Litter Box Theater

I went to Moscow last weekend on Saturday November 7, the former Day of the Revolution (the big one). It's no longer an official government holiday, but there were still parades on Red Square and I saw lots of wreaths in Victory Park. I celebrated like a proper revolutionary - with a trip to the Moscow Cat Theater.

This is a real thing, it exists and it is well known. If you say the words "cat theater" in Russian (teatr koshek), many people will immediately say "Ah, Kuklechev!" That's the founder, Yuri Kuklechev. When I told one of my Russian friends that I was going to go to the cat theater, she replied "Kuklecheva?" This puzzled me for a moment as I contemplated the possibility of more than one cat theater in Moscow.

Anyway, at some point this clown (not derogatory, he's actually a clown) got the idea to train cats and dress them in outfits and put them on scooters and other incredibly cute and freakish things. One of my professors told me she saw the show as a child and it featured a cat dressed as a chef, stirring a boiling cauldron with a pawed spoon. Muscovites apparently love this sort of thing, because when I called to ask about tickets the woman on the phone told me good seats were available for 1400 rubles (that's about $45). Last time I was in St. Petersburg, I paid 800R ($25) to see the world famous Mariinsky Ballet Theater perform La Sylphide. There had better be some pirouetting.

When I got to the box office, I looked at the seating plan and ticket prices. Luckily, tickets for the furthest two sections were 200R and 150R. I asked for a pair of either and she told me there weren't any available. This was a lie, because after we bought our 350R ($11) tickets and took our seats eight rows remained empty behind us. Something about my black hooded sweatshirt, baseball hat and North Face jacket must have said "I will pay any price for this."

I somehow convinced Micah (picture below) to go with me. Micah is a smoking, drinking Kentuckian known to sport a handlebar mustache and complain loudly about the quality of his morning BM. The main audience for cat theater is three year olds and parents who look like they've run out of ideas. There was one couple in the corner who cuddled throughout the entire performance which was touching and creepy. We were clearly the oldest males in the theater not accompanied by a child or a female (the only two segments of society permitted to fawn and pet things).

I won't spend a lot of time outlining the performance, because it's much funnier to watch somebody step in a puddle or slip on ice than to describe it afterward. There were cats on scooters, cats hanging from half-moons, cats hopping between clouds above the stage. There were dance scenes that had nothing to do with cats and an impossible to follow plot involving a detective, a janitor and three scantily dressed dancers. (Micah: "I bet the one on the right knows how to work a pole.")

There were some highlights. Towards the middle, the human performers / cat herders brought out the feline equivalent of parallel bars. Through some more than obvious coaxing, the trainer managed to get one of the cats to monkey across the two bars using only its front paws, its back legs dangling in the air. And for the finale they brought out a small padded seat attached to a 15 foot pole. A different cat scaled the pole, sat atop it a moment to heighten the tension, then leaped down onto a cushioned pad held by a different performer. It was very dramatic.

After the show ended, the performers tossed balloons into the audience for the kids to take home with them, but none of them reached our back row. Micah and I left the theater bewildered and aimless, unsure what remained for two 20-something guys do in Moscow at 8pm on a Saturday night.