Sunday, 4 October 2026

Poster for the Blue Bird, one of the best-known Russian cabaret theatres in Europe, by Ivan Bilibin

Share
Poster for the Blue Bird, one of the best-known Russian cabaret theatres in Europe, by Ivan Bilibin

The Russian theatre was founded in Paris in 1921 and run by Yakov Yuzhny, at one time celebrated as a compère and teller of Jewish stories.

Yuzhny toured extensively with the Blue Bird, which was enormously popular in Germany, but by the 1930s something had to be decided: to practise art, and Russian émigrés in particular, was becoming ever more dangerous. Yuzhny fled to Czechoslovakia, but his former success was not to be revived there. Yuzhny soon died of heart failure, and the theatre ceased to exist.

Report a translation error