Between April 12-14, 2007, after half-a-year of intense collaboration between Music, Slavic, Theater and Dance, and the School of Architecture, Princeton University was home to the world premiere  of the Pushkin-Meyerhold-Prokofiev production of Boris Godunov.   The collaboration was originally commissioned for the 100^th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, but the play was only partially rehearsed throughout 1936, and—in the increasingly tense artistic atmosphere of the onset of the Terror—never realized.  

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Princeton’s rehabilitation of the aborted concept utilized 21^st-century technology: the stage was filled with rows of ceiling-to-floor flexible “bungee cords” and light projections. An acting company of thirteen undergraduates filled Pushkin’s sixty-odd roles; the University Orchestra and Glee Club provided live music, and the Polish scenes were choreographed for Princeton student dancers, Architecture graduate students designed the set and props.   The performance was in English, with sung texts performed in Russian.   It was a gratifying pilot project for the University’s new Center for the Creative and Performing Acts, that an amateur undergraduate production in a small liberal-arts institution without a drama school (and indeed no drama major) would catch the attention of the national, and then the world, press.   Russian coverage was extensive, but among the nicest and most wistful comments we heard: “To think that Pushkin sold out in New Jersey.”

The four performances were accompanied by an international symposium involving Pushkin, Prokofiev, and Russian theater scholars. Firestone Library curated an exhibit  devoted to the project, and the Slavic Department offered an upper-level undergraduate course called "Pushkin, Prokofiev, Meyerhold: Boris Godunov on the Twentieth-Century Stage."

The “Godunov” project was managed by Simon Morrison, an associate professor of music who tracked down lost scores and choreographies by Prokofiev and other artists, and Caryl Emerson, chair of the Slavic languages and literatures department and a leading authority on Pushkin’s play.

Creative Connections: ‘Godunov’ project driven by scholarly, artistic collaborations March 5, 2007 By Eric Quiñones

“Boris Godunov” premiere takes center stage April 6, 2007 By Eric Quiñones

The sold-out performances are the culmination of a vast creative endeavor that has spanned the entire academic year and numerous departments across the University. The effort to bring new life to Alexander Pushkin's classic play features a cast of student actors in multiple roles as well as performances by the University Glee Club, University Orchestra and student dancers -- all on a flexible, dynamic set designed by graduate students in the of Architecture. The project also includes a Firestone Library exhibition and several academic initiatives. …

Directed by Tim Vasen, a lecturer in the Program in Theater and Dance, the Princeton production is inspired by Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold's unrealized version of Pushkin's historical play...
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Watch video "Staging Boris Godunov"

A Pushkin work rises from the Soviet scrap heap April 10, 2007 By Patricia Cohen

Rediscovered 1936 Boris Godunov, With Music by Prokofiev, Gets World Premiere in Princeton April 11, 2007 By Matthew Westphal

An avant-garde Soviet production of Pushkin's play Boris Godunov, in an unrealized production by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold with incidental music by Sergei Prokofiev, gets its long-delayed world premiere tomorrow at Princeton University.

Meyerhold, a major force in early 20th-century theater, had planned to mount his staging in Moscow in 1936, but the political climate under Stalin's regime forced him to cancel the production. He was ultimately arrested in June 1939 on charges of treason and shot in February 1940.

Prokofiev's score, for chorus and orchestra, has never been used for a live performance of Pushkin's play, although it has been recorded. It features a military tattoo, drunken singing, ballroom dances, a reverie and a love scene; one of the numbers, a Polonaise, requires complex choreography.As in Mussorgsky's operatic version of Boris Godunov, Prokofiev's music includes a passage for a Holy Fool.

The New York Times quotes Simon Morrison, an associate professor of music at Princeton who is writing a book about Prokofiev, as saying, "I was fairly stunned and I continue to be stunned. This is one of the scores that he composed in the '30s when he was at the top of his game, and it went to waste. He never heard it in his lifetime." … Read more

A Lost 'Boris Godunov' Is Found and Staged April 11, 2007 By Patricia Cohen

..."Boris" ran afoul of the government long before Prokofiev and Meyerhold got a hold of it. Pushkin's play -- about the 16th-century tyrannical czar Boris Godunov, and Dimitri, a pretender to the throne -- "is very seditious," said Caryl Emerson, chairwoman of Princeton's Slavic languages and literature department, who is overseeing the project with Mr. Morrison.

This production, which is using a new English translation by Antony Wood, is the first in which all 25 scenes that Pushkin wrote are being performed together, Ms. Emerson said. "It combines three geniuses of Russian culture, "she said. "Pushkin, Prokofiev and Meyerhold, the poet, the composer and the stage director...

A Russian television crew from the state-run Channel 1 was scheduled to film Tuesday night's dress rehearsal and explain to viewers how it is that this essentially Russian work is being first performed in New Jersey. In Russia, Pushkin is more often read than performed, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, which ended state subsidies and introduced artistic freedom.

From Mr. Morrison and Ms. Emerson's perspective, only a university with resources like Princeton's could afford such an undertaking. The 15 actors (who play 70 parts), 10 dancers, 24 choral singers and 35 musicians are all undergraduates. "The entire campus became a kind of creative workshop, an atelier," Mr. Morrison said... Read more

Студенты из Принстона поставили спектакль "Борис Годунов" 13 апреля 2007, 10:34 Channel 1 Moscow

...Twenty-five fragments of orchestral and vocal music (done well by members of the Princeton University Glee Club and Orchestra) are woven into the drama like carefully rationed accents, which befits Meyerhold’s spare and modern production and emphasizes both the comic and weighty aspects of Pushkin's play. There are long periods with no music; when it appears, it plays a supporting role to Pushkin's lyrical text, performed here in a vital new translation by Antony Wood ...

The composer Peter Westergaard, an emeritus professor of music at Princeton, wrote music for one scene Prokofiev did not complete: an effective paraphrase of Russian liturgical chant to heighten the drama while the young monk Grigory Otrepiev begins to lust after Godunov’s throne.

The Polish ball is one of the most visually striking scenes in the staging, which features floor-to-ceiling spaghettilike cords that encourage the actors (all Princeton undergraduates) to adopt fully Meyerhold’s intensely physical style of acting. Orchestra musicians in fanciful wigs are seated behind a multilayered red grid, against which the brightly colored round skirts of the dancers whirling to a Tchaikovsky-like waltz and a polonaise intersect like circles and lines in a Malevich painting. … Read more

They are three of Russia's most towering cultural figures: the national poet Alexander Pushkin, the composer Sergei Prokofiev, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the visionary theatrical director who was imprisoned and executed during Stalin's purges.

Now after a delay of 70 years, the fruit of their collective genius will be unveiled in a world premiere of a new version of Pushkin's verse masterpiece, Boris Godunov. But the performance will not take place on a or St Petersburg stage, but more than 4,000 miles away at Princeton University, in New Jersey.

The production that opens tonight at Princeton's Berlind Theatre is remarkable by

amateur standards, made possible only by the vast financial resources of one of America's most lavishly endowed universities. The four scheduled performances - all sold out - will cost $140,000 (£71,000), even though the 84 actors, singers, musicians and dancers are all undergraduates.

The set itself could not be more modern, consisting of little more than rows of floor to ceiling stretch cords anchored in grooves that run across the stage. They can be moulded into the shape of trees, used like bows and arrows in battle scenes, and even wrapped around the bodies of performers - reflecting the "biomechanics "method of acting pioneered by Meyerhold, where specific physical movements are used to express outward emotions. … Read more

...The production was staged with an emphasis on the innovative frame of mind in which it was originally conceived, Emerson said. "[We've] tried to be modernists, in the spirit of Meyerhold, who was a modernist," she said. "We're trying to do what he would have done with all these resources he didn't have." …

The expansive nature of the production provided an opportunity for performers to experiment outside their areas of expertise, Vasen said. Glee Club members appearing onstage near the end of the first act had to sing through thick fake beards, something to which they were not accustomed.

Several portions of Prokofiev's vocal arrangements do not include words, leading Glee Club director Richard Tang Yuk to "become part of the orchestral fabric ... to come up with certain vowel sounds to match the orchestra, there was some level of experimentation involved with that," he said. …

"The project required people to do things that they've never done before," Vasen said. "Stirring things up and getting people off balance often allows things to come forward that have never been tried before." …
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