My Fair Comrade

Anxious angels may wonder if they will get their wings clipped by Goldilocks, the Walter and Jean Kerr musical due on Broadway this fall; even Rodgers and Hammerstein may worry about their forthcoming Flower Drum Song. But there is one show in the works that simply cannot miss. Title: Moscow-Cheryomushki. Composer: Dmitry Shostakovich. Book: by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky, two reliable party-line pros. Opening is scheduled for December at Moscow's Operetta Theater, but insiders last week got a preview of the vehicle that is to brighten Russia's winter season.

The show starts with a misty-eyed, reminiscent scene of pre-revolutionary Moscow--the small houses and crooked side streets of the Cheryomushki district, near Moscow University. But before this sentimentality can get out of hand, bulldozers move in. All the old decadence is demolished, and a modern housing development rises on the ruins. Construction workers sing at their jobs; new tenants arrive; all is youth and enthusiasm. Friendships grow and love blossoms.

Lest the audience mistake all this for pure uplift propaganda, the librettists give a dutiful nod to the flaws that can be found even in the Soviet soul. A comedy trio of class conscious careerists who are more interested in self-advancement than the good of the group are exposed and punished. A bourgeois, bureaucratic superintendent is lampooned in the hassle that arises from the assigning of apartments. But through it all, the hero and the heroine work at their interior decoration and wait patiently for the fruits of love and Marxism.

Of 21 musical numbers. Shostakovich has already composed 15. The rest will be ready when the cast comes back from vacation for mid-September rehearsals. This is the first time Shosty has done an operetta, but he has turned out plenty of light music for films, and apparently he is again leaning heavily on safely popular folk motifs. The choreography is careful too; jittery western fox trots have been displaced by waltzes and polkas.

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