‘There was no one in the audience’: The first Soviet musical on a Czechoslovak stage

After the 1968 Soviet invasion, the people of Czechoslovakia could not avoid the presence of Soviet culture, which was a symbolic manifestation of subordination to the Soviet hegemony. When researching the theatre culture of this era, one comes across a very specific tension between the state’s cultural politics, the principles of theatres’ repertoire-making and audience perceptions. As new Soviet musicals began to appear on Czechoslovak stages in the early 1970s, serving as obligatory Soviet titles, audiences were not very approving, even as the official discourse created a completely different image. The case study of the 1971 Prague production of the Soviet musical Nobody Is Happier Than Me by Andrei Eshpai shows the impact of cultural politics on the theatre industry, how the discourse balanced the unpopularity of the show and its political importance and how the production was perceived by various agents involved in it. Research on this previously untouched area can shed light on the cultural mechanisms of late communism in Czechoslovakia, the nature of popular culture in communist states and the relationship between the Soviet Union and its satellites.