Word: cheryomushky
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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