RUSSIA: Blue Bird v. Fat Men

Pampered by the Soviet State with operas, plays and ballets staged specially for them, the moppets of Moscow are the world’s most theatre-conscious children. Four years ago they were told that Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, long one of their favorites at the Moscow Art Theatre, must be stricken from the repertoire because it is “too bourgeois,” too mawkishly insistent upon happiness. In place of The Blue Bird, Moscow’s moppets were given Three Fat Men, a brand new, violently slapstick Soviet farce. They refused to like it, have hankered for The Blue Bird ever since.

Suddenly last week came news that Dictator Stalin, “steel” by name but not by nature where children are concerned, has sanctioned The Blue Bird’s return. Its happiness theme, Soviet editors abruptly discovered, is not really so bourgeois after all. With the Moscow Art Theatre busily rehearsing, moppets excitedly wangled tickets through their Communist child organizations. Old Bolsheviks recalled that Lenin, too, had a weakness for suffering little children to have what they wanted. Atheist though he was, and despite the fact that he plastered all Russia with the slogan “Religion is Opium for the People.” Dictator Lenin in his last years shocked super-orthodox Bolsheviks by permitting Christmas trees, suppressed after his death.