The illustrious Chekhov Moscow Art Theater and attached school have seen many changes since their inception, but are still holding the torch of theatrical professionalism high

They come from all over Russia, with more hope than chances to enter the theater school attached to the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT), Russia's leading school for those who see their future on the stage.

Two hundred young women and 120 young men compete for just one place in each year's class of 30 students. For those who make the cut, there is the promise that few schools in Russia, or anywhere else, can offer – near-certain employment on the stages of Moscow or St. Petersburg after graduation and, after that, the possibility of joining the firmament of MKhAT stars – Vladimir Vysotsky, Oleg Yefremov, Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Tatiana Doronina, Aleksei Batalov and Oleg Tabakov.

Today, students come not only from all over Russia, but from all over the world. The MKhAT school was first created by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and implemented by a decree of the Soviet Cultural Commissar in March 1943, as Moscow faced the German invasion. The first students were admitted the following September, and, in October, the first classes were held. This October, the school will celebrate its 60th anniversary. In preparation, the Kultura television channel will be screening a 10-part series on the school's history, with rare footage of its most famous alumni in performance. The series was prepared by the current rector of the school, Anatoly Smelyansky.

The MKhAT school, explained Dean of the Acting Department Sergei Zemtzov, teaches acting and theater to students each year from Detroit and Chicago and at the universities of Yale and Harvard in the United States, as well as in a summer program in Valencia, Spain. It is the American tie that is the strongest: Harvard and the MKhAT school have a combined theater-studies program, which takes Russian theater masters to Massachusetts each year and brings a troupe of U.S. student actors to Moscow. ...

At the school, the teaching is intense – six to eight acting teachers for each of four years of study – and every form of lesson, from acting to direction, dancing to makeup, costume design to box-office management, is studied from 9 in the morning to 11 at night. In all, the school's teaching staff numbers 79 with additional part-timers, many of them actors in Moscow theaters. ...

Dean since 1997 and, before that, an actor and director with eight years of teaching in Paris, Zemtzov said that he and [Igor ] Zolotovitsky have teamed together for 20 years now. The MKhAT has now lasted through two revolutions in Russia and the MKhAT school through the revolution of 1991. Together, they have watched the transition from the Soviet to the Russian regime. How has this affected future actors and students? "They are now more free," Zemtzov says. But this has its downside, he concedes. "They don't have the communist ideology. But they do have more problems with discipline."

The aspiring actors are arriving at the school as the theater itself struggles with what Zemtszov and his colleagues call a sharp change in the quality of the audience and the star system that it inspires on the stage. "After 1991," Zemtzov remembers, "the audience numbers fell off, and so the repertoire had to be changed to draw them back into the theater. Today, we have more comedy than in Soviet times. But we also have more of what was forbidden then – more imports from France, England and the United States, more sentimental melodrama, more nudity, more gay and lesbian themes, more boulevard theater."

In the decade since the end of the Soviet Union, MKhAT graduates have distinguished themselves in film, television and theater. They include Vladimir Mashkov (Hollywood's stereotypical Russian gangster), Irina Apeksimova (who has played Anna Karenina in France) and Yevgeny Mironov (who recently starred as Prince Myshkin in the televised serial of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot). №13, one of the theater's most financially successful productions, is a light situation comedy directed by Mashkov and starring, among others, Mironov and Zolotovitsky. It has been running for two years, and every performance is a sellout.

But the stage stars of Russia today are very different from those of the past. "If, before, someone became a star," says Zemtzov, "it required hard work and long experience. Now anyone can become a star by appearing in a soap opera on television. Face recognition is all there is to stardom now." To draw the audiences, theater directors must now pick casts of one-day wonders already known from television, because this is what pulls people in.

When reminded that Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is about one form of privatization that was dramatically changing the Russian landscape in the 1890s, Zemtzov said there has been no new Chekhov of post-1991 privatization. "The changes Chekhov dramatized had taken more than 15 years before he wrote The Cherry Orchard. We haven't had enough time yet."

But then, Zemtzov is skeptical that a modern-day version would succeed at the box office. "If the theater can make a good comedy," he acknowledges, "it can make good money."