The Show Goes On in Moscow Again Months After Siege

Just over three months ago, it was a hall of death. But Saturday night, cheerful ticket-holders hurried up to the Dubrovka Theater here, their faces alight in anticipation of a good night’s entertainment at the reopening of the musical “Nord-Ost.”

Among them were few mourners for those who died in the theater in October after Chechen terrorists took the audience and cast hostage. Most came Saturday with the simple wish for an enjoyable evening out.

A few elderly people were hanging around in hopes of seeing flashy VIPs like Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov.

“I don’t think about the dead,” said Konstantin Grishin, 29, a serviceman who was selling tickets outside the theater for about $30 apiece. “Of course I pity those who died, but that’s over.”

Saturday was Nina Milovidov’s 15th birthday, or would have been, had she not died after Russian security forces pumped gas into the theater, where she was a hostage, stormed in and killed the terrorists in an operation that cost 129 captives their lives. Of those, 127 -- including Nina -- were killed by the gas.

Her parents, Dmitri and Olga Milovidov, were unable to get tickets for the reopening. Instead, they spent Saturday at a cemetery and a church, and then mourned Nina at home.

Nina and her sister, Lena, 13, were both in the theater at the time of the attack, but Lena was released by the terrorists.

“The musical must go on as life must go on,” Dmitri Milovidov, 39, an engineer who also has a 2-year-old son, said in a telephone interview. “But the tragedy must not serve as an advertisement for the show.

“My children are growing. I don’t want them to be afraid to go outside. I want them to go to shows and movies without fear. And I will do my best to try to make them live in a safer country. What happened at ‘Nord-Ost’ must never happen again.”

He and his wife plan to see the show this month with Lena, who has told her parents that she wishes she could have seen it to the end.

Posters around Moscow are advertising “Nord-Ost,” the first Broadway-style musical in Russia, with the slogan “Full Speed Ahead!”

Although many audience members felt no qualms about a night’s light entertainment at the site of such a tragedy, others confessed to deep ambivalence.

For Olga Plakhotnik, 33, who came from Ukraine to see the show, a heavy air of tragedy lingered about the theater.

“Actually, it is a very sad place. But I think that art is stronger than death and tragedy,” she said. “It is right that the music should continue here, in this very place. It must continue because our life is continuing.”

Elena and Nikolai Tersky, 41 and 43, respectively, had seen the show five times and love it.

“It’s a very symbolic play. It’s very Russian. Nothing should end, not in such a tragic way,” said Nikolai Tersky, a manager. “We feel some hope in this revival.”

Regina Livshetz, 44, from Los Angeles, was on a five-day visit to Moscow and agreed to take a relative to the show.

“Actually, I was depressed when I found out it was the first night,” she acknowledged. “I’m not in a good mood to go here because it’s tragic. I don’t have a good feeling here. Just to sit here and understand that so many people died -- it’s not a good feeling. It feels very painful.”

Twenty-seven “Nord-Ost” cast members died in the siege, including two children.

Still, as part of an effort to expunge the aura of death around the musical, the Dubrovka was not merely cleaned and repainted but renovated and remodeled. The Moscow government footed the $2.5-million bill.

The seats, once red and spattered with the blood of female terrorists shot dead by security forces, have been replaced by blue seats. The orchestra pit, which hostages were forced to use as a lavatory, now is on the same level as the audience.

Director Grigory Vasiliev took his parents into the theater to show them exactly where he sat while he was a captive. “But I couldn’t find the seats,” he said at a news conference Friday.

Security was tight before Saturday’s performance. Sniffer dogs and bomb experts checked the theater before the show, and audience members passed through a metal detector.

For survivors of the events in October and the bereaved, questions remain. Dmitri Milovidov and his family are among 61 victims suing the Moscow government for more than $60 million in compensation for suffering.

But Russian law protects the authorities from negligence related to terrorist attacks. Nor will the case answer why so many died from the gas used to subdue the terrorists.

“I blame the authorities for what happened and ultimately for my daughter’s death,” Milovidov said. The desperate sadness and grief of the last 3 1/2 months have led him to a sinister conclusion: “I have been thinking a lot about what happened, and I become more and more convinced that the authorities didn’t really want to save all the hostages. You can’t help reaching the conclusion that they deliberately let a certain number of hostages die to keep up the anti-Chechen sentiment in the society, for their own ends.”

Other Russians, like the Terskys, feel certain that many of the dead could have been saved. But they find it difficult to allocate blame.

“It was just circumstances,” said Nikolai Tersky, “or some mismanagement. It was everything together.”

Saturday’s show began with a minute’s silence.

But addressing the audience before the performance, Mayor Luzhkov struck an ebullient note.

“Life goes on,” he declared. “Nothing can stop it!”