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...