Moscow Musical

Eager audiences last week thronged to look at a modern, Broadway-styled musical comedy dealing with a local subject. Its title: Moscow-Cheryomushki. Composer: Dmitry Shostakovich.

Composer Shostakovich has long been urging a more imaginative fusion of light and serious music by Soviet composers. The libretto of this new operetta (TIME, Aug. 25) has to do with three couples trying to find apartments in Moscow's Cheryomushki district, where huge apartment buildings are being erected to relieve the housing shortage. Included in the cast are a construction worker, a museum guide, an old man who stubbornly refuses to leave his apartment in "Warm Alley" for the new development, and a married couple named Sasha and Masha, who are forced to kiss goodnight each evening and retire to their separate dwellings. Eventually all the characters get apartments in a triumph over the bureaucratic housing director and his scheming wife.

To this featherweight libretto, Composer Shostakovich set a blandly melodic score. The operetta's high points were provided by the choreography: a dream ballet in which a defeated schemer cavorts near one of the coveted apartments, a wild Lindy hop by two of the triumphant apartment hunters. Tame by Broadway standards, the dances proved to be crowd rousers on opening night. Otherwise, Composer Shostakovich's first excursion into musical comedy got only tepid applause. The Moscow cognoscenti diagnosed Cheryomushki as an unequal contest between composer and librettists, with Shostakovich's music clearly coming out the loser.

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