Word: balieff
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...immediately after this Boston engagement, so says the program, Balieff and his Chauve-Souris Company, are sailing for Paris to begin an engagement at the Femina Theatre. Here, in December 1920, the vastly, fat and vastly diverting Russian first gathered together the fugitive members of his original Bat Theatre of Moscow. It has been an eventful and profitable four years, in which the inimitable Balieff and his company of singers, clowns, and dancers have journeyed from Paris, to London, to America, and back to Paris again, finding everywhere the same joyous welcome...
After those four years, any comment on the performance of the Chauve-Souris seems quite superfluous. Better typewriters than ours have rattled off their choicest superlatives in praise of the rotund personality of Balieff and the magnificently foolish or beautiful performance of his company. The fragments which have made up the repertory of Balieff's Chauve-Souris are by now the common property of all America. The drollery of the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers; the exquisite, breathless beauty of the porcelain pantomines; the gorgeous foolishment of "The Sudden Death of a Horse; or the "Greatness of the Russian Soul...
...only a step from the sublime to the silly: that is one of Balieff's own favorite sayings. And Balieff takes that step half a hundred times in the course of a single evening of the Chauve-Souris' program of jumbled beauty and absurdity. That is perhaps its greatest merit. Either sublimity or absurdity by itself soon tends to become tiresome. The endless foolery of a straw-hat comedian soon grows dreary. The lengthy sublimity of a five-hour opera by Wagner is almost as boring. But in the Chauve-Souris the clowns are artists, and the artists...
...Balieff's Players an Influence in America...
America should be grateful to Mr. Balieff for the new and exciting form of entertainment he has brought to enliven our none-too-lively stage. It is said that in Russia, an American negro minstrel show has been enjoying as much popularity with Russian audiences as have the Russian players in America: whatever may be the relation of the ruble and the dollar, the rate of dramatic exchange sets strongly in Russia's favor...