The music is familiar and more or less recognizable words like “La Manchi” or “Ciudad Realu” sometimes emerge from the text. On the stage of a theater hall from 1902 with a baroque interior with intense gilding and red seats, the austerity of a La Mancha town is displayed. In the background, saffron fields, windmills and landscapes with which to travel and escape, even for two hours, somewhere in La Mancha, far from kyiv, from the threat of missiles and anti-aircraft alerts, from war.
The zarzuela The saffron rosewhich premiered this Friday at the National Operetta Theater in kyiv before a “very warm and excited” audience, has become, thanks to stage director Ignacio García, another symbol of Ukrainian resistance against Russia. The texts about peace, justice and freedom extracted from Don Quixote resonate with an audience that finds in theater “spiritual food,” according to García, and “a meeting space, a place to have fun and disconnect.”
Theater halls are packed in Ukraine. The concert ones too. The Operetta Theater has all the tickets sold until January. Before the large-scale invasion, many plays were performed in Russian. Now it is unthinkable. The repertoire has been filled with Ukrainian operettas, musicals such as Chicago o The Adams Familyand now, for the first time in its 90-year history, a zarzuela. García leaves after the premiere, but The saffron roseco-produced by the Spanish Embassy in Ukraine, remains on the program.
The play, a rural love drama with a social background, has many analogies that bring it closer to Ukraine. “The rural world, the wheat fields, the saffron fields… Values that have to do with effort, difficulties, seasons and uncertainty in the harvest are engraved here,” explains the director.
García, a 47-year-old from Madrid, throws words in Ukrainian, English and Spanish at the team during rehearsal. “Art has a universal language and in the end we always understand each other,” he reflects as he continues the performance in the stalls, where there is also a performer. The set and costumes of the play are made in Ukraine but are replicas of the production that premiered in Spain, crochet collars included. “Povilno!”, he asks the actors at one point to lower their tone a little. An important part of the work has been, however, the opposite: ensuring that the company integrated “the impetus and temperament of Spanish music and art”, but in a natural way.
The impact of war
An anti-aircraft alert sounds and it is time to stop work to take shelter. If it happens during the performance, the public has to go to a nearby metro stop. When the interruption lasts more than an hour, they can return another day. People pay little attention to the alarms anymore, but the theater is old and the rules are respected. During the daily blackouts, they rehearse with LED lights almost in darkness.
García, who has traveled to the country eight times since the war began in February 2022, is also used to it. “It’s more uncomfortable than anything else. The moments of fear are specific: when you are sleeping and you hear the alarm or explosions, or when you are on the train and you see the anti-aircraft guns.” The Ukrainians thank him for his courage in coming to bring a foreign work, especially after a French team canceled the day before his arrival. Before the war, international exchanges were common.
The soprano Yana Tatarova-Tsutskiridze, or Sagrario, combed with her character’s bun and dressed in a gray shirt and long black skirt, says in the dressing room, during the half hour that the alarm lasts: “Ignacio asks for a lot of expressiveness and we are not accustomed.” “At a certain point, my character explodes, and that, which is not typical for us, is very interesting for someone creative,” he continues.
“The audience is going to be filled with these emotions, with the goodness of the work,” believes the actress. “Ukrainians need them and this music is very rich, it fills you,” he says. Along with the orchestra, castanets and tambourines from La Mancha play, and jotas and seguidillas are danced.
The practically entire team is Ukrainian, and they are all-rounders. In the morning they rehearse a zarzuela and in the afternoon they perform Chicago. García has been working with them for a year, with intermittent visits. On November 25, he returned with Ana Cris, production assistant, to finish off the last three weeks before the premiere. In his absence, a member of the company led the rehearsals, whom he had to convince to leave his creative mark so that the work had a Ukrainian sensitivity. It wasn’t easy. “They are very hierarchical,” he says, and he did not want to interfere with García’s directives.
The translation was a goldsmith’s job. As the director says, the first line already gives an idea of the difficulty of adapting the text: “Although I am from La Mancha, I do not stain don’t you”. The translator worked by fitting each syllable with each note, but according to García, Ukrainian has enough flexibility to allow words to be changed without altering the meaning of the sentences.
The Spanish artist hopes to contribute to the Ukrainian cause with the “healing and therapeutic capacity of art.” Dressed in vishivanka, the shirt with typical Ukrainian embroidery, he says that “the war is not in the city, but it is in the people.” The company is no stranger to it. There are fallen comrades on the front and others who continue fighting. There are also fathers and husbands on the battlefield or captured by Russian troops.
Tatarova-Tsutskiridze tried to convince her husband not to volunteer to go to the front. He achieved it in 2022, but the following year he enlisted. “If I don’t go, who is going to go,” he told him. He is on the zero line, in an attack brigade. “In the theater I can completely disconnect,” says the actress, smiling. “We need these things like air to breathe. We need different emotions to distract ourselves.”