Life Is All Around (Всюду Жизнь!)
A Monday night in Moscow. Already tired from one day at work. An invitation to the theatre, no real desire to see a performance that lasts only one hour. Must be something wrong with this.
How wrong could I have been. “LIFE IS ALL AROUND” is the first comedy directed by Yegor Druzhinin. Why it is called a comedy I do not know, as it is really a set of skits, performed with brilliantly executed dance and mime (not a word is said throughout the performance) which touch on eternal male-female motives. The music is a mixture of compositions of Goran Bregović, American jazz tunes, and the folk music of the Balkans. The music gives the performance a gypsy-type feel, but there is also Italy, France, and the Soviet Union after the war when women outnumbered men.
“This is a movement production about a village life.” So the official programme goes.
“21 actors on stage are telling 21 stories using just the language of their bodies. Those are stories of meetings and partings; of false expectations, love and hopes. The show is full of optimism, good mood, lyricism and trust in human race, full of speechless love.”
The acting company includes actors seen in the musicals Love and Espionage, Monte Cristo, Mamma Mia!, The Ordinary Miracle, as well as TV series There Goes the Youth, The Uni, Interns.
Yegor Druzhinin who was awarded with Golden Mask National Theatre award for his Leo Bloom as the Best Actor of the year 2010. He is a popular choreographer nationally acclaimed for his participation in the Star Factory on Channel One, and later as the fairest adjudicator in Dancing with the Stars on Russia 1 TV. He is justly remembered for his role of Vasechkin in a cult movie Adventures of Petrov and Vasechkin. Theatre-goers
remember Yegor for his appearances in the Russian versions of Chicago and The Producers, and for his choreography for the new Russian musical Love and Espionage by Maxim Dunaevsky. Yegor had a dance education in New York and was a choreographer at the famous New York dance school “Steps on Broadway”
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