4 Best Performing Arts in Vladimirskaya (Lower Nevsky Prospekt), St. Petersburg

With a smattering of performances with English, French, and Italian subtitles, the MDT is home to one of the best theater companies in Russia and is well worth seeing. The repertoire includes productions of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde. The theater is also one of the few companies in town to continue to stage the finest plays from the Soviet era. Seeing their whole repertoire has been compared to living through the entire 20th-century history of Russia. If you have a whole day to spare and lots of stamina, the nine-hour performance of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed makes for an incredible theatrical experience, although it can be a bit hard on the posterior and comes without translation. It takes two consecutive evenings to sit through the company's veteran show, Fyodor Abramov's Brothers and Sisters, but it's an great experience. Order tickets well in advance, because it's rare that the Maly plays to a less-than-packed house.

Inside the five floors of what was once a bakery are galleries, exhibition halls, and designer boutiques. This arts and cultural center gets attention from the hip for its provocative shows, controversial artists, and unorthodox approches. Exhibitions on themes like urban biking, post-war Italian commercial design, or World Press photos are displayed on the rough-and-ready painted brick walls, concrete floors, and exposed pipes.

Also known as the Free Arts Foundation, this ramshackle maze of studios, galleries, yards, cafés, and performance spaces was once a legendary squat for the pioneering artists of the Nonconformist, unofficial, and Neo-Academy art movements that flowered here in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union's grip on cultural life began to loosen. Today the foundation receives state funds, but it has lost none of its thirst for exhibiting modern art that thumbs its nose at the establishment. Pushkinskaya 10 includes, among others, the New Academy Fine Arts Museum, the Museum of Nonconformist Art, the St. Petersburg Archive and Library of Independent Art, FOTOImage, Navicula Artis Gallery, GEZ-21, and Kino-FOT-703.

This charming theater is a great place for parents and their children to catch a show together. Masterfully blending dramatic and musical elements, the captivating productions are famous for their daring experiments. The company is good at winning children over to opera with entertaining versions of serious repertoire such as Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore—during which Nemorino sings his famous aria while riding a bike—or Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann and Puccini's La Bohème. Shows can last anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours.