Moscow Orientation – Day 8 – Theater for the Masses

Our meeting with a deputy from the Duma was cancelled at the last minute, so I headed off to the office for the rest of the day.

The group reconvened around 7pm, as we had tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet’s performance of Raimonda. The main Bolshoi Theater is closed for renovation until 2008, so the performance was held at the New Stage, an impressive new facility just across the street. The reception hall is all marble, brass, and gilt. It’s all very opulent and formal in a very Russian way. It resembles a lot of later Romanov palaces. That is to say, it’s damn near over-the-top gaudy in its exuberant decoration.

But theaters are a pretty good place to reflect on modern construction, cultural heritage, the role of the arts and society, and, this being modern Russia – corruption.

The main hall was supposed to have four massive columns of marble framing a center court of benches. And while the rest of the marble seems to have made it into its designated places, one can’t help but notice that the four main columns are just a bit off. Closer inspection reveals that they’re wood, painted to resemble marble. The story going around Moscow is that the choice building materials didn’t make it into the final installation – they were looted by the connected and powerful for their own uses. Probably quite a few dachas (vacation homes) around the region with beautiful marble trim thanks to that maneuver.

Which brings one to the massive restoration of the main theater across the street. When it’s completed, Russia’s premier arts hall will be a totally modern facility for the 21st century. Ambitious plans for backstage technology are elegantly coupled with a historian’s attention to detail for the appearance of the public areas of the theater. But the price tag as proposed by the city of Moscow is somewhere in the billion dollar range. Critics point out that the brand-new opera houses of several major European capitals combined didn’t total that much.

So it seems that the beneficiaries of the building plan, emboldened by their success in looting the construction site across the street, went right to the source and inflated the actual price tag instead of just stealing the materials once they arrived. That should mean a lot of nice new dachas over the next couple of years.

The ballet was fantastic, by the way.