The unabashed socio-political pathos of Alexei Remizov’s ""Tsar Maximilian"" struck me as being so antiquated as to be impotent and infuriating both.

Dmitry Astrakhan, best known as a film director, may become chief director of the Pushkin Drama Theater.

The 4Rest Club promotion group's third and last ""da City house"" party takes place Friday at the Barmelei.

If you're one of those wet blankets who prefers lettuce to lard, then Dzhagannat Express could be for you.

Arina Sharapova — the former TV diva — has escaped to Krasnoyarsk to host a local television program.

In early September, Scott Brady, a young American cellist, arrived in Moscow to take up a unique two-month ""residency"" in the cello section of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

In early September, Scott Brady, a young American cellist, arrived in Moscow to take up a unique two-month ""residency"" in the cello section of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

Moscow will show work from some of Georgia's most talented artists at the three-day Art-Gruz festival.

Diamanda Gal?s has a voice as potent and bitter as a shot of arsenic; but a dose of Gal?s isn’t deadly — in fact, it’s the kind of venom that’s hard not to drink. Diamanda Gal?s has a voice as potent and bitter as a shot of arsenic. But a dose of Gal?s isn’t deadly — in fact, it’s the kind of venom that’s hard not to drink. A casual listener exposed for the first time to Gal?s’ curtain of jet-black hair, Snow White-pale skin and tormented wail will think: ""Satanist diva."" Others will have heard the rumors: that she is HIV-positive, or that she is actually a drag queen. But whether or not any of this is true becomes irrelevant as soon as Gal?s opens her mouth. Because, before all else, she is an intensely gifted singer who shocks first-time listeners into silence with her exceptional range. The child of Greek Orthodox parents, Gal?s was raised in San Diego where, even as a small child, she was considered a gifted piano player. ""I could play absolutely anything that was ever written for piano,"" she told journalists at a press conference in 1998. Gal?s then went on to study the performance arts at the University of California, but, bored with her studies, she spent most of her time on the streets with local transvestite prostitutes, using drugs. She soon tired of this, too, at which point she joined a French-language opera. She has since said that her time on the streets made her into the kind of singer she is today. What kind is that? For example, a now-hackneyed, true anecdote tells of how neighbors once overheard her rehearsing a song in her Greenwich Village apartment and panicked: They called the police, convinced that someone was being murdered. But beyond her oddly beautiful shrieking that is something between opera and the avant-garde, she is the kind of singer who composes now violent, now beautiful texts — with album titles like ""The Litanies of Satan"" (1982) and a song on her latest album called ""Burning Hell"" — in five languages; an utterly unique vocalist with a four-octave range; and a star with an international following who still takes time for AIDS activism. As a vocalist who usually performs with little or no accompaniment, Gal?s’ work is a fusion of many musical genres, including classical opera, the blues, gospel and rock (witness her 1994 collaboration with former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones) to produce a glass-shatteringly outrageous sound. That so many rumors abound about Gal?s is little surprise, given her constant appearance in black clothing and provocative lyrics about death, religion, God and the Devil, many of which beg to be misinterpreted. In her famous rendition of the gospel song ""Let My People Go,"" for example — a performance strong enough to firmly elevate her in popular opinion to the class of Billie Holiday — Gal?s sings the word ""devil"" instead of ""god."" Here, and in her other many similarly themed works, she attacks bigotry and hypocrisy in religion, but certainly stops far short of championing the dark side. ""The devil here is not some abstract, gothic figure,"" she wrote, explaining why she views Middle America as the home of Satan. ""He is, in my definition, the coward, the man who is spiritually impotent, the homophobe, the willfully blind, the deserter. ""My voice was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends and a tool of torture and destruction for my enemies,"" Gal?s once said. ""It’s a source of truth."" Gal?s, whose fingers are tattooed with the words ""We are all HIV positive,"" won international acclaim for her 1984 album ""Masque of the Red Death,"" which she dedicated to AIDS victims everywhere, including her brother Philip Dimitri, who died of AIDS while she was working on the triple album, which is also known as ""Plague Mass."" ""It’s a statement of grief for people I know who are infected,"" she said of the tattoo in an interview with the BBC in 1999. ""And it’s also a statement that says you can’t separate us on that basis."" But if Gal?s is for unity among AIDS patients and non, then she is certainly no peacemaker — rather an angry soldier whose mission is to fight for the outcast and downtrodden against all that is temperate or familiar. ""You thought I’d become soft and polite?"" she once barked at critics. ""I’d have to say the Mike Tyson of the Voice does not waste time talking about bullshit."" Gal?s’ performance at the Gogol Theater on Sunday continues in this vein: Her latest album, ""Defixiones: Will and Testament"" is a memorial to Armenian and Greek victims of Turkish soldiers in the Armenian genocides in 1915 and 1922. The album sets to music the works of Armenian and Greek poets. Her subject, as usual, is a painful one and, in her music, Gal?s screams revenge. ""Defixiones were made of stone and put on top of the bodies in graves to warn people not to tamper with graves,"" she explained in an interview with Britain’s Shout magazine earlier this year. ""But the defixiones that I primarily focused on were used to threaten people like the Turks against digging up the grave of an Armenian or a Greek."" Morbid, yes. But that’s just par for the course for Gal?s. ""Greek people have gallows humor,"" she once told a BBC interviewer. That they do. Diamanda Gal?s performs songs from ""Defixiones: Will and Testament"" at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Gogol Theater, located at 8 Ulitsa Kazakova. Metro Kurskaya. Tel. 262-9214. Tickets are available at city theater kiosks, but may sell out, so make your purchases early. small/2000_09/2000_09_22/22galas1.jpg huge/2000_09/2000_09_22/22galas4.jpg large/2000_09/2000_09_22/22insek2.jpg 71 08 YES but a dose of Gal?s isn’t deadly — in fact, it’s the kind of venom that’s hard not to drink.

Held this year for the third time at the Shchusev Architecture Museum, ""Dolls"" begins when participants are given a naked, faceless doll to transform as he or she sees fit.

The unabashed socio-political pathos of Alexei Remizov’s ""Tsar Maximilian"" struck me as being so antiquated as to be impotent and infuriating both.

Dmitry Astrakhan, best known as a film director, may become chief director of the Pushkin Drama Theater.

The 4Rest Club promotion group's third and last ""da City house"" party takes place Friday at the Barmelei.