Hard not to sound like a a tour guide, as we wind up our stay... We spent Super Bowl Sunday at Moscow's Obraztsov Puppet Theater, watching a puppet version of "Aladdin and his Magic Lamp" with a new friend from New York, and her daughter. Incredibly, they lived in the building next to ours on West 110th Street near Amsterdam Avenue and we only met in Moscow!
In any case, the Obraztsov is better than Disney, for Russian style. In the lobby, in a fountain, is an animated lady with a mask, perhaps the spirit of puppetry. She wears a mask, and beneath her glass skirt swim live fish. Lots of gears whirring around. Perhaps she is a version of Hoffman's Olympia, the "living doll."
There is also an animated clock on the building facade, like the famous one in New York's old Central Park Children's Zoo, or Germany's Bremen Town Square. But we didn't wait for it to ring, so can't say what the animated figures do.
This was just a foretaste of an imaginative and stirring production of Aladdin. This genie wasn't genial--instead scary, huge, red, looking like a devil. The court of the Sultan appreared to come from Uzbekistan,the designer was named Alimov, often an Uzbek name. Voices were by famous Russian actors, named in a real theatre program. The story was full of Russian soul, about brave individuals suffering unjust persecution by powerful state figures. I couldn't stop thinking that Aladdin's fate--thrown in jail, in chains, his lamp taken from him by the government, his property stolen--had echoes of the Khodorkhovsky case, and the shows probably resonated at other time with other events in Russia. Maybe children's theatre, like Soviet "multfilms" (animated cartoons), were safer venues for artists to express themselves, even if in code, than in adult theatre.
The Obraztsov's stage is full-sized, and the theatre, built in the 1960s, is beautiful, modern, wood-paneled. It was packed with giggling, laughing children and their parents. In front of us sat a professor of Russian culture from the University of Pennsylvania, with his daughter. His field of study was Russian romanticism. He confirmed what seemed apparent from living in Moscow, if we didn't already realize it from Russian music and art: Russians are very romantic. Hard to believe as it may seem, apparently they got their romanticism from the Germans. But of course, I wouldn't believe in Romantic Englishmen from our recent trip to London, yet we know at one time such did exist--Keats, Shelly, Byron, et al.
In any case, Romance was everywhere in the Obraztsov's staging of Aladdin. What a spectacle! Elephants, lions, horses, camels! A beautiful princess, an evil Vizier, an aged and foolish Sultan, thieves, an oasis and,of course and the desert. A golden palace, a humble home. A "Babushkha" of course, as Aladdin's mother. In the foyer bar, an aquarium with colorful live fishes, in the halls, artworks by schoolchildren among magnificent theatrical puppets. And downstairs, in the puppet museum, hundreds of puppets--ranging from ancient clay marionettes thousands of years old to a couple of Jim Henson's muppets, which looked sort of like poor relations, rather scruffy and chintzy, compared to the Russian, Polish, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Bengali exhibits--some of them life-sized.
A little learning, a little romance, and a lot of joy for children is to be found at Moscow's Obraztsov's Puppet Theater.
