Swords crossed at the Donetsk Drama Theater

The Three Musketeers musical premiered to great applause at the Donetsk National Music and Drama Theater. Its creators revised everything, including Alexandre Dumas’ storyline, Mark Rozovsky and Yuri Ryashentsev’s play, and Maksim Dunaevsky’s hit songs, while discouraging comparisons with other productions of the same name by installing iron ‘towers’ on stage.

“We were aware that 90 percent of our audience would know the story well, so it would be hard to surprise them with the performance’s dramatic depth. Thus, we tried to make the production a funny and light entertainment for the audience to have a good time,” the director and choreographer Vasyl Maslii says.

All songs are sung live, without lip-syncing. “We tried to cast actors who can sing well, and these singers are among the heroic four as well as the cardinal’s spies. To help the matter, we installed a record number of microphones on stage,” the chorus director Tetiana Pashchuk says. A popular Donetsk actor, winner of the Slavonic Bazaar-2011 Volodymyr Kvasnytsia played the devout Aramis. His remark “Gentlemen, you have not heard my top C note yet!” was met with thunderous applause.

The audience greeted very cordially the Queen, played by Liubov Dobronozhenko. The musical’s chief set and costume designer Andrii Romanchenko says that “the duet of the Queen and Buckingham is the best thing I have seen in this season.” The piece will be well-remembered not only because of fine singing, but the characters’ passionate dancing, too. A young actor Maksym Selivanov played the part of D’Artagnan, showing the Gascon chevalier to be a bold and overconfident young man, while Serhii Bannikov created a colorful image of the treacherous Cardinal.

The scene was dominated by the two metal towers, where the plot unfolds. Romanchenko explains the design thus: “Life is a mechanism, clockwork, puppeteer’s box, but then a joker always appears to destroy everything. We, the director and the set designer, tried to show here the interplay between the puppeteer, his puppets and the joker.” At the same time, the source play’s central analogy between life and chess was downplayed by the musical’s creators.

The Three Musketeers is the Donetsk theater’s most expensive production ever. The management had to spend most of the funds to procure costumes and wigs. By the way, the First Lady of Ukraine Liudmyla Yanukovych attended the premiere showing of the musical and liked it. The theater plans to perform it in Luhansk and Mariupol in the summer of 2013.