Woland

First, you have the devil himself.

He arrives in Soviet Moscow disguised as a foreign professor named Woland, and he brings this bizarre, terrifying retinue with him.

[laughs] An, an iconic group.

Yeah, a giant vodka drinking, talking black cat named Behemoth, a fanged assassin, and a naked witch.

He burns his own manuscript in a stove and ends up in a psychiatric asylum.

And then there's Margarita.

And the woman who loves him, Margarita, makes a literal deal with the devil, with Woland, to become a witch, host a satanic ball, and fly over Moscow just to save him.

It is a monumental piece of literature, and the journey of this 2027 film adaptation is almost as fraught and dramatic as the novel's own history.

So that's the collapse of a utopia.

So Woland builds a utopia and it collapses.

Stalin and Lenin built an utopia and then it collapsed.

I mean, they didn't even build a utopia.

[laughs]

But it is also really, really delightful because the composers for that show are the same composers as for our multi Helen Hayes Award-winning show, Professor Woland, that you mentioned earlier.

Are they local?

They're not, no.

This absurd premise forms the central plot of Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, written in Moscow during the 1930s This surreal blend of political satire, historical fiction and occult mysticism has earned a legacy as one of the 20th century's greatest novels and one of its strangest.

The story begins when a meeting between two members of Moscow's literary elite is interrupted by a strange gentleman named Woland who presents himself as a foreign scholar invited to give a presentation on black magic.

As the stranger engages the two companions in a philosophical debate and makes ominous predictions about their fates, the reader is suddenly transported to first century Jerusalem.

There, a tormented Pontius Pilate reluctantly sentences Jesus of Nazareth to death.

With the narrative shifting between the two settings, Woland and his entourage, Azazela, Koroviev, Gela, and a giant cat named Behemoth, are seen to have uncanny magical powers, which they use to stage their performance while leaving a trail of havoc and confusion in their wake.

Much of the novel's dark humor comes not only from this demonic mischief, but also the backdrop against which it occurs.

Bulgakov's story takes place in the same setting where it was written, the USSR, at the height of the Stalinist period.

There, artists and authors worked under strict censorship, subject to imprisonment, exile, or execution if they were seen as undermining state ideology.

Tell me about what this head says.

This is, this is, uh, Woland.

This is Woland.

Here's Woland's speech.

Ready? You have always been an ardent preacher of the theory that on the cutting off of his head, life ceases in a man.

He turns to ashes and goes into non-being.

You have Satan himself, who is a participant in a whole particular kind of afterlife system and fate, sentencing a sinner to actual non-being.

Berlioz believed in a kind of atheism and was very adamant that there was no consciousness or life after death.