A hellish time machine was launched at the Satire Theater

The Satire Theater opened its 100th season with the premiere of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play “Ivan Vasilyevich,” known to wide audiences from Leonid Gaidai’s cult film comedy “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession.” Taking on a production that is doomed to be compared to a movie masterpiece is always a risk. But the current artistic director is not a timid one.

Therefore, until the light went out in the hall, it was his voice that informed the public that the play “Ivan Vasilyevich” was written by Bulgakov in 1935 for the Satire Theater, but at that difficult time, for censorship reasons, it was not destined to see the light of the stage. We had to wait some 88 years for the story of teleportation in time of the Russian Tsar and Soviet citizens to take place.

To begin with, director Gazarov decided to amaze the viewer visually, for which purpose the artist Vladimir Arefyev built something on stage that amazes the imagination with its shape and size – a huge metallic-colored ball with attached pipes and instruments seemed to be hovering in the air. It seemed that the considerable size of the Satire stage was too small for such a scene, especially when engineer Timofeev put his invention into action. Then the sphere, rotating menacingly, began to move, not childishly creating the illusion of refraction of space, which is why the wall blocking the depth of the stage moved in one direction, and behind the sphere a luminous path crawled, also divided into sections and ominously edged with red illumination. An impressive sight, I tell you – powerful and expensive.

But this, so to speak, is the embodiment of the miracle of engineering of the future, on the one hand. And on the other, the past with the painted walls of the Palace of Facets, archers, guslars and the Mother Queen, accompanied. The sitcom with the participation of historical and fictional characters was a very big style, which has not been remembered in Satire for a long time.

The genre chosen by the director for Bulgakov’s “Ivan Vasilyevich” – the grotesque – matches the set design.

The roles of the main characters are colored – costume, musically and plastically. If the poses are deliberately pretentious, if the makeup is, then they are deliberately excessive. The costumes are historical, rich and from the times of the New Economic Policy. Everyone will come out, if not with “Gypsy Girl,” then with a dance or vocal number in both their native and foreign languages. The props are more than realistic; in any case, the dishes served on dishes at the royal table can be seen even from the last rows of the stalls.

It would seem that the game should correspond to this style. But not every participant in the performance turned out to be a master of the grotesque – a genre that is catchy, rough, but in order to appear so, requires subtle characterization. It turned out that the performer of the title role, Yuri Vasiliev, who in the play played two Ivan Vasilyevichs at once – the manager of the house Bunshu-Koretsky and the Tsar of All Rus’ Grozny – is the best at this.

But the artist, brought up in the best traditions of the former Satire, surpassed himself in this role. I didn’t even recognize him at first, as soon as he appeared in the image of a busy house manager: he shuffles half-bent, his voice is rattling, fussy and petty. And across the stage he is the king, whose gait and voice fully correspond to his historical nickname. And both of his Ivan Vasilyevichs are convincing. By the way, the artist has more transformations from one image to another in the performance than anyone else, so he is insured by another artist in the mask of Vasilyev the Tsar, and maybe Vasilyev-Bunshi – I’m completely confused in this Bulgakovian phantasmagoria embodied by Gazarov .

The second, undoubtedly, successful role is Georges Miloslavsky, accurately performed by Artem Minin, a light, flexible artist, he actually bends, spins, and does the splits. Others had a more difficult time with farce and grotesquery – the external sharpness of the images, achieved mainly through costumes and wigs, did not add internal sharpness. Maybe that’s why Maria Borovskaya’s voluminous costumes were remembered more than those who demonstrated them, taking spectacular poses in them or lying at the feet of Ivan Vasilyevich. The poses weren’t enough.

Perhaps it was not easy for the artists, especially those with a large crowd, to be distributed on the stage, which was densely built up with decorations in both the first and second acts. And perhaps, due to the number of extras, it was not worth taking the stage. Be that as it may, everyone still has work to do.

But the ending, frankly speaking, was a success and fully corresponded to Ivan Vasilyevich’s phrase from Gaidaev’s Comedy: “Everyone is dancing!!!” Literally everyone danced to a modern melody in the style of catchy jazz, skillfully arranged by the director in spectacular groups on the proscenium, on a floating path from the infernal time machine, to the left and to the right. It seemed that this infernal machine itself was laughing and trembling in the air, pleased that it had returned everyone to the 21st century.