Hypothetically Murdered

Dream Note

Hold onto your vodka glasses, comrades, because we need to discuss what is arguably the most deranged theatrical production in the history of Soviet entertainment — and considering this is the same country that gave us ballet dancers defying gravity for six hours straight, that's saying something considerable. In 1931, a young Dmitri Shostakovich — yes, THE Shostakovich, the brooding genius who would go on to compose symphonies so emotionally devastating they could make a statue weep — decided to write a full-length score for the Leningrad Music Hall. And when I say 'full-length,' I mean this man apparently looked at the concept of restraint and laughed directly in its face like a Cossack who'd just been told to quiet down. The resulting show was less a theatrical production and more a fever dream assembled by a committee of insane geniuses who'd each been given different substances. Dancing girls? Naturally. A jazz band? Of course. A dancing DOG? Why on earth not — we've already abandoned every convention of civilized entertainment, let's throw in a poodle with rhythm. But wait, there's more, because this extravaganza also featured sequences of silent film — because why commit to one medium when you can have two — simulated air raids and gas attacks that must have been absolutely delightful for an audience living in constant fear of actual ones, a literal lorry driving around, a storm effect, waiters and waitresses performing in a luxury restaurant scene, and — I cannot stress this enough — RIVER NYMPHS. As if all that weren't enough to make every theatrical producer in history feel like an underachiever, the piece climaxed with a scene set in Heaven where the Devil and the Twelve Apostles performed a blasphemous knees-up. Let me repeat: THE DEVIL AND THE APOSTLES. DANCING. TOGETHER. IN HEAVEN. This is the kind of audacious, sacrilegious, magnificently unhinged artistic vision that could only exist in a society teetering between revolutionary fervor and totalitarian nightmare. Shostakovich would later face official condemnation for far less, which makes this glorious madness even more precious.