The aftertaste of “Tiger Catchers”: a review of the musical based on the novel by Ivan Bagryany

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On June 2 and 3, the National Operetta of Ukraine hosted the premiere screenings of the musical “Tigrolovi” based on the novel of the same name by Ivan Bagryany. Music reviewer of UP. Culture shared their impressions of the performance. Read UP.Kultura in Telegram Expectations and reality The combination of the two words “musical” and “Tiger Hunters” caused me certain doubts about their compatibility. Before visiting the performance, I listened to the comments of its creators – director Serhii Pavlyuk and set designer Oleksandr Bilozub, I talked with the co-author of the libretto and co-composer Kyryl Beskorovainy. Doubts arose: is it possible to combine such different people in one team and get something coherent as a result?… The night before the premiere, I almost did not sleep – not because of another air raid or shelling, but because I decided to re-read “Tiger Hunters”. And practically from the pages of the novel, I moved to the stage of the National Operetta, from where a red-eyed dragon wagon looked at me and breathed in my face. It was transformed into a restaurant, then into a madhouse, then into a prison, then into a Ukrainian house in the taiga, and this created the effect of a rapid change of frames in an adventure film. Wooden beams always hung on the stage, like Damocles’ swords, reminding of the totalitarian regime and its third dragon eye, which always watches over you. The built-up dramaturgy – from darkness to light – did not give a chance to be bored for even a second during the performance, and there were many touching moments. I watched as an unfamiliar woman sitting next to me hurriedly wiped her tears at the end of the performance. I think that such empathy was born from experiencing and living the autobiographical novel of Bagryany by the creators of the musical. Photo: Anatoliy Fedortsiv History lessons Living through personal experience described in “Tiger Hunters” are not just words for director Serhiy Pavlyuk. Interrogations that were practiced 100 years ago are now used by the Russians during a full-scale war. Pavlyuk had to go through this experience while in temporarily occupied Kherson. “We forget our history too quickly,” says the director of “Tiger Hunters”, which is why it is so important to recall it, to tell about it in the language of art. For example, about how the Russians tried to destroy Ukrainians by banning everything Ukrainian. On the stage, we see how the main character’s embroidered shirt is torn off, and instead a straitjacket is pulled on, his mouth is gagged. How Ukrainians on “death row” are ordered to shut up immediately when they start singing. “Put down the songs!” How the bureaucratic wheels turn around Hrytsk when he tries to get a hunting permit. As around Grigoriy Mnohogryshny, the posypaks in plague masks dance. Because having received the status of “enemy of the people”, you seem to become a contagion for society. In fact, the biggest plague of that time was the totalitarian Soviet regime, whose tentacles have not weakened even to our time. Photo: Anatoliy Fedortsiv Dissonances and consonances of “The Tiger Hunters” Bagryany wrote “The Tiger Hunters” in just two weeks, you can reread this novel in one night, and the work on the new musical in the Operetta lasted several years. This story begins in 2018, when the co-authors of the libretto and co-composers of “Tiger Hunters” Kyrylo Beskorovainy and Anton Humanyuk were fascinated by Broadway musicals and Ivan Bagryany’s novel. Neither Kyrylo nor Anton are professional musicians, they outlined the melody of the future musical, and the orchestration and final musical design was performed by the composer Bohdan Reshetilov. Perhaps the only thing missing from my ear trained in modern academic music was the more complex harmonies in the music. However, taking into account the specifics of the play’s genre, I did not have any dissonance with what I heard and saw on stage. Quite colorful musical material was organically combined with the heroes of the musical, among whom “new faces” appeared. For example, Fiona, a tabby cat from Pacific Express, she is the wife of Tungus Dyadorov and the lover of Major Medvin. Her appearance is accompanied by a long blues theme. The image of the chief executioner, Major Medvin, seemed to the authors of the musical not to be sufficiently revealed, so it was decided to add material from Bagryany’s “Garden of Gethsemane” “for additional colors” – as co-librettist Kyrylo Beskorovainy noted. Indeed, Medvin’s ominous rap aria became one of the most striking scenes in the musical. Among the musical finds are sarcastic overdubs of Hrytsk and Mariyka, stylized as kolomyki. Oriental motifs in the geisha dance and the spirit of the taiga sounded from the stage. The authors managed to achieve a balance in this combination of contrasts – from an aria on the verge of a scream by Grigoriy Mnogogryshny to Natalka’s penetrating hum. I cannot fail to note the wonderful embodiment of the images of the heroes by the actors of the Operetta Theater. It seemed that each role was written specifically for them and corresponded to their characters. Photo: Anatoly Fedortsiv What was not in the script of the musical It is surprising that until now only one screen adaptation of the novel “Tigrolovi” has appeared – an ambiguous feature film by Rostislav Synko in 1994. It is worth watching only for fans of the opera singer Anatoly Mokrenko, who, in my opinion, overshadowed other star actors with his performance. I doubt that this film version would have been liked by Ivan Bagryany, who even in the early 1950s saw the creation of Ukrainian films as a means of combating the ideology of the USSR. He had more than one idea for film scripts, in particular, he planned to write a script for an adventure film based on “Tiger Hunters” for Hollywood. These plans were never realized during Bagryany’s lifetime. But I’m sure that he would have been delighted with the musical “Tigrolovi” in the Operetta. Not only a writer, but also a seer, Bagryany saw the internal problems of the Ukrainians themselves, so he called on them to unite. And this unity could be felt on the evening of the first premiere of the musical “Tiger Tigers”. Then, after the end of the performance, the audience in the hall responded in one breath “Glory to the heroes!” in response to “Glory to Ukraine!” the leader of the Operetta Bohdan Strutynskyi. A quote from Bagryany’s novel, the leitmotif of “Tiger Hunters” – the brave are always lucky – was mentioned in almost all materials about the new musical. If we abstract from Bagryany’s novel, we can see the confirmation of this statement on the example of modern art. Bold and talented experiments with Ukrainian classics proved the success of completely different projects. Let’s recall the series “Catch Kaidash”, the cartoon “Mavka”, the opera “Kateryna” by Rodin in Odesa, or the updated “Zaporozhets za Danube” in Lviv, the play “The Witch of Konotop” by Ivan Uryvskyi at the Franko Theater. This is another sign of getting rid of the inferiority complex that has been going on since the time of the Russian Empire. Read also: A lesson in decolonization from the Lviv Opera and its “Zaporozhets over the Danube”

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