macabre over them.

The main impressions of the performance are visual and purely semantic, staging. Okunev’s “picture” turned out to be enchanting: a lot of beautiful dresses, chic decorations. The backdrops changed six times - it is clear that they did not spare money for the production. Then a romantic landscape with a medieval castle above the lake was visible (again a reference to the “swan lake”), then a fruit -vegetable still life, with shamelessly protruding sides of apples and pumpkins - such gifts of punch. There are so many gilding everywhere that it is in the eyes: the patterns are lined with a “glass” on luxurious dresses of the most appetizing, cream-chocolate shades. The edges of the packs are bent "saucer." Even on the wig of King Babesh, a golden cupid flaunts.

The familiar seemingly model of the “theater in the theater” among Aleksandrov and Okunev gained specific outlines. Baroque curls are relaxedly rhyme with them with a schedule-graph of the works of REU No. 71 on the wall; The court ladies in blond wigs are perfectly coexist with broken male girls, to the eyebrows with sprayed paint.

However, the performance was tragically did not correspond to the invented performance: the typical case when the directorial and visual ideas are good, and the embodiment is below the average. Actors categorically could not cope with vocals or stage movement; On a general unsightly background, perhaps, only an experienced crooked -nobility looked more or less natural and confident. As for the rest of the participants in the performance (including an unpresentable orchestra, led by Igor Verbitsky), sometimes I just wanted to exclaim: “As you are not ashamed!” It’s not a shame to play and sing so badly, so constrained to stay on the stage of operetta artists who simply must be related and plastic! A frivolous, fantasy, funny performance, with unpredictably polyphonic composition (here, by the way, the help of choreographer Gali Abaidulov turned out to be invaluable), faded and faded: he was literally destroyed by a musical component of the sight. It was insulting, but understandable: the difficult heritage of the recent past theater made itself felt about the loss of vocal skill and acting professionalism.

02/15/2006 / Gyular Sadykh-Zade, the material was published in the newspaper No. 26 dated 02.16.2006.