2023-12-28 14:21:44
“Happy is the person who forgets what cannot be changed.” This is one of the many, eternally valid operetta philosophies of “Fledermaus”. So we simply forget that the “Fledermaus” Olympus was built at the Bavarian State Opera in 1974, in Otto Schenk furniture that was cloned many times from Düsseldorf to New York and Vienna (where it still runs today). The premiere looked dusty and old-fashioned, but was a wonderful background for even wonderfully older jokes.
Over the years there has been a parade of singers from Lucia Popp to Edita Gruberova to Brigitte Fassbaender and Benno Kusche, with Franz Muxeneder and even Heinz Rühmann appearing as prison guard Frosch sliwowitz in the third act. And in the best case scenario, Carlos Kleiber, the last waltz god, was at the podium, driving the ecstatic audience into Duidu delirium and also conducting the third act in disguise on Shrove Tuesday.
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In December 1997, Schenk’s “Fledermaus” was followed by a new production by Leander Haußmann, who at the time was in high demand as a theater director. It turned out to be a brutally unfunny hangover breakfast before New Year’s Eve. Haußmann’s musical theater career, which was just starting to ignite, was over quickly like fireworks.
But because they needed a frivolous schedule at the end of the year and for carnival, the thing, which had been dead from the start, was dragged through the seasons for over two decades; However, it has been largely rendered harmless by the hands of many editors.
So it’s high time for a new Munich operetta flight, especially since carefree escapism is particularly good in the theater at the moment. In any case, a willing waltz conqueror was ready: the current Bavarian general music director Vladimir Jurowski is flexible from Mozart to modernity and as a Russian, in whose homeland Emmerich Kálmán is still more popular today than anywhere else. And who would be more ideal today as a new interpreter of the old, but beloved nonsense than Barrie Kosky, the Australian Renaissance prince of the Berlin jazz operetta?
There is a lack of pace
Unfortunately, the eagerly awaited evening turned out to be a disappointment. Because when approaching his first classical Viennese operetta, Kosky got caught up in clichés or even refused to do so. And what was already noticeable in his somewhat brash, nostalgic musical adaptation of Kander & Ebb’s “Chicago” in Berlin – it definitely lacks speed.
So it begins almost like an amateur theater to the overture, which is all too jaggedly timed, with a stuffy bat ballet in front of the marriage bed of the reindeer Eisenstein, who as the German nightdress Michel is slumbering off his intoxication between pink plumeaux. The lounger, in turn, is located at Judenplatz, where photo wallpapers depicting Viennese house facades rotate on mobile backdrops.
Later, set designer Rebecca Ringst will (expectedly) show them from the side of the iron stairs until they serve as a prison maze, completely naked. This looks very much like a touring theater routine without any false sense of irony, especially since it is largely played from the libretto and is initially sung in a charmless, dry manner.
In the end the chandeliers fall
Source: Wilfried Hösl
Georg Nigls Eisenstein, who himself exploded the Viennese Schenk variant via stream on Pandemic New Year’s Eve 2020 with his uninhibited subversion in the coattails of bourgeois decency, is taking far too long this time until the unleashed googly-eyed bourgeois rages within him.
Diana Damrau wants to conquer the Tralala diva role of Rosalinde with heavy vocal warfare and a rasping Viennese accent that Wilma Degischer couldn’t have done better as the eternally evil Sisi mother-in-law. And yet it remains an all-too-light, depthless, mature coloratura soprano. Katharina Konradi’s Adele sings extremely cleanly, but without any domesticated sloppiness.
Markus Brück (Dr. Falke) and Kevin Conners (Dr. Blind) remain inconspicuous, the only thing that is somehow strange is the gently bizarre prison director Frank (Martin Winkler), who invites you into his little “bird house” in vain. Vladimir Jurowski never really lets himself go either. His timing is too precise, everything is polished, spelled out with extreme precision, he never falls off the operetta stool; There are also no blissfully drunken stumblers built in.
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Many feathers of paradise then blow through the queer ball of the not-at-all-Russian Prince Orlowsky. It’s screamed – like it has been in Munich for the past 20 years – by a medium-good countertenor (Andrew Watts). His invited guests, including the ballet troupe animated by Otto Pichler to shake their asses, are all metrosexual bearded girls and look like they are at a “Roman Decadence” Ibiza theme party.
Of course, every reasonably liberal provincial stage shows this today. In Kosky’s case, this unmasking larvae activity, especially if you know his Berlin “Cage aux Folles” (also with sophisticated pom-pom robes by Klaus Bruns), could be part II – an operetta cage full of Viennese fools. Instead of defiantly and proudly belting out “I Am what I Am”, you just sit on the ramp to the drunken “Duidu” ball apotheosis and watch the chandeliers falling from the stage sky.
No new sparks from old punchlines
Of course, these have no second, deeper meaning, just as little as the helplessly violent stylistic change in the third act, which is largely music-free and left to verbal comedy and is therefore so difficult. Kosky does not use a prominent actor who could create new sparks from old punchlines.
He returns to his Broadway roots, lets the famous Max Pollack as Frog I (plus five other meaningless clones) dance as suddenly and wordlessly and body percussion knocks on his thorax and throat. In addition, Jurowski delicately dabs the pizzicato polka, just as he did before in the “Unter Donner und Blitz” ballet interlude, firing from all instruments in his militaristic, grim sound element.
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In the following, the confidently physical Martin Winkler suddenly mutates in silver panties and women’s pumps into a surreal, slapstick-shrill prison grotesque number on the iron staircase. And with the appearance of the prince in his giant crinoline (a missed allusion to Archduke Ludwig Victor called “Luziwuzi”, the youngest and very gay brother of Emperor Franz Joseph), this lame revenge of the bat Dr. Falke brought to a hastily bashful happy ending.
With so many well-known Kosky recipes, Champagne owes very little. Benevolent applause, genuine enthusiasm for operetta sounds different. So: Happy is he who forgets…
#Barrie #Koskys #Bat #drink #champagne