MOSCOW, CHERRY TOWN
by Dimitri Shostakovich

Special Event–May 15,18,22
West Coast Premiere—Long Beach Opera

Musical Comedy in 2 Acts, libretto by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky

All his life Shostakovich had a fondness for light-music, operetta and musicals. In the late 1950s a friend became conductor at the Moscow Operetta Theatre and this gave the composer a chance to try out the genre for himself, working with two leading popular writers of the day. They came up with a satirical musical comedy of social optimism in a new housing development against a backdrop of housing shortages and bureaucratic corruption premiered in 1959 at the Mayakovsky Operetta Theatre in Moscow.