The 80th theater season was called “Hello today, hello always!”. The northernmost theatre was fully-filled in a checkerboard pattern, according to the new rules.
Cheerfully and musically, the Norilsk drama reminded the theatrical audience of the premieres of the past, interrupted by the pandemic, the season: ‘Golden Calf…’ after Ilf and Petrov staged by Yakov Lomkin, ‘Happy Number’ by Anna Babanova based on the play by French playwright Chevre, Timur Fairuzov’s work on Shukshin’s prose ‘My Brother’ and the play by Mikhail Kheifets ‘How Tsiolkovsky flew to the moon’. All these performances were included in the theater’s September playbill.
In the scenario of the epoch-making evening, the authors, who are theater artists, also included fragments of the current repertoire performances. For example, ‘Filumenu Marturano’ by Alexander Bargman was abundantly quoted by the actress Varvara Babayants, who made her debut in the jubilee season as a portrait painter. Twenty bright, figurative portraits of colleagues and self-portraits in the unique ‘Babayanism’ style adorned the theater’s audience foyer. The actress admitted that until that moment she had devoted herself only to the stage, but she really wanted to ‘do something else’.
The first theater creative meeting with the audience not only revealed the old and new talents of artists and directors loved by the Norilsk people, but also introduced new names. Honored Artist of Russia Yakov Allenov, according to him, knew the northernmost one long and well:
“I remember the starry days of the theater in the late 1990s – early 2000s, when I worked at the Krasnoyarsk Pushkin theater. We often met at festivals. When I came from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, I worked a lot with Vasily Reshetnikov, who had moved from Norilsk to the regional capital”.
With the People’s Artist of Russia Vasily Reshetnikov, Yakov Allenov played in Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’, ‘Seagull’ and other performances. According to the artist with extensive theatrical, cinematographic and directorial experience, the Norilsk drama attracted him by the solidarity of the troupe and the presence of worthy partners in it. He sees such a powerful partner in the favorite actor of the Norilsk public – the honored artist of Russia Sergey Rebry. There is a hope that this season the names of the honored artists will appear in the playbill of Gogol’s ‘Players’, which will be put to stage by the familiar to the Norilsk people Vladimir Smirnov, and in Chekhov’s ‘Ivanov’, on which the famous director Marat Gatsalov will work.
Together with Yakov Allenov, in the new season the Norilsk residents will also see a graduate of the famous Shchepka – the Shchepkin Higher Theater School at the Maly Theater. It is interesting that Yaroslav Surzhenko has already entered the famous stage of the Maly Theater, from which, as you know, theaters in the Arctic Circle began.
Text: Valentina Vachaeva, Photo: Alexander Haritonov