Word: staging
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stood shoulder to shoulder waiting for their favorite group. Finally, a short, well-built young man, his hair shaved severely around the sides, appears onstage. He grins demonically and defiantly surveys the crowd. Behind him a swarm of guitarists, horn players, a keyboardist and a drummer troop onto the stage. A drumbeat clears the air, and suddenly the band is cruising through the infectious opening rhythm of The Man in the Hat. The lead singer grabs the microphone and shrieks, "Heading for a meeting/ Across the frozen intersection/ On the night boulevard . . . The man in the hat of no particular...
...faces express determination, involvement, expectation but also anxiety, for Mikhail Gorbachev is well on his way to creating a new U.S.S.R. TIME presents a 63-page report on how his reforms are changing the Soviet Union, from polling booth to factory, from classroom to stage, from wheat field to metropolitan market. Whatever course the Gorbachev revolution finally takes, it is already one of the most momentous events of the second half of the 20th century...
...long-suppressed and now acclaimed production of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground at Moscow's Theater for Young Spectators, the withdrawn and embittered central character repeatedly pushes with all his might against the immovable proscenium arch at the side of the stage. The gesture is an apt visual metaphor not only for a melancholy nobody's passion to smash the barriers of loneliness but also for the yearning of the whole Moscow drama world to break down the confines of habit and tradition. Everywhere one goes in the theater these days, the same artistic self-criticism is heard: there...
...fact the quality of theater in Moscow is very high. Playwriting, if at times too grandiosely spiritual, at least concerns itself with bigger issues than middle-class marriage, the preoccupation of the commercial stage in the West. Acting is certainly of the caliber of Broadway or London. So is stage design, if a bit too dependent on imaginative metaphor rather than money. True, productions tend to look a lot alike, regardless of content: perhaps as a reaction against the easy intimacy of TV's close-ups, almost every company seems infatuated with mounting shows in gloomy near darkness...
Having justified itself for two decades and more as a medium of political expression -- obliquely during the Brezhnev years, sometimes rantingly during the current thaw -- the Soviet stage sees itself as needing to rediscover its true concern, the human soul. Audiences apparently agree. While theatergoers continue to clap for lines of topical invective, they seem to respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love, betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe...