The Provincial Theater shared plans for the eleventh season

“Bet on the classics”

On August 25, the capital’s Provincial Theater was filled with life again – the new season started here brightly and enchantingly. The artistic director of the theater, Sergei Bezrukov, promised the audience three premieres at once, two of which were performances based on exemplary works of Russian literature. This allowed us to conclude that the governors are again betting on Russian classics. The troupe’s training camp was attended by a correspondent and a photojournalist from MK.

If we sum up the main things that were said at the training camp in Gubernsky, then first of all it is worth listing future novelties – on September 16, viewers will see “The Golden Key” based on the classic fairy tale by Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy (director Alla Reshetnikova), on October 7 and 10 – “Family Picture” based on the play Ostrovsky (director Olga Matveeva), in December (9th and 10th) – the play “Once upon a time there was a Dog and a Wolf” (on the Small Stage, director Adelina Sapaeva).

Three fingers clasped in the hand are the titles with release dates scheduled for the 11th season.

In the next, that is, in the fall of 2024 – without exact chronological coordinates yet – Gubernsky will present The Captain’s Daughter based on Pushkin’s story about the Pugachev rebellion, and Bezrukov himself will act as the director, and the famous Maxim Obrezkov, the creator, for example, of the interiors of the Vakhtangov House, will be the artist in Vladikavkaz.

It also became known that the Provincial Theater and the Center for Creative Projects “Inclusion” will hold a joint inclusive laboratory “ATTENTION. THEATER” – as a result of which a performance will be staged with the involvement of disabled actors, and the qualifying part of the laboratory will be held in October 2023, and the premiere will take place at the end of the season that has begun.

It is also worth mentioning the upcoming festivals, especially since the VI Big Children’s Festival on the Moscow stage will open in a few weeks – on September 17 – with a performance of the Tyumen Big Drama Theater “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”. And in just two autumn months, 79 projects aimed at a children’s audience will be presented in Moscow.

The BDF ECHO special program in 23-24 will visit six regions, including Kamchatka, Dagestan, Tver, Irkutsk, Arkhangelsk and Izhevsk, and the VI Summer Festival of Provincial Theaters “Stanislavsky Factory” (which “Moskovsky Komsomolets” traditionally pays attention to) will be held in June next of the year.

Bezrukov’s team is also waiting for tours, and not only domestic ones, but also near-foreign ones – except for St. Siberian Victor Astafiev) theater artists will visit Tashkent.

The extremely high activity of the Moscow Provincial Theater is easy to explain – on January 9, the theater will celebrate its tenth anniversary, and on October 18, Sergey Vitalievich will turn fifty – a high concentration of anniversaries obliges the theater to keep the bar as high as possible.

It remains to be noted that in the tenth season the governors managed to do a lot – to release four premieres (“Jazz-Comedy”, “Marriage. Almost according to Gogol”, “Forty-First” and “Dog in the Manger”), hold six festivals, travel half the country on tour.

If we express what was done in the language of numbers, then over 130 thousand spectators visited the theater on Volgogradsky Prospekt for 438 events during the season. Thirty more field performances were attended by 22,000 connoisseurs of theatrical art. Plus, 120 performances and concerts at related venues in Moscow and the Moscow region were seen by 100,000 people.

The final figure of a quarter of a million viewers is really impressive. The main thing is that the theater does not try to concentrate its activities in its native land, constantly expanding the geography of its presence on the cultural map of Russia.

The search for new creative personnel in the regions, holding master classes in acting, plastic arts, stage speech in the field have become another important festival and laboratory trend. Let’s hope it continues in the coming years.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29102 dated August 29, 2023

Newspaper headline:
“Bet on the classics”