Grigori Gurvich

Grigoriy Efimovich Gurvich (October 24, 1957, Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, USSR - November 5, 1999, Jerusalem, Israel) - theater director, playwright and television presenter. In 1984 he graduated from the directing department of GITIS. In 1989, he created the Bat Theater in Moscow, which became the continuation of the tradition of the legendary theater of the same name, founded in 1908 by the Moscow Art Theater actor Nikita Baliev and philanthropist Nikolay Tarasov. The idea of ??rebuilding the Bat-Cabaret Theater was suggested to Gurvich by Mark Zakharov and Grigoriy Gorin. They approached the young author of the next cabbageman on January 13, 1983, to congratulate him on a resounding success, and practically unanimously advised him to take up the cabaret theater, a genre that originated from the skits of the Moscow Art Theater. According to Gurvich himself, at first he didn't really like such advice - he was going to engage in serious art and stage serious performances. Nevertheless, Mark Zakharov at each meeting repeated to Gurvich the same unchanging advice. The distant echoes of this juxtaposition of genres were repeatedly subsequently woven by the author into the fabric of his performances. In the end, Grigoriy Efimovich was imbued with this idea, moreover, with "serious" performances in other theaters, he was haunted by a series of administrative failures. In 1988, businessman Aleksey Belskiy, who knew and loved Gurvich skits, agreed to finance the creation of a new theater, and the director of the House of Actors named after Yablochkina Margarita Eskina, who greatly appreciated the director's talent for Grigory Gurvich, helped to get permission for the new theater to work in the premises of the GITIS Student Theater - the very same room where, until its closure in 1920, Baliev's Bat-cabaret shone in the Nirnsee house. The premiere of the first performance, "Reading a new play," took place on June 12, 1989. Grigoriy Gurvich staged six performances on the stage of his cabaret theater: "Reading a new play", "I'm stepping through Moscow" , "One hundred years of cabaret", "This is show business", "You are allowed to replay", "Great illusion" (already in the film actor building on Povarskaya). Grigoriy Efimovich himself was the author of all the plays, both by the playwright and the director, with the exception of the play "You are allowed to replay", staged by Gurvich based on the play "Biography" by Max Frisch. The most famous is Gurvich's musical film "Starry Night at Kamergerskiy", filmed in 1997 and shown on television. In addition, Grigoriy Gurvich, as a director, shot two production films: "A true artist, a true artist, a real killer" (1994) and "Tango with Death" (1999). The first film was shown several times on the channel "Culture". The fate of Gurvich's film "Tango with Death" is not completely clear. It is not known whether this film was shown on television. Information about it is minimal, on the Internet there are not even single frames from the film. It is possible that the film is lost or is in archives inaccessible to the general public. In 1996, ATV President Anatoliy Malkin came up with the idea of ??transferring "Old Apartment". According to the idea of ??Malkin, this was supposed to be the history of the country from 1947 to 1999, based on the fates and stories of ordinary people. The actor Boris Lvovich was initially assigned to the role of the host before the shooting, and Grigoriy Gurvich, who then worked as a cultural observer in the program "Vremechko", was supposed to be the stage director, but it did not work out. After some time, Gurvich became the host of this program. Knowing that there was already a candidate for this role, he called Boris Lvovich with a question whether he would be against it. Grigory Efimovich led this program for almost three years, until his departure to Israel. After his departure, Andrey Maksimov became a "responsible tenant" for some time. For the past two years, he has been sick with leukemia, underwent several chemotherapy courses, and died on the night of November 4-5, 1999 in an Israeli clinic. At the Vagankovskiy cemetery in Moscow, Grigoriy Gurvich installed a cenotaph, at the base of which is a capsule filled with earth from the Israeli grave of Gurvich. He himself was buried in the Yarkon cemetery near the city of Petah Tikva, not far from Tel Aviv.