"Jesus Christ" was crucified in Rostov

The directorate of the Rostov Regional Philharmonic canceled the performance of the rock musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which came to the city on tour, after 18 local Orthodox activists wrote a letter to the director of the philharmonic asking to ban the performance, which allegedly offended their feelings. The Russian blogosphere responded to this shocking news immediately.

Hayde Gisborne : I'm an atheist, but I'm pretty tolerant of religion. But this??? I’m wondering, like, don’t we have non-believers in Rostov? Are they all too Orthodox? Are there no ordinary ones?

So I wonder what those who just wanted to go see think? And I wanted it, and Lera wanted it, and so did our history and MDC teacher. I liked her reaction: “Bitches!”

Believers, if you don’t want to look at all this, don’t look! Go to the temple, read a book, cook some dish. Why spoil other people's mood???

And I’m interested, do we have some kind of special religion in Rostov? All over the country, all over the world, the IHS is shown to huge sell-outs, but here it was rejected... Nonsense!

Alexander Timofeevsky : I worked all day, didn’t follow the news, at night I went on the Internet, and there was a chronicle of a madhouse.

The Orthodox Taliban from Rostov is waiting for the local prosecutor’s office to deal with the opera “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which was heard in all the yards of my childhood. The prosecutor accepted the request. Having learned about this, the director of the Philharmonic decided not to wait and prudently canceled the performance, ordering the tickets to be withdrawn from sale.

At the same time, the Orthodox Taliban from St. Petersburg also turned to the local prosecutor's office to sternly ask the Wimm-Bill-Dann company for milk and "Jolly Milkman" kefir. And then the prosecutor accepted the request. But what about it? On Milkman's bags, the LGBT symbol - a six-color rainbow - clearly promotes homosexuality among children, and this is prohibited by city law.

It is not clear why the St. Petersburg public is so petty, wasting itself on some kind of “Wimm-Bill-Dann”, and does not demand that the prosecutor’s office call to account the Lord God, who, combining rain with the sun’s rays, shamelessly scatters LGBT symbols throughout the sky . And the children see this, such a disgrace, and the law adopted by the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly is directly violated.

There is no strength to comment on this further. There is no strength.

byum : But if I don’t fast in the spring, will they put me in prison?

Dwarf Arcoiris : From the release of the St. Petersburg Rock Opera Theater dated February 29, 2012:

"Dear viewers!

Due to the aggressive position taken by a number of leaders of Orthodox dioceses in Belarus, the performance of the play “Jesus Christ Superstar” was banned in several cities on the tour. Local cultural departments allegedly received letters from “offended believers” demanding a ban on the rental of the “blasphemous” rock opera. In order to meet the “wishes of the working people,” secular cultural institutions refused to admit our theater. As a result, the performance was filmed in four cities out of five on the tour (as it turned out, the theater’s performance in Brest was also in danger of being cancelled). At the same time, in violation of all contractual practices, the theater was notified in advance of the cancellation of the performance only in Mogilev - and we managed to agree on a replacement: instead of “Jesus...” residents of Mogilev will see the rock opera “Orpheus and Eurydice”.

The Rock Opera Theater has been touring with pleasure in the fraternal Republic of Belarus for many years and has always found the warmest welcome there. We cannot understand why thousands of spectators were denied the right to attend theater performances and form their own opinion about the spiritual content of a work that has long occupied a prominent place in world culture."

Dmitry Olshansky , journalist: Dear Orthodox leaders and functionaries!

Excuse me, but if you do not convince the Patriarch to make a statement clearly and sharply condemning all this, so to speak, social activity of believers, you will get a situation in which the Church in Russia will become enemy number 1 for every person who knows how to distinguish Gogol from Hegel and a cow from the cow.

Alex de Clémeschier : God, how I hate what we are becoming! Or have we always been like this, just hidden? Or were our hands simply tied before, and we weren’t really allowed to prohibit anything?

I'll go put the DVD with our Andrew Lloyd Webber's work on the same shelf as the extremist "Well, wait a minute!"

Alex Drobot : Gentlemen, theatergoers, artists and other directors with costume designers, I give you an interesting idea: collect a pile of signatures among yourselves and register the “All-Good True Church of Melpomene” and declare your theatrical productions as worship services, and the public as parishioners. And then you can even butt heads with those who like to ban everything.

lev_56 : In my opinion, in its search for an enemy - diverse and terrible - with the goal of rallying society around the authorities, the authorities have clearly already overdone it. Now society is rapidly splitting into secular and clerical. And secular society is represented, in this case, by the creative intelligentsia. If the tip of a poisoned arrow is directed against her and the Internet free spirits, who a priori oppose all prohibitions, this is again stupid and short-sighted.

I am not a supporter of considering our supreme power to be anecdotally stupid, but those on whom it relies, those who implement one or another of its thoughts, are so unsubtle and clumsy, cynical that this only discredits the power. More precisely, it speaks of its strategic miscalculation: its electorate is not the only support on which stability can be maintained. Even if the chair leg is thick, even if there are two, even three of them - ignorant people, bureaucrats and now the orthodox, the social structure will not be viable.

Mazutych : They’ve been trying to ban “Dom-2” for several years, but now it’s done! Every day on TV there is the abomination “Let them talk”, the whole country is shown freaks killing their parents and children, but the Orthodox are silent on this matter. For some reason this does not offend their religious feelings.

Orthodox Christians, you are savages, barbarians, Asian monsters! What's next? You will demand to close the Pushkin Museum named after. Pushkin on the grounds that there are statues of Greek and Roman gods, which, in your dense understanding, are “pagan idols”? Will you bashfully cover David's pussy? Retouch shame with Photoshop?

merelana : The only thing that can be done now is to get the Dumaks to reject this law. Even if this is a clever PR move to allow Vova to show off during his second coming and show himself as the savior of democracy and a secular state, they might foolishly accept it. Putin says the law needs to be improved. It does not need modification, but complete cancellation, so that such an idea never arises again.

For all this leads to religious wars, the Inquisition and so on. Because there will always be those who are offended, not just some, but others.

kornibek : To maintain the momentum, it is time for believers to stock up on firewood and kerosene, and for State Duma deputies to urgently introduce an addition to the Criminal Code introducing burning at the stake into practice.

And who would have thought that this assumption could be true? Would you say no? Were you ready yesterday to believe in the prohibition of “Jesus Christ”?