The premiere of the musical “Constellation of Stray Cats” based on the story “I’ll Go to the Cats” by Gianni Rodari will take place at the Snark Theater, which is loved by both children and adults. Irina Romanova and her two daughters attended the performance and learned a lot about Italy, stray cats and distant stars.
— One day, a retired Signor Antonio, offended that his family did not pay attention to him, left the house. And turned into a stray cat. And when I became a cat, I discovered that many stray cats used to be human too! – says Volodya (Bob) Gochua, bass guitarist of the band “Paperny TAM” and part-time music teacher of my eldest daughter Katya.
For two months now, our class schedule has been dependent on the rehearsal schedule at the Snark Theater, where Bob plays double bass in the new play “Constellation of Stray Cats.” The theater is named after the mysterious creature from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Hunt for the Snark”, and is directed by director Yuri Alesin, who has previously staged children’s performances throughout Russia — in the Altai, Sakhalin, and Tomsk. Once at the festival “Gavroche” he saw the performance ” H2O “of the German theater “Helios”, where in half an hour four actors told everything about water without words: that it can be ice, and fog, and a cleansing wave, and a refreshing drink… And Yura realized that he also wants to make unusual performances for children. Serious in an adult way. With modern drama. With live music. In the current formats of storytelling, performance or street performance.
So there was the Snark Theater, which now has five performances in its repertoire-they go to different Moscow venues (most often on the “Open Stage” or in the KC “Moskvich”). There is, for example, a production of “Ding” – about the adventures of a drop of water. There is an “Elephant Concert”, which contains poems, legends, songs and scientific facts about the largest animal on the planet. There is a “Tili-tili-dough”, where the actors talk to the guys about love… Maybe because Yura has two daughters — five — year-old Alice and three-year-old Arina-most of his performances are marked ” 2+”. In fact, they are suitable for children up to 12 years old. In the course of the action, the children guess riddles, come up with plot twists, trumpet like elephants and write letters on paper.
The last premiere of “Snark” — “The constellation of stray cats”. For the first time, Alesin did not direct the play himself, but entrusted it to Gala Salzman, a student of GITIS and director of RAMT. Galya collected in one story the little-known stories and poems of the writer Gianni Rodari about the cats of the city of Rome, the composer Ashot Ahverdyan wrote the music, and the artist Maya Arsenyeva made the scenery — the dilapidated columns of the Colosseum. So it turned out to be a performance filled with the rhythms of tarantella and the smells of pizza. And it’s not so much about cats as it is about people. Why does a person get tired of living among people? Why does he decide to go to the cats? And what could make him go back to the human world? Here are the questions that the creators of the play are trying to answer.
Katya, Lisa, and I are standing in the lobby of the cinema hall of the Moskvich Cinema Center, which has been turned into a replica of the Eternal City. The layout of the Pantheon. Layout of the Roman Opera. The Capitoline wolf with Romulus and Ram. Laundry is being dried on stretched ropes. The sun is pouring in through the windows. Suddenly the sheets part and Signor Antonio appears: “Buon giorno, bambini! Have you been to Rome before? No? Be sure to visit! All roads lead to Rome!” Signor Antonio leads a short tour of the Roman sights.
Then we go into the hall. The lights go out and the Piazza Argentina, the magic gate, and four cats appear on the stage: a black, gray, striped, and eyeless pirate cat. They quarrel, make up, fall in love, rap, dance the tango (written, by the way, especially for the performance by the accordionist Dima Karev), eat fish heads, listen to a lecture on astronomy, and even organize a riot in Rome, demanding to name a constellation in their honor. How so — the Big Dipper is, the Lion is, even Cancer is, and the constellation of the Cat is not?! It’s not fair! The cats take over the Colosseum, bravely fight with the dogs, and a miracle happens-a new star is lit over the Piazza Argentina. A star named Cat.
Since I know in advance how this story will end, I look at the children during the performance. Kids — with a head in a fairy tale. “Mother, did they bring the columns from Rome?” one girl asks. And the boy, after carefully examining the telescope — two cardboard tubes with a tin can at the end – whispers: “And if you look into it, you can see Saturn?”. Katya and Lisa, after returning home, first of all got on the Internet and found out: the star named Cat really was! In the XVIII century, the French astronomer Joseph Lalande named a group of stars in the neighborhood of the constellation Hydra. At the end of the XIX century, his colleagues, for some unknown reason, stopped marking these stars on sky maps. But still, the Cat shone on people for a hundred years!