Poppy a La Teheran

Poppy a La Teheran

The most famous ballet conceived in Soviet Russia had its Manhattan premiere last week. It was The Red Poppy, a stark, fist-shaking proletarian melodrama set to lush, romantic music by Russia's aging Reinhold Gliere. It caused almost as much excitement in Manhattan's City Center of Music and Drama as it had in Moscow at its first performance in 1927. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with Alexandra Danilova as the star, gave it an energetic performance. But it was not the same Red Poppy that Muscovites had cheered in the Bolshoi Theater 17 years ago. The Poppy, like all things Russian and the American Communist Party, had undergone many adjustments.

As danced in Moscow in the '20s, The Poppy was about a little cabaret dancer named Tai Hoa (symbolizing China) whose love for a Russian sea captain was frustrated by the machinations of an imperialistic British treaty-port commander named Sir Hips. The ballet ended with the murder of Tai Hoa by a jealous Chinese who is a tool of Sir Hips, and the rise of the Chinese proletariat to the strains of the Internationale.

Recently the Russian choreographer Igor Schwezoff brought The Poppy up to date. With a deft tour-en-l'air of the choreographic party line, Schwezoff abolished the evil British commander, converted Tai Hoa's murderer into a Japanese, added a British and a U.S. sailor (both very agreeable fellows), ended with the murder, not of Tai Hoa, but of the Japanese. The Manhattan audience did not seem to mind these alterations. As the Internationale burst from the City Center's orchestra, the crowd broke into cheers.

Meanwhile in Moscow, last week, an audience that had practically forgotten about The Red Poppy crammed the Bolshoi Theater for the crowning event of the Moscow ballet season. The event was about as revolutionary as the late Czarina's tiara. It consisted of top-flight Soviet Ballerina Lepeshinskaya leaping through the enchanted 19th Century fairyland of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty.

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