STAGE

Moscow’s Taganka Theater has a new artistic director. Actor and film director Nikolai Gubyenko, appointed Monday, vowed to keep up the Taganka’s reputation for staging controversial avant-garde productions. Gubyenko told Tass he planned productions based on the poetry of the late Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, who both suffered official persecution, and their modern spiritual descendants Bulat Okudzhava, Andrei Voznesensky and Bella Akhmadulina. Gubyenko replaced Anatoly Efros, who died in January.