Musical Chairs in Moscow

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Contrary to St. Petersburg, we had better luck finding theatres in Moscow. Just as well as two of a group of three elderly ladies were sitting in our seats when we arrived at the National Ballet Theatre of Russia to watch an abridged version of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Ballet. (The unabridged version lasts about 4 hours.) When we pointed this out, the ladies looked at us then moved a few seats to the left. Five minutes later the owners of those seats arrived and the ladies moved right.



We realized this was happening all around us. A Japanese tour guide arrived with twenty-five or more tourists and was moving Russians left, right and centre. Later we saw our elderly trio moving yet again and would have loved to know whether they bought the cheapest seats and were trying to upgrade, whether a friend let them in through the backdoor, or what the story was.



This wasn’t peculiar to this theatre as the same thing happened on another evening when the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra was performing at the Tchaikovsky concert hall but there people changed seats in between pieces as well as before the concert began and during the intermission.



Numerous women had taken bouquets to the philharmonic too and when they felt like it, at the end of a particularly favourite piece perhaps, would take them to the stage and wait for the conductor to step forward and gather them up. He received an ‘official’ bouquet from one of the elderly ushers before the encore.



Despite our three Russian language lessons aboard the river boat, there was little point our buying a program printed only in the Cyrillic alphabet, made more confusing by the fact that some letters appear familiar but are not (Cyrillic B is our letter v, P is r, and H is n for example), so Keith and I had yet further entertainment playing “I know this piece of music but what is it called?”



What with people playing musical chairs, rushing around with bouquets, taking flash photographs and texting on their phones, the theatre was a hive of activity.

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