More than one in number

“Big Change” reached the gala concert

Having reached the halfway point, the first Moscow international theater festival for children “Big Change” broke out with a gala performance at the New Opera. Young people dressed as clowns were jumping in the foyer, a full-length theater orchestra was sitting on the stage, and before the start of the performance, Lyudmila Shvetsova for some reason congratulated everyone on the opening of the festival and shouted into the hall, like Santa Claus at the Christmas tree: “Children, do you need a children's theater?” And although there weren’t too many children in the hall, they unanimously screamed in response: “Yes!” The fifth day of the festival was ending.

His program initially looked huge and incomprehensible. The Moscow list was striking in its indiscriminate nature: a mixture of attractive new productions with old and obscure productions. From St. Petersburg, the gold-mask theater "Puppet Format" brought the already seen "Robin-Bobin" for kids and the premiere "Crime and Punishment" - a strange semi-parody spectacle, where the murdered old woman in Raskolnikov's dream sang the aria of Pushkin's Countess about three cards and with the words "marry Liza,” pointing to the deceased Lizaveta in a veil. They were expecting “The Green Bird” from the Youth Theater and “Mumu” ​​from the MDT, which was attracted by the name of Dodin, although Filshtinsky staged the play twenty years ago. Then there was complete fog, although one of the experts assured that it was worth going to Samara’s “Happy Hans”. The names of the festival's selectors, as well as their tastes, were unknown, but the organizers praised the international program and the high qualifications of the recommenders. Trips to the theater did not confirm this.

The Dutch “Falled Girls” promised an interactive performance for children, but in reality the children, who were ordered to take off their shoes and sat on cushions around a paper carpet, sat there, languishing and listening with translation to the conversations of two middle-aged girls who fell from the sky, full of pseudo-philosophical conclusions and rehashes “The Little Prince,” and enviously looked at how the third lady drew on the floor what was being discussed. The British “Marcos” turned out to be a one-man show by a shaven-headed, middle-aged actor, who spoke in the first person about a child who grew up in the forest with animals and was later unable to come to terms with civilization. The story was not very childish, the actor’s performance was rather average, and the fact that he used only a couple of household items to tell the story about all his adventures and heroes smacked not of a wealth of imagination, but of a lack of money. About another British performance - "Young Hamlet" - the most depressing rumors were heard from colleagues.

And even the Italian “Strange Games”, which I wanted to go to because their director and main character was the former St. Petersburg clown Vladimir Olshansky, who once worked with Polunin, turned out to be a very orphan event. Olshansky himself, acting in the image of a sad, dreamy clown like Asisyai, and his two angry Italian colleagues, apparently, really knew their business. There was no vulgarity in them, they skillfully and cheerfully worked with the audience, before starting, collecting garbage from the floor and then “accidentally” dumping it on the audience. But the poor show itself, which had neither a clear plot, nor a general idea, nor solid, complete numbers, almost all the time seemed painful and marking time.

By the middle of the festival, the rich program began to seem assembled according to the principle of “more numbers, cheaper prices.” And when it turned out that the entire noisily announced British program had migrated entirely from the festival of the small Vedogon Theater, which was going on at the same time in Zelenograd, which has modest capabilities and unpretentious tastes, hopes for the actual theatrical part of the “Big Change” completely dissipated. Festivals with serious ambitions do not collect in this way. However, in addition to the performances themselves, they also promised a serious special program with seminars, master classes and round tables on the problems of children's theater. Here the organizers could show that they were really serious about the conversation. But then a gala concert called “Theater and Cinema Stars for Children” broke out.

Of course, everyone understands that children do not need any gala concerts with stars, this is increasingly being done for pomp. But they promised a lot of good artists, recalling from the stage their childhood in the direction of Nina Chusova. The result was a Kremlin concert for children - a great style of stagnation at its most false. For some reason, the orchestra thundered Salieri's "Tarara", ballerinas from the theater Kasatkina and Vasilyev performed the dance of snowflakes, Popov's children's choir sang "Beautiful Maidens" from "Eugene Onegin". There was also Figaro's aria from The Barber of Seville, a duet from the musical Romeo and Juliet, a clown performance, a teenage jazz band from Sergei Kazarnovsky's school and a blue sky with stars as scenery. But the main ones were the presenters: a boy and a girl, plus two instead of a long list of announced stars - Anatoly Bely and Alexandra Ursulyak. The children, like pioneers, loudly said something about dreams, fantasies and the Internet, hugged each other by the shoulders, like around a fire, and extended their arms into the hall. Bely and Ursulyak, in the classic “piano in the bushes” genre, came out from different scenes, made surprised faces (“Oh, did you also sign up for this adventure?”) and began to say something supposedly spontaneous: “I was an athlete and loved mathematics,” “And I was always protesting against something,” but, of course, we were both dreamers. Perhaps the same memories of the puppet theater that the parents staged in the hallway behind the blanket would have been very charming in another situation, but here the memorized improvisations looked much more false than someone else’s official text. “What is the most important thing in children's theater?” - asked the inquisitive boy, journalistically handing Bely a voice recorder. “The main thing is to be honest,” the actor answered with a truthful face, then recalled that at school he loved to read poetry, and immediately recited the beginning of the main work of the Victory Day matinees: “Do you remember, Alyosha, the roads of the Smolensk region " Then Popov’s choir sang something folk about felt boots. In the finale, glittering streamers rained down from the balconies, confusing the musicians who were trying to have more fun playing the tragic waltz from “Masquerade.”

I met a colleague in the foyer, he was having fun: “The only thing they forgot was to send a welcoming telegram to Brezhnev.” When leaving the theater, children were given red balloons with the Big Change logo. I no longer wanted to go to round tables and seminars on the problems of children's theater.

Dina GODER