Nord-Ost

"Nord-Ost" is a milestone in the history of our Theatre. We are twice grateful to Alexei Ivashchenko and Georgy Vasiliev: first, for writing the musical; second, for sending us the vocal score, thereby giving permission to stage it at home. At that time it was our most difficult project. For the first time, even after cuts, the show ran one hour and 45 minutes. The action constantly moved from one space to another — we indicated this by pulling two curtains, and we still had to make 4(!) intermissions to change the sets (seven years later, in the 2016 production, we managed with one curtain and three intermissions. Experience, after all...).

For the same reason a huge amount of props was needed — stacks of crates stood in the yard, and the morning after a show it took a whole hour to put everything back in place. The multi-layered plot and abundance of dramatic scenes demanded corresponding acting, and for the first time in the last few weeks before the show we had to rehearse almost daily. The men's cast of the theatre expanded considerably — before this project there were only three "permanent" men in it. At the dress rehearsal, 5 days before the premiere, everything was still topsy-turvy and the father of one of the actors came up to us and asked hopefully: "You'll only be showing this to yourselves, right?").

Our titanic efforts were not in vain. For the first time we gave 12 performances, people began to talk about our theatre "among the folk," we started to be recognised at Russian-speaking gatherings, and our artists began to be invited to other theatre groups. To the last performance someone invited the granddaughter of Veniamin Kaverin, who lives not far from us. She presented the theatre with a copy of the book "Two Captains" signed by V. Kaverin's son.

There was one more novelty: during work on the show and over the 12 performances there were so many funny mishaps that we released an additional video disc under the working title "Funny Moments," or "Bloop-bloop-bloopers" (see the link below). Unfortunately, not everything made it onto the disc. For example, Anton Nikiforov, playing little Romashov in the "School" scene, was supposed to take a bundle of letters out of Sanya's bag, sing with a sly intonation: "So many letters! I suppose they're all love letters," and scatter them. And at one performance he sang it in a somewhat bewildered tone and never took out and scattered the letters. Later, watching the video, we realised there were simply no letters in the bag — we had forgotten to put them in! Anton got out of the predicament with honour by pretending to sort through and read the letters without taking them out of the bag.

Once Katya (Anya Sadovnikova) and Sanya (Sergei Shkarupo) were rehearsing the scene of their meeting after a long separation: Sanya was supposed to hug Katya and spin around with her. Katya was wearing a coat; a curtain hung nearby. And during the spinning the curtain caught on the hem of the burlap coat and wound itself around the two spinning figures. As a result they ended up in the curtain as in a cocoon. Too bad this moment wasn't recorded...