Sunday, April 15, saw the ceremony of the 24^th Gold Mask national theater award on the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theater.
The awards were conferred in six main contests: drama, opera, operetta or musical, ballet, puppet shows and "Experiment".
The Best Stage Play
The Stage Play category had the biggest number of nominees - 29. More than ten powerful big stage plays competed for Gold Mask, but the winner is one - "Fear Love Despair" by stage director Lev Dodin (St Petersburg Small Drama Theater - Theater of Europe).
“Thank you for the Mask. We worked hard, long and honestly”, - Lev Dodin commented on his victory from the stage.
The winner in the Small Stage Play nomination is "Chuk and Huck" by Mikhail Patlasov (Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg).
The Best Stage Director prize in this category is awarded to Yury Butusov ("Uncle Vanya", Lensovet Theater, Petersburg), and the Best Playwright is Dmitry Danilov ("The Man from Podolsk" of the Moscow Teatr.doc).
Vyacheslav Kovalyov ("Exile", Vladimir Mayakovsky Theater, Moscow) and Alla Demidov ("Akhmatova, The Poem Without a Hero", "Gogol Center", Moscow) have got the Gold Masks as the Best Actor and Best Actress respectively.

The Best Opera and Operetta
The main prize in the Opera category goes to the Bolshoi Theater for "Billy Budd" (a joint production with the English National Opera and the German opera). The Bolshoi Theater had the most nominations in the "musical" categories.
The Best Conductor's prize is taken by Oliver von Dohnanya (Slovakia) for the "Passenger" of the Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater, and the Best Director is Kirill Serebrennikov ("Chaadsky" of the Moscow "Helikon Opera"). The award for Serebrennikov, who is currently under house arrest, was received by artist Pavel Kaplevich.
Yevgeny Stravinsky (Mephistopheles in Faust, EV Kolobov Novaya Opera Theater) is the Best Actor and Nadezhda Babitseva (Liza in Passenger, Ekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater) is the Best Actress.
Special jury award in the musical theater category goes to the Cantos of the Perm P.I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater as well as opera singers Anna Netrebko and Yusif Eyvazov ("for a unique creative duet in the Bolshoi Theater’s “Manon Lesko”)
The Best Musical of this year is "Sweeney Todd, a Barber Maniac from Fleet Street" of the Moscow Taganka Theater. The same production gained awards to its director Alexei Franchetti and its lead actor Peter Markin.
The Best Composer in the musical theater is Alexei Syamak from the Perm P.I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater.

The Best Ballet and Dance
The Perm Opera and Ballet Theater is in the lead as per the number of awards in the "ballet" category. Its art director Theodor Kurentzis personally has taken Gold Mask for his conductorship in Cinderella. In addition, the award goes to the choreographer of the same performance, Alexei Miroshnichenko.
The Best Ballet prize has been awarded to "Suite in White" (the Moscow Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater).
The Best Modern Dance is "Imago-Trap" by choreographer Tatyana Baganova from the Yekaterinburg Theater “Provincial Dances”.