Translated material
Remembering the Tamer
The Taming of the Shrew was danced at the Musical Theater
Before the curtain was still closed, theater director Vladimir Urin came on stage and made a speech. Such speeches are said at funerals, when only good things are remembered about a person. The director recalled Dmitry Bryantsev, a choreographer who served as the chief choreographer of the Musical Theater for two decades. Six years ago he died in the Czech Republic, and now the theater has decided to remember its recent history and resume one of Bryantsev’s performances.Why the worst of them was chosen is a mystery. The last decade of Bryantsev’s life was generally not rich in successes: the choreographer, who became famous in his time for the television “Galatea” with Ekaterina Maksimova, either rushed into the jungle of belated eroticism, or sweetly babbled with the children’s audience. But there were some nice things - "The Phantom Ball", for example, or "Shulamith". The one-act “Bal” was resumed last year - it was given the honor of joining Nacho Duato’s Na floresta and Frederic Ashton’s “Margarita and Armand” in the “Masterpieces of World Choreography” program. This season, the ballet initially gathered to honor the memory of the former chief simply in the evening in his honor (which would have been reasonable), but then they decided to resume The Taming of the Shrew.
This ballet to the music of Mikhail Bronner, reminiscent of the traditions of Soviet pop song, was staged by Bryantsev a decade and a half ago. And then it was clear that the performance was not just bad, but amazingly, crystal bad. But they got used to such premieres of the Musical Theater back then - they laughed in passing and moved on. Now, when the theater has been striving to become a leader in the capital for several seasons in a row and proudly competes with the Bolshoi (sometimes very, very successfully: they managed to promote Neumeier for long-term cooperation, agreed with Kilian on the production before the Bolshoi, got Duato, which colleagues from Teatralnaya Square can only dream of ), the appearance of “The Taming of the Shrew” causes amazement.
Dmitry Bryantsev cut off the branches of Shakespeare's plot: the obstinate Katarina does not have any younger sister whom the best gentlemen in the city would like to marry, but matchmaking was impossible without the marriage of the eldest sister. The evil girl lives on her own and kicks away the suitors. They pay the riotous Petruchio to take revenge for them by marrying a devil. The hired worker dashingly carries out the assignment.
He drags the girl down the aisle, wringing her hands and lightly strangling her; forcibly lowers the heroine to her knees and bends her head when a drunken monk asks for consent. Petruchio (Georgi Smilevski) walks around the stage with a long whip and controls those around him with this whip. Even before Katarina appears, he clicks the rhythm of his friends' exits; in the second act, at his home, he scares the servants with a whip. The intonation has changed: instead of a Shakespearean joke on stage, there is a confident declaration “a woman must obey, if she doesn’t obey, hit her.”
Natalya Krapivina, who got the role of Katarina, makes the heroine such a villain that it becomes completely incomprehensible that it was three previous suitors who tried to woo her. She puffs out her cheeks, puffs up as if she always wants to hit someone with her head, and convulsively writhes her fingers (ugh, now I’ll scratch my whole face). As a dance characteristic, the choreographer gave the heroine only one feature: she jumps, placing her foot with her heel forward, that is, she does not easily slide through the air, but stupidly floats through space. Georgi Smilevski was even less fortunate - the hero’s “speech” is made up of the most ordinary combinations. But it is equipped with blows of a whip, and it looks like the speech of a not very self-confident person trying to make himself look cool by using obscene language.
Dmitry Bryantsev really wanted the performance to be fun, and joked as best he could. The main joke of this “Taming” was the singing corps de ballet - at a certain moment the ballet crowd opens their mouths and bawls wildly and awkwardly with pleasure. Another joke - the fake donkey's tail begins to spin. And in a circle, like a propeller. In the choreography, humor is assigned to the feet with an “iron” and indicated blows to the teeth. You'll want to laugh.
And yet why? Why remind us of the person’s failures? The divergent public voiced “conspiracy theories” (against such a background, the accomplishments of the current authorities look even more significant) and “theories of mercy” (so that the author’s money would go to the widow and child). Both theories are crazy (the repertoire of recent years is already good; if you want to help an orphaned family, you can do it with less losses for the theater). But no reasonable version is visible. Mystery.
Photo by VADIM LAPIN