When fire destroyed Odesa's first theatre, the city turned to Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, the Viennese practice that had already given Central Europe a generation of opera houses. The result stands at the top of the city's slope towards the sea: a neo-Baroque volume of curved facades, sculpted groups and colonnaded loggias that seems to belong as much to Vienna as to the Black Sea. The interior is the surprise. Behind the restrained stone, the auditorium unfolds in gilded rococo plasterwork, tiers of boxes, a painted ceiling and a chandelier that closes the composition, and its acoustics have long been counted among the finest in the region. The film moves from the square outside to the foyers, the staircases and the house itself, and on into the working parts of the building — rehearsal rooms, wings, the machinery of the stage — where a company prepares. As the emblem of Odesa and one of the great nineteenth-century theatres of Europe, the building offers programmers both an architectural subject and a portrait of a living cultural institution.
