Mark Rozovsky for the sake of a new performance rhymed and modernized “Kashtanka”

On the eve of Easter, on the evening of April 15, the Mark Rozovsky Theater gave a play based on Chekhov’s classics. The production of “Kashtanka.sobaka.ru” turned out to be musical, modern, instructive, funny, very childish and at the same time adult. The correspondent of “MK” visited the premiere.

The theater under the direction of Rozovsky has considerable experience in creating musical performances based on classical literature. “Dear Friend”, “Captain’s Daughter”, “Dancing Men” or “Goldfish” for children from the Small Stage. But in the performance based on Pushkin, the canonical text of the tale sounded unchanged; Rozovsky, on the other hand, largely retreated from the original source, which did not become a step to the side, but a movement towards the viewer, in this case, towards children.

The “transformation” of the theater for two and a half hours into the circus “At the Nikitsky Gate”, the introduction of clowns (more precisely, clowness) into the list of actors was also done taking into account the main audience. To keep the attention of young viewers, the performance was saturated with direct appeals and questions to the audience: “Guys, doing this and that is not good”, “What do you think this word means?” … The format of interaction with the adult world is a question-answer – they learned well in kindergarten and school. And if they are only discovering the theater for themselves, “interactive elements” will help not to turn what is happening on the stage into a picture on the screen, which is somewhere there, on the other side.

The theater is better than a TV or a PC monitor, because they only broadcast and don’t want to know what you think about it. The theater is better than the TV, because here a multi-colored spinning ball flies into your hands. The theater is better than TV, because there is no border between you and a miracle.

These first three “theatrical lessons” from Rozovsky are the most important. Plus, Mark Grigoryevich made Kashtanka and her accompanying characters speak in verse, sing and dance to the music of Maxim Dunaevsky, who wrote melodies for hits from The Three Musketeers, Mary Poppins, Goodbye and the cartoon The Flying Ship. Moreover, the animalistic heroes – the dog Kashtanka-Aunt herself, “a mixture of a dachshund and a mongrel”, the goose Ivan Ivanovich, the cat Fyodor Timofeevich and the pig Khavronya Ivanovna – are literally and characteristically humanized by Rozovsky.

Kashtanka (Alisa Tarasenko) as a result turned (without ceasing to be a dog) into a fidget girl with red hair, out of hunger and despair, agreeing to go to a stranger’s house. The cat (Nikita Syusyukin) became a mannered art critic. Goose (Ivan Arngold) turned into an unrecognized genius of the Moscow Art Theater School. Well, the pig Khavronya (Natalya Denisova) is a young actress with a pink handbag, screaming at every corner that she is a star, and writing memoirs about her “life in art”. Recognizable characters, right? The roles were a success.

Chekhov, of course, does not have all this. How to make it so that animals of unprecedented beauty walk around the stage-arena and speak in such a way that it is understandable to those born not in Brezhnev or perestroika times, but after 2010? The problem is quite serious. Yes, Rozovsky quotes: “Kashtanka, you are an insect creature. You are against a man that a carpenter is against a carpenter, ”but before that, they explain to the children who a carpenter is, what a machine is, how to work with a planer! Explain and show. And further speech is a mixture of ancient and modern language, in the spirit of stray dogs’ remarks: “Do you have sausage? And if I find it?”, “I want to catch hype”, “Egyptian power” or a hackneyed line from a monologue with a slang word: “I went crazy under this lantern.” At the level of sound accompaniment, the modern era invades us with the rhythm of the song “We Will Rock You” by the British band Queen.

And yes – almost the entire performance is positive. With circus tricks. With jokes. Tragic moments (such as the illness and agony of Ivan Ivanovich) are necessarily interspersed with joy and fun. Is such an interpretation of the story justified, which makes you want to scream and howl at the moon worse than Kashtanka, and not jump and gallop? Yes, justified. Because it is not easy for children to coexist with death, they do not believe in it. When the goose died, the lights went out, and the actor depicting him (the arm is a neck with a goose palm-head, on his feet are fins for diving) got up to leave, the boy sitting in the third row saw the outline in the twilight and whispered: “ Ivan Ivanovich is not dead, there he goes. But when the tragedy nevertheless became a fact, exclamations were heard: “Poor Ivan Ivanovich!”

“She came to our house …” the actor says. “Death,” the guys finish the sentence. “But most of all I want …” – says Kashtanka, when she was destined to return to the Joiner (Vladimir Davidenko), – “Home”, – again sounds like an echo, a hint. So, everything is understood and assimilated. Including the last “lesson” – love of life and optimism: “You can’t live alone – I tell myself“ don’t whine. He allowed everything to be conquered, including “sad sadness” and the finiteness of earthly existence, for “the clown does not die, the clown lives forever.” And the final song (words by Rozovsky, music by Dunaevsky) generally became a “hymn of joy” and an eternal return to the native hearth:

We know the feeling of home

There is no warm home.

How good it is for me!

Hello my beloved home!

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29013 dated April 18, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Animals and people of the circus “At the Nikitsky Gate”