Nicole schreibt...

Wintertime called me to Stockholm for the annual company christmas do and since I always have to change planes at Copenhagen Airport anyway I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch the Danish version of my beloved all-time favourite musical Cats. But I had to be in Hamburg on Saturday already and plane tickets are ridiculously expensive if you don't include a Sunday in your schedule, so it meant re-arranging my travel plans from plane to train. After our problematic trip to Prague in October I had sworn to never use the night train again and here I was again on Cologne central station to catch the night train to Copenhagen. Luckily all railways and bridges were intact and the only hiccup en route was an overzealous customs guy who woke me up in the middle of the night requesting to see my passport (what about Schengen?!). But I was fairly well awake and rested when I arrived in Copenhagen at 10am and was met by a wonderful young man from the company of Cats who hadn't only helped me to secure a free ticket to the show but also offered to share his kitty basket with me for a night. He took me home for coffee and a chat, then I set out to explore some more of Copenhagen. I had visited the town once before, on an icy-cold February day when I felt thoroughly miserable from the cold, the wind and the snow of a Scandinavian winter. All I remembered from that trip was an endless walk along the quayside to the famous statue of the Little Mermaid, who had sat in the middle of ice with not a single soul nearby. It wasn't quite as cold now and I spent some hours walking down Copenhagen's shopping street, the Strøget, and around the Christiansborg Palace complex. I had known nothing of Copenhagen's history when I had first visited the town but now I enjoyed the sightseeing and thinking of what I had learned about the two battles of Copenhagen during the Napoleonic Wars when the English were after the Danish fleet to keep it out of French hands and bombed the hapless town to pieces. These days, Copenhagen is one of the lesser known jewels of European capitals with many beautiful old buildings, great shopping opportunities and the famous Tivoli amusement park where a "Winter Wonderland" was awaiting the tourists. Det Ny Teater is Copenhagen's oldest and most prestigious theatre for light entertainment such as operettas and musicals. It has undergone major refurbishment a few years ago before re-opening with Andrew Lloyd-Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" which became the highest-grossing shows in Danish history and ran for more than two years. What better show to follow up the Phantom than ALW's other smash hit "Cats"? Discussions about a Danish production had been going on for years with the major problem being the casting. Small Denmark doesn't have enough fully trained musical performers for a demanding show like "Cats" and even now half of the cast has been recruited from all over Europe; mainly from Sweden. I cannot judge the pronouncation of the foreigners (which was lamented in many Danish newspapers) because my comprehension of Danish is zilch, but overall I thought they had managed to assemble a good cast that presented the show as good as performers anywhere else. There isn't much to say about "Cats" anymore I guess. If you don't know what the show is about, you must have spend the last twenty years under a rock. Many long-run productions of "Cats" have suffered from fatigue and it took brand-new fresh productions such as those in Antwerp or Stuttgart to show just how good this show can be. Unfortunately the Danish production lacked this certain spark of energy, but nonetheless it was enjoyable as always. Danish pop singer Charlotte Viberg played Grizabella and when she sang "Memory" I realized (with a certain sadness) that it has been years since new songs were written that brought such a hush to the audience and left everyone breathless while listening. Some of the Danish kitty names like "Burma Charley og Salto Sally" (Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer) were highly amusing but overall I just enjoyed seeing one of my all-time favourites once more. German musical lovers are probably more drawn to the Berlin production, but I'd really recommend a weekend-trip to wonderful Copenhagen and the Danish production, too. Next morning I went from Copenhagen via the new Öresund-Bridge to Malmö and from there on the X2000 highspeed train to Stockholm. Well, "high speed" in Sweden mustn't lead you to the assumption that we're talking TGV here. The train still stopped at every place containing more than 10 houses and a church and to allow greater speed it was constructed in a shaky way that made it sway worse than a ship in gale force 10. Needless to say that I was already sick ten miles out of Malmö and remained so all the way to Stockholm, while I watched Kristina-country fly by from the window. Travelling through Sweden is sweet in a way when you realize that Astrid Lindgren's world of red- or yellow-painted wooden houses with front porches is still alive and kicking outside the big cities and not just a cliché promoted by the tourist industry. On Thursday I was treated to that special Swedish form of torture called julbord, which involves stuffing yourself with more food than humanly possible in the shortest stretch of time possible. I'm talking of course of our company's christmas party at Villa Källhagen on Stockholm's most beautiful island Djurgården. Even though I thought I had learnt from last year's mistake and only loaded my plate with very little food, I still felt like an over-stuffed turkey two days before christmas when we had finished the meal. I blame the Swedish way of eating all three courses immediately following each other instead of allowing half an hour after each course to let it sink. By the time evening fell (which, in Sweden in December means 3pm) I had somewhat recovered and went to see "Garbo - The Musical". With music by Jim Steinman and an American production team under its belt, "Garbo" should have been the big autumn hit in Stockholm's theatre scene, but alas it wasn't to be. The Swedish version of Chess is still the biggest hit in town at the Cirkusteatern on Djurgården and what's more, "Garbo" received such a battering in the Swedish press that the show is now forced to close prematurely on 20th December. The cast published an "open letter" in Sweden's most popular daily newspaper "Aftonbladet" pointing out the unfair treatment and accussing the critics of making them redundant. So when I entered the beautiful Oscarsteatern near the central station, it was with a lot of curiosity and not much expectancy. I was pleasantly surprised. "Garbo" might not be the best show of the year, but it has some great songs and even better cast. If there's one problem with this show, it's simply that Greta Garbo might have been a screen legend in her time, but she hadn't got a very exciting life. We see young Greta Gustafsson in the poor quarters of Stockholm where she grows up until she's discovered in a talent show, we see her relationship with director Mauritz Stiller who makes her a star and takes her to Hollywood. To keep the second act somewhat interesting, it was built around Greta's lesbian relationship with Mercedes de Acosta until she is forced to make up her mind between a man and a woman, between being an untouchable screen goddess or a human being. During the entire first act Greta doesn't have a single song to sing and we never learn how she feels about leaving her native Sweden and her family behind or how she feels in Hollywood. Only in the second act she finally has some great songs to sing. The programme didn't list the song titles, so I can only say that the songs that really touched me was her big solo on the set of "Queen Kristina" (a movie where Greta Garbo apparently saw a lot of similiarities between herself and the untouchable Swedish virgin queen) and the final song, where she realizes that she cannot escape from real life. Gunilla Backman does a fine job as Greta and I guess it's not her fault that we can never really feel anything for Greta, because she has one and the same cool, rigid facial expression of screen goddness from beginning to end. Perhaps they should have invested in a second wig to make a clearer difference between young Greta Gustafsson from Stockholm and the screen goddess Greta Garbo in Hollywood or even better yet, split the part between two actresses with one acting as narrator, as they have done so ingeniously in the musical "Spend, spend, spend" in England. The part of Mercedes is played by Sweden's no.1 musical performer Petra Nielsen and although I was happy to see this wonderful lady live on stage again, I found Mercedes an odd personage. She was dressed as a stereotype lesbian in male trousers and shirts with short-cropped hair and yet she was given fantastic sexy latin rhythms to sing and dance to that didn't match her outfit at all. The two leading ladies had great supports in the male performers such as Dan Ekborg as Mauritz Stiller, Anders Börjesson as Louis B.Mayer and Fredrick Lycke as Irving Thalberg, but overall the show left you surprisingly cold. Overall Greta's life just wasn't very spectacular and I found myself thinking back on other movie-to-stage shows like Mack & Mabel or Sunset Boulevard where the magic of old Hollywood is evoked in a much better way. Still I don't think that "Garbo" deserved the trashing it received from the popular Swedish press. Perhaps Greta Garbo was an unlikely subject for a bio-musical, but it would be a shame if all those great songs would disappear in the drawer. With some work on the script (give that girl a song to sing in the first act!) and a better direction, it could certainly become a good musical worth seeing on either side of the pond. On Friday, after a day's work, I rounded off my Stockholm trip by seeing "Die another day" at the movies, but I reserve my rant about it for the movie reviews pages on kino.de. Let me just say here that when it comes to story-telling, James Bond has received a new all-time low. I took the night train from Stockholm to Malmö, but slept badly and stumbled into Malmö central station at 6am only to find that all the shops were still shut and a (supposedly closed) bottle of orange juice had leaked all over my bag, soaking my brand-new Patrick O'Brian and everything else in reach. I spent some miserable hours on the train to Hamburg and couldn't even smile at the funny view of an entire train rolling onto a ferry (one guy found it so amazing, he went to take a picture of the train). Unfortunately the small ferry between Rödby and Puttgarden was awash with smokers desperate for a fag after being cooped up on non-smoking coaches and the queue seemed at the cafeteria a mile long, so I returned to the train immediately and suffered the sensation of being seasick aboard a swaying train that's standing aboard a rolling ferry. And so I returned to the shores of my beloved home country once more, green in the face and exhausted to a point of braindead numbness. I spent almost all afternoon asleep at the lovely Rema Domicil Hotel (now part of the Mercure chain) in Hamburg's Stresemannstrasse and by the evening had recovered enough to attend the press night of Stage Holding's latest musical "Titanic". I have never been too fond of "Titanic" and after seeing the first European production in Liege, I realized why: There is no real plot and no one to really care about. Maury Yeston writes in the sleeve notes of the Broadway cast recording that he wanted the ship itself to be the focus of the show, but we all now what's happening to it: During the entire first act we wait for it to collide with the iceberg and during the second act we wait for it to sink. Meanwhile people come on stage, sing a song, and disappear again to never be heard of again. But I ackknowledged the fact that a day's shopping in Liege I was too exhausted to focus on a show sung entirely in French, so the Belgian production at the Opèra de Wallonie might not have been as boring as I had made out that evening. I didn't go to see the Dutch production with became a huge hit across the border, so I was very curious to see how the same production would look at the Neue Flora Theater in Hamburg now. And I'm happy to say that StageHolding made the nearly impossible possible: The German musical, long presumed dead and gone, is alive and thriving. I will never count "Titanic" among my favourite musicals, but they managed to present the show as one harmonious company piece where the music and the excellent cast kept you engaged until the sad but inevitable finale. I cannot find fault with the Hamburg production - it's as good as this show is ever likely to get. After a good night's sleep I felt human again and found myself looking forward to seeing "Mamma mia" again. Despite all my misgivings about pop recycling shows I had enjoyed the show in London very much. The cast was excellent (the leading ladies were all played by understudies with Jasna Ivir playing a fantastic Donna and a really cute Marta Helmin playing Sophie) and the audience clearly loved every minute of the show. After the show we fled town immediately and despite a traffic jam between Bremen and Osnabrück arrived home at last safely. I'll never travel such a long distance by train again, but thanks to all the wonderful, helpful people in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Hamburg I had a very good and exciting week.