On March 15, 1925, the Worker's Party of America, together with the Young Communist League, staged a lavish celebration at Madison Square Garden to commemorate the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Paris Commune. The Boston Globe estimated that some 13,000 people attended the event, while The New York Times noted that “from the cover of the program to the draperies of the platform, women's blouses and men's boutonnieres, the color scheme in the historic Garden was red.” The festivities were opened by Julia Stuart Poyntz, longtime labor advocate and founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), who quipped that “We are now going to overthrow the United States government, so be prepared for the worst,” presumably for the benefit of the many policemen waiting in the wings to disband the gala. But the highlight of the evening was Alexander Arkatov's The Paris Commune, a pageant that represented various scenes from the 1871 uprising and featured a cast of several hundred. Two days later, the Times acidly observed of the dancing that followed: “Apparently, the ‘proletariat’ of New York City has not been reduced to the hapless condition where it is incapable of response to the appeal of a good jazz band.” But as the dancing and the size of the cast help to highlight, Arkatov's worker theater production aimed both to retell the story of the Commune and to find a new theatrical mode for doing so – incorporating humor, jazz, and outsized scale into its revolutionary repertoire. And the spectacle was hailed by The Daily Worker as “the first time in the history of the revolutionary movement [that] a fitting memorial has been arranged for the Paris Commune.”