One of the most intresting things about the history of the Rag Dolly musical (which, if you don't know anything about, you should read my main shrine on it first!) is the cultural exchange trip it took to Moscow in 1986.
I'm just going to quote wikipedia I want to get to the good stuff.
"In 1972, Pat Snyder met and befriended Natalya Sats, legendary director of The Moscow Children's Theatre, through work with the International Children's Theatre Association. Sats journeyed to the US in September 1984 with a proposal for a new cultural exchange. She arrived just in time to see preliminary work on Raggedy Ann and made a return trip in December to catch a full performance. By March 1985, tentative plans were made to bring the show to Moscow, but this was not ensured until November, when U.S. and Soviet leaders signed a new cultural agreement at the Geneva Summit. At 5 a.m. on the morning of December 3, Snyder received a formal invitation via telephone, the deal was finalized six days later, and the cast began rehearsals in Moscow on January 2, 1986." - Wikipedia
- Wikipedia
- RARE website
- Read primary sources in this Internet Archive collection of newspaper clippings
After the American actors left, there were plans to take advantage of the huge popularity of the show and provide a license for it to be produced in the USSR from then on. Due to one reason or another, whether this was the complicated political state between the two countries or the complicated state of the USSR's copyright laws not holding up to standards, this never happened. What they did get was a proper translation of the script, without the music. Where each song would be is a short, two-sentence description of what happens in the number. Because of this, productions overseas only have three options: cut the music entirely, compose original songs, or use prexisting pop songs and movie scores to fill in the gaps (the most entertaining option!). We have found productions with all three.
Starting in 2021, my friends and I began a google doc to organize all the productions and save them as we found them. In 2024, it got an overhaul as a spreadsheet so that we could better keep track of the dates and names, as well as comb through many links that had been taken down in three years' time.
I won't be sharing this list though. Mostly because the majority of these productions are school productions, and though these photos are already online, I don't feel comfortable sharing a list of photos of kids. I do however want to talk about a few of my favorites, most of which are larger productions with adult casts, and I'll blur any photos of kids.
These productions still happen. I cannot stress this enough. This show is not lost, it just moved overseas. There are 2025 productions, and one theater (the Theatre of Rains) has even done Rag Dolly evry year for over a decade. There are popular "successful" shows that don't see this kind of dedication.
Since the script is not licensed andproduced without any oversight, they have the freedom to do whatever they want with it. This usually means shortening the show, but there's some wild liberties that are what makes this so incredibly interesting to me. Over 40 years, this story has essentially immidiately become the public domain, and an explosion of creativity has come from it. You see the same varriation and experimentation as you'd get from an old fairy tale, which is in some ways the perfect result of the playwright's intentional fairy tale themeing (though, not the outcome he predicted, I'm sure, but he made plenty of money to not have this lack of licensing put a dent in his pocket).
