NEWS FEATURE: Moscow Jewish theater incorporates casino to survive

c. 1998 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ If all goes according to plan, on Nov. 20 the audience for the Yiddish-language musical”L’Haim”at the Jewish Musical Theater will file out of the theater past people entering through a casino’s metal detector on their way to an erotic show called”The Aroma of Light.” The theater has just […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ If all goes according to plan, on Nov. 20 the audience for the Yiddish-language musical”L’Haim”at the Jewish Musical Theater will file out of the theater past people entering through a casino’s metal detector on their way to an erotic show called”The Aroma of Light.” The theater has just completed a remarkable, $1 million transformation that, in addition to continuing its tradition of Jewish-oriented productions, is also bringing to stage shows featuring”naked girls and wild beasts”at a venue once known for productions that pushed the envelope of Soviet political propriety.

The Jewish stage, located in an area of Moscow famous for its theaters, made a deal with a firm that runs casinos to conduct a first-class renovation in return for taking over part of the complex and turning the theater itself into a nightclub after 10 p.m. each night.”It is the only example in the world where a casino supports art like this,”said Maria Kosyura, the theater’s dynamic and infectiously enthusiastic producer.”It was a dying theater. I brought it back. I did it.” Not everyone, however, is pleased with what Kosyura has done.”If a professional director or scenographer were there, it would be wonderful. Now it is awful,”said Mikhail Filippov, Russia’s best-known interior architect who won a top prize last year from the Moscow Union of Journalists for his design for the renovated theater.


For entirely different reasons Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Berel Lazar agreed.”There is a Jewish law forbidding playing at casinos, so having a Jewish center in a casino is not the best match,”said Lazar, head of the Lubavitch-dominated Rabbinical Alliance of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The composer Mikhail Gluz, who has had a longtime association with the Jewish theater where two of his musicals will soon premiere, said the transformation was bumpy.”An awful lot of people were against it. But there was no choice.” Under an arrangement dating back to 1977, the Jewish Musical Theater had been financed and controlled by Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, Stalin’s Jewish homeland on the Chinese border.

In the waning years of the Soviet Union, according to Gluz, the theater gained a reputation for productions that were only”semi-legal”in content. With the demise of the Soviet state and the wholesale emigration of Jews from the Jewish Autonomous Region to Israel, there was no one to pay the rent.

Neither pleading letters to then-prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin nor appeals to Moscow’s Jewish community brought results, Kosyura said. So, in 1995 the casino operator, Vinso Grand, opened gaming tables in one part of the complex. One year later, the casino operators opened a restaurant in another section and this year the fully rebuilt theater re-opened.

Kosyura said she hopes an art school for Jewish children will open in the building’s courtyard within the next two years.

While the casino complex as a whole is unremarkable, the 200-seat theater space is striking in both its originality and cleverness. A vaulted ceiling, mirrors on either end, white-washed block walls and seats surrounding the stage, all combine to give the theater an organic, informal feel. Filippov has effectively created the sense that the audience is sitting in a small square in a Middle Eastern city such as Jerusalem watching a local troupe perform.”The main idea was not to reproduce how Jerusalem looks today,”said Filippov, who has never been to Israel, as he flipped through art books showing the source of his inspiration.”It is the Jerusalem that was drawn by European painters in the early Renaissance or even the Jerusalem that is found in icons.”It was very interesting to me to make an image of Jewish culture because I am a Jew,”said Filippov of his first theater design.”For me, Jewish culture is much bigger than national culture. Just like the Bible became the base for many cultures, so, too, did Jewish culture become the base for those in Eastern and Western Europe.” Given Filippov’s intent and the impressive result, the casino’s nightly program is bound to be jarring. On one recent night, as strobe lights flashed and pop music throbbed, two men and two women took the stage and embarked on a tightly choreographed dance program lasting about five minutes. What followed was largely a succession of young women appearing on stage in bikinis and thongs and leaving naked. “Men like striptease,”explained the artistic director Zhenya Popova, who hopes to add more thematic shows including one with Roman gladiators.”The architectural design we have is found nowhere else in Moscow. We want to have a show to match that.” While the nightclub’s repertoire is unlikely to include erotic shows on Jewish themes _”to avoid duplication with the theater,”Popova says _ the nightclub’s menu does feature items like gefilte fish for $6, as well as Dom Perignon champagne for $350 a bottle.

Popova said the management is still working out the nightclub’s identity.”There was a bit of a change,”Popova said.”Now it is half Jerusalem and half Greece, although our theme is ancient Rome,”she added, noting the waitresses and barmen in tunics and togas.


This infuriates designer Fillipov, who objects to the theater being called”The Senate”.”It is idiotic. It just sounds nice to them. They might as well call it `Congress’.” MJP END BROWN

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