Natalya Sats Musical Theater

**The Natalya Sats Musical Theater**, formally known as the **Moscow State Academic Children's Music Theater Named After Natalya Sats**, is a theater specializing in opera, ballet and dramatic productions for children. The world's first professional theater for children, it is perhaps best known internationally as the birthplace of Sergei Prokofiev's *Peter and the Wolf*.

## History

The theater that would come to be known as the Natalya Sats Musical Theater was opened in a former movie house as the "Moscow Children's Theater" in 1921.

It had its origins in a series of touring productions staged in 1918 by the Soviet Commissariat for Education. Prior to this time, few adult actors specialized in children's roles, but after the October Revolution Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya began to champion theater for children. She was joined by actor Constantin Stanislavski. Natalya Sats, the 15-year-old daughter of Moscow Art Theatre Composer Ilya Sats, was called on to direct performances in Petrograd, Saratov and Moscow.

The first performance Sats organized, "David," was staged in June 1918 and 350 children attended. The Moscow venture evolved into The First State Children's Theater.

In 1936, the troupe moved out of the former movie house into a large theater on Sverdlov Square near the Bolshoi Theater. At this time the Soviet government changed the troupe's name to "Central Children's Theater." Here Sats pioneered a combination of music, dance, acrobatics, drama and multimedia. Known as "synthesized theater," it has become the dominant style of children's theater.

Natalya Sats directorship was cut short in 1937. Sats was condemned as the mistress of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the eight top Red Army commanders purged by Stalin in 1937. The attendance of the American ambassador at a performance also contributed to her arrest. She spent the next five years in Siberian labor camps. Her name was not cleared until two years after Joseph Stalin's death.

"It was her strong will, courage and innate feeling of dignity that helped her to survive through all the hardships," the Itar-Tass news agency wrote in 1993, when reporting on the theater pioneer's death at the age of 90.

The theatre that bears her name was founded in 1965, and developed a strong repertoire from close work with contemporary composers. Sats' ambition was both to create new productions specifically aimed at a younger audience, and to present the classics in a way that made them accessible to children.

In 1979, the Children's Musical Theater moved into the Palace of Children's Opera, which was designed especially for the company.

## Peter and the Wolf

In 1936, Natalya Sats asked Sergei Prokofiev to write a work that would teach orchestral instruments to children and fit the "musical tastes in children from the first years of school." The composer, who had recently returned to Russia after 13 years abroad, wrote his symphonic fairy tale in a couple of weeks.

The first performance of *Peter and the Wolf* was on May 2, 1936; Prokofiev later wrote that the debut was "inauspicious at best" and the work "failed to attract much attention."

Yet although it is generally not considered among Prokofiev's greatest compositions, it has become one of the most frequently recorded classical work. To date there have been more than 400 different recordings in more than a dozen languages.

Natalya Sats first narrated *Peter and the Wolf* in 1936. She would go on to give more than 300 performances. The first time she narrated it in English was in Albany, New York as part of a 1986 cultural exchange of theater troupes.

Eleanor Roosevelt, David Bowie, Sir Alec Guinness, Sophia Loren, Zero Mostel, and Boris Karloff have all recorded narrations of Peter and the Wolf.

## Raggedy Ann/Rag Dolly

In 1972, Pat Snyder met and befriended Natalya Sats, legendary director of The Moscow Children's Theatre (later renamed in Sats' honor), through work with the International Children's Theatre Association. As part of a cultural exchange agreement, Snyder staged a production of *The Wizard of Oz* in Moscow in 1974 (featuring Joel Aroeste as the Cowardly Lion), and she helped bring two of Sats' productions to the United States in 1977 and 1978. The New Cold War prompted U.S. President Jimmy Carter to abruptly halt the cultural exchange in 1979, but this didn't diminish Snyder's and Sats' friendship. Hoping to help thaw the icy Soviet relations, Sats journeyed to the US in September 1984 with a proposal for a new cultural exchange. A ban had been imposed on Russian flights, so Sats flew to Montreal, took a train to New York, and popped into Snyder's office for a visit. She arrived just in time to see preliminary work on *Raggedy Ann* and she made a return trip in December to catch a full performance. By March 1985, tentative plans were made to bring the show to Moscow, but this was not ensured until November, when U.S. and Soviet leaders signed a new cultural agreement at the Geneva Summit. At 5 a.m. on the morning of December 3, Snyder received a formal invitation via telephone, the deal was finalized six days later, and the cast began rehearsals in Moscow on January 2, 1986.

The trip for the 75 American cast and crew members was funded by CBS, with the Soviet government footing the bill for their stay. Among them was State University of New York alum Tom Gliserman, who wrote, directed, shot and edited a 30-minute documentary titled *Rag Dolly in the USSR*, which features cast and crew interviews as well as behind-the-scenes footage and performance excerpts. Decades later as the show's popularity swelled, Ivy Austin generously shared this chronicle on YouTube, providing fans with seldom-seen visuals and little-known information to accompany the rampantly bootlegged audio.

Production moved at a breakneck pace, with all of the performers from the second ESIPA staging reprising their roles, and a crew consisting of a mixture of persons from both countries. In preparation, Ivy Austin endured a few weeks of Russian lessons, and learned to sing "Rag Dolly" in the Muscovites' native tongue. Soon after arriving, Raposo panicked, realizing that the Russians couldn't provide some unusual instruments that he needed, so his wife had them expressed from New York. Only six of the twenty musicians were American, which required an interpreter to convey Raposo's intentions. The language barrier occasionally led to difficulties - most notably, when the composer wanted to evoke the sound of a Mariachi band - but musical director St. Louis was thoroughly awed by the orchestra's intensity.

The show was not widely advertised in Moscow, but word of mouth quickly spread, the performances sold out, and tickets were scalped for ten times their original cost. It opened under the title *Rag Dolly: The Raggedy Ann Musical* on January 6 and ran for two previews and eight performances. The play was largely performed in English, but each act opened with Russian narration and cast members learned key phrases, occasionally breaking the fourth wall with little Russian asides that resulted in thunderous applause. Ivy Austin also received a three-minute standing ovation after she crooned the title song in Russian during the first preview, and all these pauses helped to bloat the running time to nearly three hours. Only a small percentage of the audience indicated a knowledge of English, and they sometimes laughed and clapped unexpectedly, but they were receptive to words like Rolls-Royce, Buick and granny knot. The Russians provided zero criticism of the dark themes, but controversy would resume when the show returned to the USA.

The production became an outright spectacle. The cast were mobbed as they signed autographs and passed out letters from American kids who were seeking pen pals, the Moscow children performed rousing English folk songs during intermission, Raposo put on a concert of songs from *Sesame Street*, and prominent Russian figures like first lady Raisa Gorbacheva and minister of culture Pyotr Demichev attended performances. Russian audiences were generally very reserved, so their outpouring of emotion was highly unusual.

News traveled slowly prior to internet connectivity, so the crew returned home to find Ivy Austin's *Raggedy Ann* visage splashed across the front pages of The Daily News and The Economist, and their trip the subject of mass media coverage. Tensions had been high between the two countries for decades, with Hollywood fervently perpetuating the American perception that Russians were secretive villains and Russian propaganda depicting Americans to be General D.-like military extremists, so the media seized upon the heartwarming story of the company's goodwill trip to entertain the children of Moscow. Unfortunately, the English-language journalists largely neglected to remark on the play itself, and the state-controlled Russian press only lavished them with praises, which set the show up to be a punchline for countless mean-spirited jokes later in the year. The overwhelming experience led the company to believe that they'd be welcomed with a similarly warm reception in The Big Apple, rather than the red-hot roasting that they conclusively received.

The show was officially translated into Russian and has been performed countless times, but the legality of these stagings has been questioned. There are bizarre interpretations of the characters, the ending is frequently altered to reunite the parents, and Raposo's songs were cut from the show (although they've been sneaked in on occasion), leaving the companies to find their own songs, which wildly vary.

## The Theater Today

The Natalya Sats Children's Musical Theater, built in 1979, was designed with children's audiences in mind. The building houses a large 1100-seat theater and a concert hall with 300 seats. On the roof is a "bluebird of happiness," the theater's symbol. The exterior combines elements of a medieval castle and modern design: the portals are adorned with sculptures depicting characters from various fairy tales. Special criers herald the beginning of performances from balconies under the portals. Inside, costumed characters entertain children before the show. Real birds sing in the aviary, decorative fish swim in aquariums, and there is a special mural room painted in story-book style.,

The theater now stages approximately 30 operas and ballets a year. Its repertoire today reflects Sats educational philosophy and, alongside new versions of fairytales such as *Puss in Boots*, *Snow White* and *The Frog Princess*, there are also productions of “adult” operas like *Madama Butterfly* and *Eugene Onegin* and new ballets like the *Snow Maiden*. The company employs many young artists, and has served as a springboard for many artist's careers