Penza, 3 June 2011. PenzaNews. The theater critic Grigory Zaslavsky compared the new building of the regional Drama Theater named after A. V. Lunacharsky which had been constructed recently in Penza with the station of the Moscow metro, which had been opened recently. The Head of the Department of Culture writed about it in "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" on June, 3.

The critic said: "The theater appeared in Penza at the end of the 18 century, but the present building, which has just been constructed and is under warranty: the warranty for the theater, as I have found out recently, is less, than for "Chevrolet", " Hyundai" or "Opel". It is given three years for the cars and only two years for the building of the new theater. The new theater in Penza has appeared after the old one which was completely burned down.

Long time ago, it seems to me that, during the lifetime of the first people's commissar of education, the Penza Theater was named after Lunacharsky. And they live — do not grieve. Inside — everything is up-to-date, there is almost hospital cleanliness in the toilets, washstands with the photo cells, there is marble and granite outside and inside, everything shines, as at the Moscow underground station, which has just been opened. Beautiful!"

Speaking about the first regional festival which just has been finished in Penza "The Theatre in the Volga region" Grigory Zaslavsky discussed three works in details — the performance based on Shukshin’s stories of the Ulyanovsk Youth Theatre, the Nizhniy Novgorod's "Dadya Vanya" and the Penza staging of Gogol's "Revizor".

Grigory Zaslavsky in "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" said: "In Penza the performance was made by Valery Beljakovich from Moscow; he did not worry about neither Gogol nor his imagination, though there are gossips in the city, that he shouted at the rehearsals: "He threw microphones into the walls and microphones are expensive, one costs 100 thousand!"

The critic has underlined that Penza spectators loved the theater very much and there was "an unusual energy" of the art director Sergey Kazakov.