Paying dance instructors over widely dispersed areas across Canada and the United States, as well as for rental spaces for his schools, perpetuated his financial woes. To clear up these troubles, Avramenko turned to the idea of staging his work on Broadway. His successes up to now had been solely in the Ukrainian community. His first attempt to reach beyond it was at the Star Casino, and was disrupted by a summer storm that hit the city. His second attempt was at the Metropolitan Opera, with 500 dancers, a chorus of 100 singers, and a folk orchestra, all dressed in Ukrainian costume. The New York Evening Post gave it a rave review, "…excited over the kaleidoscopic ardors of the dance, the richness of the chorus, the congeniality of the audience and the fairly inspiring naturalness of what really amounted to a brilliant Ukrainian folk festival." The Ukrainian newspapers, like "Svoboda", saw the performance as a well-attended artistic failure. In a venue like the Met, where the great operas of the world were performed by the finest singers, the Ukrainian press had expected those values to be reflected in the premiere of a comparable Ukrainian operetta or musical. Instead, they found themselves seeing more of what they, unlike the larger English community, were already familiar with from Avramenko. His debts increased, and in order to address his finances, he turned to film.