From February to April, Moscow hosts a theater festival and the Golden Mask award. Traditionally, the program of the event includes the best performances of the 2021/22 season, according to the expert council of the award, in such genres as drama, opera, ballet, modern dance, operetta and musical, puppet theater.
In order to form a competitive program, from August 2021 to July 2022, 20 theater experts made 649 business trips, visited more than 130 cities, watched 1046 performances. Despite such an impressive geography of the search, as a result, there were only 17 participating cities. About 50% of the competition program (26 performances out of 50) came from the capitals: 18 performances from Moscow, 8 from St. Petersburg. Also nominated for the award are productions from theaters in Novosibirsk (4), Perm (4), Yekaterinburg (3), Tyumen (2), Petrozavodsk (2), etc.