If George S. Kaufman and Morrie Riskind had been given the opportunity to write a play about the process of preserving communist leader Vladimir Lenin's body for the ages, they might have written something like Vern Thiessen's Lenin's Embalmers, a mostly merry fantasy about life in the early days of the USSR, now playing at Ensemble Studio Theatre.

A top-notch ensemble gamely delivers the initial froth of this piece, which has been extrapolated from the real-life events outlined in Ilya Zabarky and Samuel Hutchinson's book Lenin's Embalmers, as Stalin (played as a dangerous and preening dimwit by Richmond Hoxie) embarks on a crusade to have Lenin's corpse embalmed for future generations. [...]