ІНТЕРПРЕТАЦІЇ ТВОРІВ У ЖАНРАХ «ВІДЕНСЬКОЇ» ТА УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ОПЕРЕТИ РЕЖИСЕРОМ ЮРІЄМ СТАРЧЕНКОМ

The article analyzes the approach of Yuriy Starchenko (in the period from 1985 to 1996 – the main director of the Kharkiv Academic Theater of Musical Comedy) to the implementation of classical operettas and their domestic genre analogues. Yu. Starchenko’s work was multifaceted: these were the first productions of rock operas in Ukraine, the resuscitation of intelligent viewer’s curiosity to the classical operetta, and the embodiment of dramatic quality works in the genre of musical. Background. Unlike the productions in the genre of rock opera by this director, the topic for this paper has been little studied in the Ukrainian theater research. Monographs about the country’s first musical comedy theater still do not exist. The only scientific article describing Yu. Starchenko’s directing, is devoted to the aspect of staging by the director of two (from his three) rock operas [3] and is dated 2005, which means that the theater studies scarcely focus on the practice of the musical comedy theater. Methods. The article uses historical and chronological, typo-logical, comparative and analytical methods, with an element of reconstruction of plays and roles. The sources were the available few reviews of certain productions of this period, opinion articles about the principal theater actors for the time of Yu. Starchenko’s leadership, and theatrical research analysis of the plays seen by the author of this article. Objectives. The article partly highlights the interaction of the director with the scene designer and choreographer when describing the general idea of the play, but mostly it reveals the issue of Yu. Starchenko raising the contemporary culture of the operetta artist. Results. The directors Yu. Grinshpun (Odessa), V. Begma (Kyiv) and Yu. Starchenko (Kharkiv) relied in their own reforms on qualitatively modern librettos to operettas written in the 1970s–1980s. In the direction of operetta of Yu. Starchenko as a graduate of the Directing Department of Drama Theater at Kharkiv State Institute of Arts named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky, instead of playing according to the role, the actor had to create psychological images (within the conventionality of the genre and drama). This led to bringing the operetta troupe training criteria closer to the similar standards of the “workshop” of the main director in the drama theater. In this article, the following has served as the materials for the analysis of directing and acting art: “Countess Maritza” after “neo-Viennese” operetta by E. Kalman, and “Sorochyntsi Fair” by O. Riabova (after M. Gogol) and “Proposal in Goncharivka” by K. Stetsenko (after H. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko) – both in the direction of Yu. Starchenko, “Night in Venice” after J. Strauss’s classical operetta (directed by V. Horislavets). Also we have ana-lyzed the changes in the ensemble culture of the old productions of “The Riviera Girl” and “Bajadere” by E. Kalman. The play “The Merry Widow” of Yu. Starchenko and V. Gorislavets (after the “neo-Viennese” operetta by F. Lehar) was characterized by the solution through the constructive scene design that gave birth to an image of the golden cage, but at the same time, acting was still traditionally psychological in the conventional genre of operetta, as it has always been in the theaters of our region. In both productions of Yu. Starchenko, Ukrainian national operettas were leaning to the bright conditional scene design. In the “Sorochyntsi Fair”, in particular, the director applied techniques of rhythmic refl ections and stop-frames borrowed from the cinema. In the old production by I. Radomysky and Vs. Dubchak, the director together with the actors introduced modern intonations, which resulted in meticulous and forceful work with texts in dialogue scenes, and in applying subtexts and actual improvisations. The students of the acting department at the KhNUA named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky Viktor Robertov, Grygoriy Babich, as well as Mykola and Valentyna Butkovsky, raised by Volodymyr Begma, the reformer director of the Kyiv National Academic Theatre of Operetta, contributed to Yu. Starchenko’s reform of classical operetta. In particular, G. Babich, who after higher acting education got higher vocal education, and also graduated from a ballet school, had highly versatile acting skills. He was able to use them in the productions by Yu. Starchenko, practically working in classical operettas as a actor of the musical (without involving a double ballet dancer for his character, etc.). Even the young actresses Valentyna Podorlova and Olga Katsayeva who came to the theater, having just got vocal education, met Yu. Starchenko’s directing assign ments with understanding. Each of them created totally opposite images, such as the heroines of classical operettas (V. Podorlova – Silva, Countess Maritza, O. Katsayeva – Silva, Valentyna from “The Merry Widow”, Lisa from “Countess Maritza”), and age roles (V. Podorlova – Pamela from the musical by M. Samoylov “Dear Pamela”) or character roles (O. Katsayeva – Elsa from the musical comedy “Horrible Elsa” by O. Feltsman). The actors of Yu. Starchenko were skilled in the most saturated emotional vocal wording (in particular, Vira Kharytonova, Grygoriy Babich, Valen-tyna Podorlova in performances of classical operettas). All these innovations of Yu. Starchenko in the Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy during the mentioned decade brought the theater of the “light” genre closer to the actual drama theater. Conclusions. The director’s operetta theater became possible after cleaning the theater through the crucible of the musical. In contrast to the actors of the 1950s – 1970s, who were educated mainly in the system of the role, a generation of the artists-personalities loose in genres appeared in the 1980s, with innovative intellectual potential in operetta, and that was due to the strategy of Yu. Starchenko, particularly, the renovation of the posters and the director’s educational approach that differed from those of the past. It was the universal training that helped the like-minded actors of Yu. Starchenko implement the task of modern directing with synthetic means of musical and drama theater. In contrast to the predecessors, the artists S. Kuzovkin and T. Shygimaga sought to materialize not the entourage of action, but an idea. Yu. Starchenko’s directing approaches to the genres of the musical and musical comedy are the subject of separate research. It was the symbiosis of these genres in the repertoire poster of the theater that created a basis for a comprehensive and, in our opinion, very convincing experiment of this director in the musical comedy theater.