Ru
EnA. Selitsky
Operettas and musicals by composers from the Don region on the Rostov stage
The repertoire policy in the USSR required the predominance of works by Soviet authors in the program; the issue was more acute in musical theater than in drama theater. As part of this trend, cooperation with local authors developed, beginning with the opening of the theater in 1931. The archives of the Rostov Musical Theater (the successor to the Musical Comedy Theater), the State Archive of the Rostov Region, and the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation allow us to recreate the panorama of such cooperation.
The leadership here belongs to Semyon Zaslavsky, whose eight operettas (out of the 15 he composed) were staged on the Rostov stage. The collaboration began with the production of "Son of the Sea" (1933) and continued for about 40 years. For Ilya Shaposhnikov and Alexey Artamonov, this genre was not at the center of their creative interests; nevertheless, the operettas they created were staged in the 1950s and 1960s. Artamonov's "The Third Extra" endured at least 100 performances. Vladimir Druzhinin's children's operas and his heroic operetta "The Last Masquerade" (1976) were also successful. Vitaly Khodosh's "Black Magic Session" (1978), based on Leo Tolstoy's "Fruits of Enlightenment," was the only musical comedy of that time, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth. Since the mid-1980s, contacts with Igor Levin’s Rostov stage have continued to this day: currently, the musical "Sherlock Holmes and the Dancing Men" (2017) based on A. Conan Doyle’s work is in the repertoire, and the composer is working on new scores.
The Rostov Musical Comedy Theater was rightfully called the laboratory of Soviet operetta. The prerequisite for cooperation with local authors was the presence in Rostov of one of the oldest composer organizations in the country, and the incentives were the need to feature exclusive works on the program and the desire to help talented local composers build reputations in the theatrical world. A comparative analysis shows that, in this respect, the Rostov stage occupies one of the leading positions in the country.
Key words
Local authors, S. Zaslavsky, I. Shaposhnikov, A. Artamonov, V. Druzhinin, V. Khodosh, I. Levin.
For citation
Selitsky A. Operettas and musicals by composers from the Don region on the Rostov stage. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2025. No. 1. Pp. 14–25.
