METHOD SWEETHEARTS Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova, who star as the last first couple of the Soviet Union in Alvis Hermanis’s “Gorbachev,” at a charity event.
ANTON CHEKHOV WOULD BE proud. This week, the biggest theater news in the world was from Moscow, Moscow, Moscow. Apologies to Halley Feiffer.
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“Gorbachev,” a romantic drama — political developments stay in the background — about Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa Gorbacheva, is the biggest hit in town at the Theater of Nations. The play is “a breath of fresh air,” evoking both nostalgia and timelessness, according to Ivan Nechepurenko, a reporter in The New York Times’s Moscow bureau.
The key action in the play is a decision made by Gorbachev, played by Yevgeny Mironov, 54. In 1991, after his release from house arrest in Crimea, while thousands gathered, Mr. Gorbachev chose to go to the hospital with his wife, to hold her hand. Mironov played Dostoyevsky in the 2011 mini-series of the same name and played Lenin in “Demon Revolyutsii” in 2017.
Who knew that Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999, was “among the most hated figures in late Soviet times”? (And presumably, among the most loved by the other side.) She is played by Chulpan Khamatova, 45, who was also in “Dostoyevsky” and played Lara in Russia’s 2006 “Dr. Zhivago” mini-series.,
Theater productions have continued in Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic but with limited seating, and tickets for “Gorbachev” are selling out. Mr. Gorbachev, 90, attended one of the final rehearsals himself.
The play is done in the Russian style known as psychological realism; American actors know it as the Stanislavsky method. Or just “the method.”
“Gorbachev,” written and directed by Alvis Hermanis. Running time; 3 hours. theaterofnations.ru