An Ordinary Miracle

A brilliant playwright, Evgeny Schwartz. Brilliant music by Gennady Gladkov and brilliant lyrics by Yuli Kim. A brilliant director, Mark Zakharov. So much has to come together at one point to produce a masterpiece of a film that we have been happily rewatching for almost four decades.

The idea of turning the film into a stage musical had evidently been in the air for a long time. In the mid-2000s Yuli Kim and Gennady Gladkov wrote about 20 more songs, and on 13 February 2009 the show was performed in Saint Petersburg, at the Lensovet Palace of Culture. Something didn't work out there and the show was quickly closed, but a recording was shown to Alexei Ivashchenko, who, together with the director Ivan Popovski, staged it at the Theatre Centre on Dubrovka. It premiered on 15 October 2010 and ran for several months with daily performances. Naturally, we knew about it and drooled. So when, a year after that show closed, Yuli Chersanovich and Alexei Igorevich answered our tentative request for help with the musical material with kind consent and sent us the texts and the vocal score, we realised that another ordinary miracle had happened — we were going to stage a show that we absolutely love.

With her accustomed snips of the scissors, Sadovnikova cut the vocal score down to a size we were able to learn and play, assigned the roles, and we began to rehearse. We were afraid our production would be too similar to the famous film or to the slightly less famous Moscow musical. But the difference from the film came naturally, since half of the musical numbers were new and these scenes evoked no associations in the audience. And the miniature size of our stage and the closeness of the actors to the audience (which meant using many small movements, gestures, and tricks) helped to strengthen the difference between the two productions of the same musical.

There were other differences too. In "Nord-Ost" and "Les Misérables" there is almost no recitative and the whole "story" is told in arias and ensembles, whereas "An Ordinary Miracle" has a great deal of spoken dialogue. Only later did we realise that in most musicals the songs take up just 20–30% of the total time and the two works mentioned above are the exception. At the time, we badly wanted to put that right at least a little and give the Hunter's Apprentice and the Ladies-in-Waiting something to sing. Ira literally scraped together, bar by bar, a few musical phrases from the existing material for which no words had yet been written, and so two musical numbers were born: the duet of the Hunter and the Apprentice (in effect a rhymed version of the squabble they have before the Bear arrives at the inn) and the couplets of the Ladies-in-Waiting, which they sing to the Bear after he proposes to one of them ("But there are two of us!" — "Forgive me, I didn't notice...").

For the first time, the women's costumes for the theatre were sewn by Anya Sadovnikova-Potanina. A clothing designer by training, and a busy person at home and at work, she made luxurious outfits.

Our legendary artist Lena Litinskaya, after visiting the Shakespeare festival in Oregon, brought back a wonderful idea from there: "Imagine, they built the whole of Verona out of styrofoam!" The idea turned out to be exceptionally fruitful: at a building-supply store you can buy a huge sheet of styrofoam of any thickness for pennies, the pieces are easy to cut, paint, and glue onto a light wooden frame. As a result we made a fireplace, put a 36" television into its maw, and played a video recording of fire on it. At the end of the second act, when the action returned from the mountain inn to the Wizard's house, the master of the house discreetly took a remote out of his pocket and, with an elegant wave of the hand, put out the fire from a distance. A Wizard, after all...

Although many things in this production were done for the first time, everything went off quite smoothly. The audience gladly immersed itself in the magical story by E. Schwartz, the brilliant verses of Yu. Kim, and the divine music of G. Gladkov, familiar to all of us since childhood.