Drama without a playwright – Newspaper Kommersant No. 164 (7365) of 09/07/2022

The premiere of the musical play “Man / Woman” starring Yulia Peresild and Alexander Krasovitsky took place at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya. For the premiere, the birthday of the actress-cosmonaut was chosen, which also fell on Charity Day. Funds from the sale of tickets for the performance were donated to the Galchonok Foundation, which helps children with cerebral palsy. Attended the premiere Boris Barabanov.

There is no name of the playwright in the advertisement for the play “Man/Woman”. After all, this is not a performance at all, but a sequence of songs staged by actress Yulia Peresild and the Zero People group. A rare case of a musical project in the theater, when it is not even about a musical, which has a plot, but actually about a concert that is played in theatrical scenery.

But the production has a director. This is Yulia Peresild herself, who met Zero People on the set of Margulis’s Apartment, fell in love with the group, recorded a new version of the song In the Eyes with Zero People in 2021, and then found a larger form of cooperation. In February 2022, the actress and Zero People met for the first time to break down the band’s songs together and see what could come of it. It was at the Sovremennik Theatre, and at the initial stage the project was headed by the then artistic director of the theater Viktor Ryzhakov. In June, the director was fired from the post of artistic director.

The stage action included the best songs of Zero People, adapted for male and female voices, accompanied by keyboards and cello. The man on stage is Alexander Krasovitsky, the leader of one of the most significant domestic rock bands of the middle generation “Animal Jazz” and the chamber project Zero People, created together with keyboardist Alexander Zarankin.

Zero People has just released the album “Songs of a Man”, imbued with pain and deep universal compassion, but only the first thing from this clip, “Man”, was included in the production with Yulia Peresild. It opens the show. But before the lights go out and the first chords sound, the audience, making their way to their seats, can see themselves on the screen – the video camera broadcasts the image from the hall. For the creators of the performance, it is very important that the audience try on the images created by Peresild and Krasovitsky.

The scenography is the merit of Alexander Yurasov, who also works in the team of “Kvartirnik u Margulis”. He came up with a video accompaniment projected onto the screen during the performance. The central image is the seashore. The camera slowly moves along the scenery placed on the sand and scattered props, in which an old suitcase stands out. A man in the world of “Men / Women” is a man who comes, leaves, then returns, and his whole life fits in this very suitcase. But a woman needs more space, more things, more feelings – however, Yulia Peresild also manages to express all their diversity. She has a table that, at the right moment, turns into a door, a slate board or a bed of love.

At first, the performance is very leisurely, the songs are also at a low pace, but the degree of pathos grows from piece to piece. This is typical for Zero People: the authors understand that the first half, or even two-thirds of the action is quite monotonous in sound, and therefore the three parts of the action are separated by short ironic scenes played by Alexander Zarankin and Alexander Gulin (cello).

In the third part, irony was added in the main content – in the songs “Tango” and “Again”. Despite the playful melodic line, a post-apocalyptic motif suddenly cut through in the lyrics of “Again” from the 2020 album “The End of the Balance”: / Let’s dance with you again. The case when the song sounds like it was written on the topic of the day, and, most likely, the majority of those present at the theater perceived it that way.

Zero People is not the group whose songs are on everyone’s lips, and Yulia Peresild was the main star that evening. However, it is unlikely that all fans of Animal Jazz and Zero People are connoisseurs of her theatrical or film roles. From this paradox, in fact, a new troupe and a new art form were born, something quite convincing, but independent of the background of the central characters. Therefore, the definition of “musical performance” seems in this case too ponderous. The “musical-dramatic experiment” characterization used in the promotional campaign seems to fit better.

The song “Wonderful Life” looks like an ideal resolution of a complex structure, which, albeit with relatively minimal means, was built by artists and directors. In the fabric of the performance, frivolous lightness and dramatic optionality finally took over. The actors frankly fooled around and broadcast pure happiness into the audience, a feeling that is now worth its weight in gold. The simple phrase “I love you – hold on” I wanted to repeat after them endlessly. During the final song “Have time to say”, Yulia Peresild and Alexander Krasovitsky filmed each other with a video camera, broadcasting close-ups on the screen, and then went down with her into the hall so that people could again, as in the overture to the play, be able to look at themselves from the outside .