Hermitage Garden

This guide to Hermitage Garden in Moscow returns to December 1898, when a play called The Seagull, hissed off a Saint Petersburg stage two years earlier by a shattered Anton Chekhov, was staged again on a wooden theatre here. It follows why two obsessive reformers, Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, picked this particular pleasure garden for their new company built on truth instead of spectacle. You'll also hear about the summer Harry Houdini performed his escapes for a Moscow crowd under the same trees.