DAY THREE - Wednesday March 28

DAY THREE - Wednesday March 28

Slept quite well.  Our first event was meeting with the Managing Director of the theatre.  Since we are both named Mikhail, we are calling him Michael East and I am Michael West.  We entered a conference room with, perhaps, the largest oval table I've ever seen in my life.  Michael East was a very gracious, jovial, welcoming man - and full of passion for theatre in general and HIS theatre in specific.  He gave us all huge books of the last 75 years of the theatre's history.  The theatre employs over 500 people year round, about 230 of them are performers.  They have 26 shows in repertory at one time.  He then offered to show us their new, smaller, performance space.  They had been trying to purchase the movie theatre next door for about 26 years and were finally able to.  They created a stunning 250 seat theatre of marble floors, gold trim and crystal chandeliers.  I think the splendor of the new space makes the mainstage need a face lift.

Here we are sitting in one of the banquet tables that take up the main floor of the new theatre.

Back row from Left: Me, Michael East (managing director), Boris (chief conductor), Kirill (artistic director).  Front Row from Left: Victor (our associate conductor), Elena (dramaturg), Patti (choreographer), Gregg (conductor).

Here we are lounging in the balcony - Gregg is holding the massive book they gave us.

Here are videos of both small and large theatre:

Small Theatre: (Part One)

Small Theatre: (Part Two)

Large Theatre (where we will be):

We then went to the "buffet" - which was the "2 meals a day included" portion of the program.  We expected a cafeteria - I guess similar to a small school lunch room - after all, they are serving (I assume) 500 people a day.  What we found, rather, was a little room - about 20' x 20' with a couple of women serving lots of white-ish, gelatinous things onto small plates.  There were noodles with pork, some barley thing, potatoes with pork and a bunch of other stuff I could not really recognize.   Nor would I able to order or ask what these items were without Gregg by my side. Luckily, the place where we went the first night we got here was a good alternative to the theatre's buffet - so that has become "the office."

At some point today, we went to a music rehearsal to meet some of our principals.  Luckily these were three talented folks - who sang beautifully - and who seemed to be good actors.  Apparently, I am to choose which of the actors are in the first cast (the first opening night) and which are in the second cast (the second opening night).  I don't know if these distinctions matter much beyond the first two days.  Luckily, I am finding my favorite performers to be the ones who seem to fit well together - for the most part.  I assume it's most important to have companies that go together - as opposed to determining which are "better" for the first cast and which are "not as good" for the second cast. I'm assuming they'll all be very good.
This is a vacation week for school children so there have been 11 AM shows every day.  The theatre is always full and the sets and costumes are delightful.  I have also peeked into the theatre during their evening shows (6:30 start time) and they, too, are entirely full.  The arts really seems to mean something to the Russian people as a whole. The demographic of the audience seems to be across the board as well - young, old, in-been - very impressive. In addition to this theatre (The Sverdlovsk Academic Theatre of Musical Comedy) there is an opera house, a philharmonic, a large dramatic theatre as well as several smaller dramatic theatres and a ballet theatre.

After lunch, we went to the electronics store across the street to activate our cell phones.  Noody in these stores speaks English so we had Katya (Company Manager type) and Gregg to help.  I, of course, had the most complicated situation with an iPhone that required a special kind of SIM card.  The standard cards are larger than those used by iPhones - of course. Thanks Apple! So for an extra 150 rubles (about 5 bucks) they will cut the card down.  Here's a picture to help illustrate:

The card at the top shows the cut out of the original size.  The bottom right shows the cut out made for the iPhone and the bottom left shows the actual cut-down card in the slot which goes into the iPhone.

So... all good, right?  No.  The phone did not recognize the SIM card.  But this is the same kind of SIM card that is used in Russian iPhones. The lady behind the counter said that these SIM cards must not work in American iPhones. That sounded fishy to me so I removed the slot and saw that the way she cut the card out - the metal of the SIM card was touching the metal of the little sliver frame.  So, that would short out the SIM card - of course rendering it unusable.  I thought to myself that there must be a way to fix that problem which, with my best McGuyver-ish ingenuity, you can see I succeeded in doing below.

See the little orange strip at the top of the card?  That is a piece of a Post-It that I used to insulate the metal of the SIM card from the metal of the frame.  Suddenly, I got one step further - the phone recognized the SIM card... but could not activate it. I had to update the settings with iTunes on my computer.  But I had three problems.  I needed the newest version of iTunes, my computer was misbehaving, and the internet was horribly slow.  It literally took about two days to download the new version of iTunes - it should have taken 10 minutes at the most! That was partly slow internet and partly screwed up computer.  Luckily, I brought a wireless router from home - so the theatre agreed to wire our rooms with ethernet cables so we could hook up our own routers.

Vladimir, the IT guy from the theatre, was also very helpful in figuring out why my computer kept crashing.  He kind of fixed things... for a while - but it was still behaving very strangely so I ended up reformatting my laptop and re-installing all of my programs.  Now things are working beautifully - HUGE thanks to Vlad.  To quote one of the final lines from our operetta, "Happy end!"

THANK G-D FOR FACETIME!  I chat with Janet and the kids 2 to 3 times a day.  It has and will make all the difference in the world. When I am waking up, I can be "with" them as they do their homework and brush their teeth before going to sleep. When I am going to sleep, I can see them right before they head out to school on a day that I have just finished!