Abstract
<jats:p>The article examines the musical as a polycode genre with a multimedia embodiment, possessing an increased potential to influence on the audience. The author associate the properties of the musical with the strategy of theatricalization – one of the hermeneutic interpretative strategies in modern text analysis, which is also actively used in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL). The educational potential of the genre is presented through the musical "Anna Karenina" based on the eponymous novel by Leo Tolstoy. Using the example of this work, the possibilities of recoding the main meanings of the original text in the verbal, musical and visual codes of the musical are explored. The article demonstrates the potential for using musicals as educational multimedia texts, facilitating a deeper understanding of the source text due to semiotic cross-codes that connect the staging with the original classical source. A conclusion is drawn about the didactic potential of the musical's libretto.</jats:p>