Thaw attempt

The musical “Awakening of Spring”, the original Broadway production of which received eight Tony bonuses in 2007, was registered in the Moscow Gogol Center not from a good life. Actor Alexei Franetti, who bought a license for a production for his own money-not for commercial reasons, but out of love, so to speak, for art, for several years in a row, he picked up a turn from the gate for several years in a row: the music, they say, are excellent, but it is interesting to understand what was so embarrassing the theater morality: still the drama of Franca Vedikenda, according to whose motifs, were the same. Composer Duncan Shayk and screenwriter Stephen Seiter wrote the libretto of their musical, has long become a classic. This is in 1907, when Vsevolod Meyerhold was the first to put Veskind’s original in the Komissarzhevskaya Theater, Alexander Blok fell upon the authors of the performance with angry Philippics, and the audience discussed not so much innovative directing as “immorality” of the story of teenagers who do not “Faust” by Goethe, but pornographic pictures.

How many water seemed to flow since then, when Kirill Serebrennikov, whom Alexei Franetti turned to without much hope, still decided to take up the production of “awakening of spring”, the musical libretto was read in the Gogol Center-and began to nervously study the criminal code: the notorious “non-traditional sexual relations”, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence illegal abortions - no matter what the topic is an article. In a matter of months, deputy legislations managed to discard the country a century ago, crossing out the experience of two sexual revolutions: in America, families go to the musical and seiter so that parents and children can better understand each other, but we have a teenage rebellion against the hypocrisy morality in a sense of civil resistance, and the performance on the awakening of feelings Inevitably read as a protest statement. So even if the Russian premiere of “Awakening of Spring” does not reach the Tony Award, the medal for the courage of the Gogol Center residents precisely deserved.

And not only the relevance of the play is a matter. Trusting such a complex musical material dramatic artists means to risk it very much. For a long time, pre-perestroika years remained in the past, when the rock opera on one sixth of the land was still a curiosity, the Mossovet Theater could afford to put “Jesus Christ” by its own modest forces-the public intoxicated by the democratic relaxation of the genre did not especially pay attention to the stylistic reliability of the staging. Over the past ten years, the situation in the domestic theater has changed quite dramatically - and the fact that selfless artists of the Seventh Studio, for all their plasticity and musicality, are obviously difficult to comply with the Broadway quality standards, at the premiere of “Awakening of Spring” was noticeably naked eye. There were enough problems in the production process: the Gogol Center even had to cancel the first two premiere performances due to non-staff with sound technology. But as a result, both technology and inexperience still managed to win: at the key show in the framework of the Territory festival, “The Seventh Studio” and the Orchestra, under the leadership of Armen Poghosyan, sounded as clearly as possible in principle in difficult proposed circumstances.

And on the purely spectacular side, the Moscow setting of “Awakening of Spring” looks much more adversely than a rock concert with dialogues on an empty square of the scene of the Broadway version. Out of habit, speaking simultaneously in the role of both the director and the stage, Kirill Serebrennikov organized the space with the help of wooden boxes, which became either desks or cabinets in the locker room, then a cramped windowsill, replacing the bed in love, and at the end of the performance of naturally turning into two coffins. Where exactly and when exactly the events of the performance are unfolding, you can’t say for sure: the girls and boys from Serebrennikov study separately, on the tee of the Law of God and Latin, but their parents endlessly watch TV, the director monitors the students in the video surveillance system, and the Russian translation by Zhenya Berkovich in modern youth jargon. Lines like “This life is a setup! / Though chop off your hands. / Just got everything. / Pipets, grave, edge "are not too deftly mounted with any now and then from the lips of the heroes discussions about sin and pull the performance somewhere towards the yard disco-however, it is worth recognizing that translate the original " The Bitch of Living " and " Totally Fucked " , while remaining within the limits of normative vocabulary, and in itself The case must be not easy.