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It's intermission for the blockbuster musical Nord Aust and the audience is a buzz with excitement.

Sandy Booker, an American from Oklahoma, buys a snack for his long-distance fiancé,

Svetlana Gubareva and her teenage daughter, Sasha.

Sandy is visiting Moscow in the hopes that Svetlana and Sasha will return with him to America,

where they can be a family together.

Act 2 is about to start, so Sandy goes back into the theater to find Svetlana and Sasha,

still sitting in their plush red seats.

As the crowd hushes and the lights go down, actors, dressed as soldiers, fill the stage and start dancing to the act's opening number.

Nord Ost is a big Broadway-style

musical set during World War II. So Sandy doesn't consider it unusual when a man holding a machine

gun steps on stage, but it soon becomes clear that something is off. The man is wearing a ski mask

and the other actors look terrified. They stop dancing and run off stage.

Sandy looks around in the dark theater and sees the aisles, filling up with other people

wearing masks and carrying guns. Like everyone in the audience, Sandy is confused. He's not sure

if this is real or part of the show. The musicians who can't see the masked men from the orchestra pit

think one of the actors has missed their cue,

so play the same bit of music over and over

until they're interrupted by gunfire.

...