Moscow is hosting the Golden Mask theater festival, the country’s most expert, popular and wide-reaching theater award. The results of the 2020/21 season will be summed up on April 20 at a ceremony that will take place on the stage of the Musical Theater. K. S. Stanislavsky and Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. The jury will select the best performances and award private nominations to authors, directors and artists in all types of theatrical art – drama, opera, ballet, modern dance, operetta / musical, puppet theater.
Theatrical excitement
This year, the Golden Mask is distinguished by a large number of nominees. The list of contenders included 81 performances, which is 30% more than, for example, last year, when experts nominated 56 performances for the award. A special stir happened in the nomination “Best performance of a small form” – 14 productions compete in it. There are also quite a few performances in the “large form” – 11. This has led to the fact that in the nomination “Best Director’s Work”, where applicants are selected from the performances included in the two main categories, 25 directors are presented simultaneously. At the same time, debutants Zhenya Berkovich and Elizaveta Bondar compete with stage mastodons Lev Dodin and Yuri Butusov.
The organizers explain this by the fact that the previous two years, many theatrical premieres had to be postponed until the audience and theater communities adapted to the new epidemiological rules of theatrical life. And last year, the premieres began to come out one by one, so the expert jury of the Golden Mask had to travel all over Russia, tirelessly watching theatrical novelties – a total of 1165 productions.