The name that will draw many people to the fascinating "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater," at the Jewish Museum, is, of course, the name in the title, Marc Chagall. But the name that will doubtless be on their minds as they leave the exhibit will be that of one of the great actors of the Russian Jewish theater, Solomon Michoels.

Michoels is hardly a familiar name today. But he was considered a leading actor not just in Russia. The visionary British director Edward Gordon Craig declared in the '30s that England had no actor capable of playing King Lear with the power Michoels did.

Interestingly, there are excerpts from a film made of Michoels' performance in the role. By our standards his acting seems exaggerated. Clearly he was not toning down his performance for the medium of film. He was an actor who was used to communicating to the last row of the balcony. He was unaware or unwilling to use the camera as a collabofrator.

This is apparent in another clip in the exhibit, which shows him drinking tea. I do not know the context for this scene, but if it was filmed, it must have been one of the things that made him famous. He does everything exquisitely but perhaps the most interesting thing is the way he elongates his neck at the end, which inevitably reminds one of the kinds of elongation one sees in the painting of, yes, Marc Chagall.

At the center of the exhibit is a mural Chagall designed for the Moscow home of the State Yiddish Theater, GOSET. GOSET was founded in the early '20s, when the Revolution was still young and receptive to fresh ideas. That the state would establish such a theater in the capital rather than in the Pale of Settlement in the West, where Russia's 5 million Jews had hitherto been restricted, was an important political statement.

Chagall's mural, "Introduction to the Jewish Theater," is full of "in" references, carefully explained in the wall text. Even without knowing the specific allusions one can appreciate the high spirits in which the painter created his work. Miraculously, the mural was saved after it was removed from public view during the Purges of the late '30s.

Chagall, of course, had the wisdom to leave the Soviet Union in the '20s. His work had already been acclaimed in Western Europe. So he was returning to a place he already felt at home, not simply leaving a world that was evolving rapidly into a totalitarian state.

Michoels was not so lucky. He did achieve great fame both in Russia and elsewhere during the many years he worked as an actor. In the early years of World War II he was sent to America to create a positive image for the Soviet Union, our new ally fighting Stalin's former friend, Adolf Hitler. Itzik Feffer, a Yiddish poet and secret police informant, was sent with him as a minder, and there are photographs of the two of them meeting such eminences as Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin.

Only a few years later, in 1947, Michoels made the mistake of voicing support for the as yet unborn state of Israel. This did not meet with the approva of Uncle Joe. Michoels was sent to Mink on the pretext of judging a play for the Stalin Prize. He was murdered and his body thrown into a street to make his death look like a traffic incident. The party official who arranged the murder was later given the Order of Lenin. (A documentary about Michoels is slated for next month's annual Jewish Film Festival, co-sponsored by the museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.)

The exhibit features set and costume designs by numerous Chagall contemporaries. They create a rich tapestry of what the Yiddish theater was like. Some reflect Chagall's influence. Others show affinities between these designers and the Constructivists. I was fascinated by material from a production of "The Golem" in 1925 by the Habimah, a troupe that performed in Hebrew and later moved to Israel. The author used the theme of the monster that begins benignly and turns malevolent as an image for the transformation of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Amazingly, it escaped the censor's eye.

The formal display of art is enriched by the film clips, like a series of short silent comedies, which, 80 years later, still make you laugh.