Die Fledermaus is the most popular and festive operetta by Johann Strauss. It is necessarily present in the repertoire of many musical theaters in the world, enjoying the love and success of the widest audience. Gorgeous, sparkling like champagne splashes, Strauss's music creates a special atmosphere of lightness and fun. And the brilliant, witty play by N. Erdman and M. Volpin has long been cited.
The Bat is a storehouse of practical jokes, witty lies and intertwined misunderstandings that the main characters, two friends, the businessman Heinrich Eisenstein and the director of the theater Falk, fall into. One falls in love with a stranger, not realizing that his wife Rosalind is hiding under the mask of a bat; the other is Adele's servant, despite the fact that he chuckles at her desire to become an actress in his theater. In the end, the masks are thrown off, and the truth is revealed to everyone's amazement.
In St. Petersburg in the middle of the 19th century, the name of the composer I. Strauss was well known. For 14 years, the composer came to the Russian capital and gave concerts at the Pavlovsky railway station. Therefore, at the suggestion of the musical director and conductor of the premiere performance, Honored Artist of Russia Andrei Alekseev, Strauss's music dedicated to St. Petersburg and his arrangements of Russian melodies sounds in the ball scene.
The performance was staged by the well-known director, laureate of the State Prize of Russia Igor Konyaev. The Bat was his fourth work at the St. Petersburg Theater of Musical Comedy:
“Sunny and merry Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss is an eternal classic of musical theatre. She is often staged, her musical hits are always heard. The plot is well known to operetta lovers. But we put another "Bat". We staged the Russian The Bat, which, according to G. M. Yaron, was rewritten in 1947 by the outstanding Russian playwright Erdman with his friend Volpin. “... they wrote a brilliant, self-playing text, where every word sounded like a bell, rushed through the ramp, beat for sure. And it's really a literary text! It reads like a high comedy,” Yaron recalled.
So we tried, relying on a brilliant text, to stage an operetta in the genre of "high comedy". In addition, we did not begin to transfer all the action to the rich and magnificent Vienna of the early 20th century, but followed the example of Erdman and rewrote the scene. New play, so new play. The whole story about "Madame morality", which taught her own husband a lesson, takes place in Russia at the end of the 19th century. With her dacha life, which A.P. Chekhov so wittily described in his humorous stories. The Russian dacha life of the time of Alexander III with its performances, dances, masquerades, intrigues and "dacha romances" is a whole aesthetics filled with special material culture and traditions. I think that playing the Russian "Bat" will be exciting not only for artists, but also for the audience, because they will not be offered this anywhere else.
