Kazimierz Krukowski was Morskie Oko’s final director – and only for a period of three months.
The history of ‘Warsaw’s Casino de Paris’ ended with the Warsaw Revue, which premiered on 3rd June 1933. On 9th July, the theatre was finally closed. The main reason was most definitely the economic crisis which, in the early 1930s, had a big and painful impact on Poland and chased the impoverished audience from theatre halls. Another reason was the salaries of the biggest stars which made the theatre go broke.
There was yet another reason for the failure – changing fads. The Paris-style revue stopped being as popular as in the late 1920s and was being overtaken by musical comedy. However, that did not mean that, with the shutdown of the theatre, Morskie Oko’s style became history.
Andrzej Włast tried to continue the project by opening more revue theatres: in 1933, after Morskie Oko’s shutdown, he created Rex Theatre, in which Fryderyk Járosy himself performed. When it also flopped, Włast opened the Wielka Rewia (Great Revue) music hall in the Panoramy building at 18 Karowa Street. It remained active until January 1939 when it was replaced by the literary theatre Ali Baba (which was active in the same building but in another, smaller room until a few days after the outbreak of the war). The creation of Ali Baba and its short lifespan was a symbolical closure of the period of Warsaw Paris-style entertainment. Today, not much remains after that era. The building of Morskie Oko, wiped off the face of the Earth during the Warsaw Uprising, was replaced by an annexe of the neighbouring building (Dom pod Orłami), a headquarters of banking institutions. The Panorama building was demolished in September 1939 and was replaced by a residential building in the 1980s.
Originally written in Polish by Tomasz Mościcki, June 2010, translated into English by Patryk Grabowski, June 2019