Losses, compensation, expectations

"Golden Mask" will open very soon

The official opening of the Golden Mask will take place on March 28, but the touring schedule of musical theaters, as always, makes adjustments to the festival schedule. The Mariinsky Theater has already shown its performances - both opera and ballet; next Monday the Novosibirsk ballet will appear in the capital. At a press conference held before the weekend, the management of the Golden Mask decided to talk in detail about this year’s festival.

We started with what won’t be at the festival. Thanking for your attention, Yuri Lyubimov withdrew his “Antigone” from the competition (obviously, the master has long outgrown any and all competitions). Anatoly Vasiliev refused to participate in the festival due to the “reorganization” of the theater (hence, there will be no “Stone Guest”). “Mary Stuart” (BDT, staged by Timur Chkheidze) will not come from St. Petersburg - it suddenly turned out that the theater has a contract with the Chekhov Festival and the Moscow premiere must certainly take place as part of its program. But, of course, even without these performances, the assortment of the “Golden Mask” is far from poor: from Dodin’s “King Lear” to the Yakut “House of Bernarda Alba”, not to mention the Moscow works of Kama Ginkas, Henrietta Yanovskaya, Mindaugas Karbauskis and Sergei Zhenovach, - - a total of forty-seven performances.

A day before the official opening, the Berliner Ensemble theater's play "The Career of Arturo Ui" (directed by Heiner Müller, starring Martin Wuttke) will appear in Moscow. The show is planned as part of the “Legendary Performances of the 20th Century” program, and Müller’s performance, desperately funny, caustic and scary, certainly has the right to be presented under such a sign. In addition, “Mask” is organizing tours of the New Riga Theater - in Moscow they will show “Long Life”, “Blow the Breeze” and “Sonya”, performances that, unfortunately, were not able to be presented to the public at the last NET festival - then the theater I couldn't get through customs on time.

As always, on the eve of the festival, the award winners were announced in the categories “For support of theatrical art” (Governor of the Rostov region Vladimir Chub; apparently, for the very impressive work of the brand new Rostov Musical Theater) and “For honor and dignity” - here the award was awarded to the legendary Moscow ballerina Marina Semenova (she is 98 and, unfortunately, no longer works at the Bolshoi Theater, where she worked all her life) and the actor of the Komi-Permyak Drama Theater Vladimir Gulyaev. These “Masks” will be presented on April 14 at the closing of the festival, which will obviously not be boring - Dmitry Chernyakov will work on the final performance. In the meantime, the festival is just beginning, and first of all, Novosibirsk residents are waiting for us, with the extravagant “Cinderella” by Kirill Simonov, in which cars and unicorns exist on stage at the same time, and the gloomily tense “Russian Seasons” by Alla Sigalova.

Anna GORDEEVA