Give us comedy!

For the sixth time already the Chernivtsi-based Olha Kobylianska Ukrainian Theater of Music Drama has held the Golden Applause of Bukovyna Festival. The forum has a regional status, but it transgresses borders, and representatives of other regions of Ukraine can also take part in it. (This time even Romania was present, a foreign country, albeit a close one).

Comedies loved by everyone may take different shapes. This genre includes situation comedies, parodies, lyrical, classical, modern, music, folklore comedies. Some bright variations were present in Bukovyna’s Golden Applause.

The festival was launched by the premiere production of the Olha Kobylianska Theater Wandering Stars, or Life is a Theater, based on Sholem Aleichem’s work. This was an example of a so-called human comedy. Director Volodymyr Vorobiov, who staged the play, united two authors in it, Sholem Aleichem and Karl Gutzkow, and inserted in the Jewish classical writer’s work the fragments of the famous play Uriel Acosta.

The director who is madly in love with theater makes allies with the actors and creates a sort of an ode to theater. A polyphonic action, including several plot lines, unfolds in a large scale but with slow pace, telling the peripetia of Leo Rafalesco (Denys Polishchuk) and Roza Spivak (Natalia Hunda), who become renowned actors. The audience sees them in the young age (Leibl — Hryhorii Rudenko-Kraievsky, Reizl — Maryna Tymku), when their feeling of mutual love was just born. They feel for the lovers disunited by fortune and rejoice at their unexpected meeting many years later. The production creates a gallery of colorful images, and the emotional image of the play are two chairs on which young actors are lifted in the middle of the stage. This flight is accepted as the might of supreme powers over human marionettes. In the finale the suspended chairs are empty, they seem to be waiting for new heroes.

Foreign comedy is highly esteemed at the festival. Such authors as Camoletti, Cooney, Frayn, Hennequin, and Mayo have become welcome guests, persistently striving to change the quality comedy, rich in content and tasting of laughter “below the belt.” Certainly, the thankful audience of the Chernivtsi festival laughed at the plays Theater by the Ivano-Frankivsk-based Ivan Franko Ukrainian Theater of Music Drama, Bon Appetite or French-style Garnish staged by the Vinnytsia-based Sadovsky Ukrainian Theater of Music Drama, How to Win Back your Husband by the Ternopil-based Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Theater of Music Drama, and Hey, Juliette by the Chernihiv Youth Theater. However, the plays also raised many serious questions.

The creators of the performance Made in the West of the Iasi-based Alexandria National Theater, Romania, found some ironical moments in the picture of life of the present-day city whose every structure is pierced with corruption. They found an interetsing theatrical form — a zonga that looks like music rap, with commentaries, an original organization of the scenic space, going beyond the cinematographic principle.

The capital’s art was represented by the audience’s favorites — the production of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk by the National Ivan Franko Theater, which well deserved its portion of Bukovyna’s Golden Applause and the Kyiv Theater of Musical Comedy, which showed a refined and light music performance Guest Party with Italians by Jacques Offenbach. Wonderful voices, bright costumes, the ability of the performers to show the comicism of theatrical conditionality, highly-qualified chamber orchestra, wonderful music, and as a result – real feast of musical comedy.

The Best Performance Award went to the Chernivtsi Theater Studio Holos for staging The Threshold of Parents’ House after Hryhir Tiutiunnyk. A simple story about a wedding in a Ukrainian village is transformed by the director Petro Kolisnyk into a scenic canvass. The residents of village — colorful and experssive characters — take part in the preparation to the wedding. All of them are like relatives to each other, they are always ready to come to help to each other. The canvas of the performance consists of Ukrainian songs: folk songs, authors’ songs. These are arranged in an unexpectadly fresh and melodious manner. The music line, full of folk humorous catchphrases and jokes, was percieved as the rite of the national wedding. The kin’s roots, the threshold of parents’ house is the starting point from which homeland begins and which one should keep in one’s soul forever. The sketch of how a new family emerges turns into the history of the nation’s creation. The quiet, sincere, and penetrating words of Tiutiunnyk effortlessly won over the clamorous turmoil of comedies by Camoletti, Frayn etc.

The wonderful actor of the Ternopil-based Shevchenko Theater Volodymyr Yachminsky was awarded with the diploma for Devoted Serving Melpomene.