Things to do · Culture
Abai Opera and Ballet Theatre (GATOB)
Opera and ballet in the 1941 building at the heart of the Golden Square — including Abai, a Kazakh opera, sung with English subtitles.
Not checked in person
Written from the theatre's own site, not from a night in the stalls. Ticket prices are not published there and vary by show and seat — Ticketon has the current ones.
What you can do there
Opera
About 2½ hours with intervals
The national repertoire — Abai, Birzhan–Sara, Kyz Zhibek — next to Traviata, Carmen, Tosca and the rest. Abai is sung in Kazakh with subtitles in Kazakh, Russian and English.
Ballet
1½–2½ hours
Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, Le Corsaire, and Kazakh work such as The Great Silk Road.
Concerts
Soloists' evenings and gala programmes between the staged shows; the playbill marks them.
The practical part
- Area
- Golden Square, city centre
- Season
- Autumn · Winter · Spring
- Booking
- Online through Ticketon, linked from each performance on the theatre's site, or at the box office in the building: +7 727 272 79 34.
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People in Almaty call it GATOB — the old acronym for the state opera and ballet theatre — though it is now officially the Kazakh National Opera and Ballet Theatre named after Abai. Ask a taxi driver for either and you will end up in the same place, on Kabanbay Batyr at the top of the Golden Square.
The company dates from 1934; the building opened on 7 November 1941, after five years of construction to a design by N. A. Kruglov. There is more about the building, its architects and the squares either side of it on the architecture page. This entry is about the other half of it: going in and watching something.
If you see one thing here, make it something you cannot see anywhere else. Abai is a Kazakh opera about the poet the theatre is named after, sung in Kazakh — and with English subtitles, so it is not an evening of guessing. The Kazakh ballets and operas on the playbill are the same argument: Swan Lake is good here, but Swan Lake is good in a lot of places.
Tickets are sold through Ticketon; every performance on the theatre’s site links straight to it, and the site has English and Kazakh versions alongside the Russian one. The playbill there is the only schedule worth trusting — the programme changes week to week, and evening shows start at 18:00 or 19:00 depending on the day.
Last updated .