Love, jazz and rap style

Paul Abraham’s charming music inspired the artistic director of the Kyiv Operetta Theater Bohdan Strutynsky to undertake Ukraine’s first production of the play Ball at the Savoy.

“Sometimes it happens that an artist sees a landscape and desires to paint a picture. The same happened to me when I heard the music by Paul Abraham — I felt like creating a performance in the music hall style,” recollects the director. “Ball at the Savoy is a story of love at the first sight for which social inequality does not exist. The main moral of this ‘fairy tale for adults’ lies in the fact that a talented person will undoubtedly find his or her place in life if they trust in themselves and importunately pursue their goal. Comic-action and lyrical lines intertwine in the plot of the operetta. The novelty of Ball at the Savoy lies in the attempts to convey a shift between two spaces: the music hall and psychological-action theater.”

Conductors and directors Ihor Yaroshenko and Serhii Holubnychy worked on the play, while Oleksandr Korsh worked on its arrangement. The artist Svitlana Pavlichenko recreated the interior of the world-known hotel Savoy and the atmosphere of the 1930s on stage. An exclusive performance and fashion show will become a surprise for spectators: Iryna Davydenko created 12 fantastic costumes, each relating to a sign of the zodiac.

The play contains a complex choreography: step, jazz, classic waltz, paso doble, and even rap. Choreographers Natalia Skuba, Maksym Bulhakov and Vadym Prokopenko worked on it with the actors.

It should be mentioned that Ball at the Savoy is the last European operetta of the 20th century, after which the “musical time” came, and it is also the first masterpiece by Paul Abraham which the Ukrainian audience will be able to assess during its premiere on October 22 and 23 at the Operetta Theater.