The director of Novosibirsk's Opera and Ballet Theatre, which is staging both the Christmas opera and The Nutcracker, has said he won't be dropping the ballet. Vladimir Kekhman instead suggested that the archbishop was only joking, and accused the media of "stirring itself up into a frenzy" whenever the Orthodox Church comments on the arts. "The devil is the father of lies," he warned Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.