Clear the stage, spotlight on, Claudia Roth – in the little black dress – launches the inescapable candy storm, the technique of showering attention that she has tried and tested on herself (we remember Volker Beck and one of the words of the year 2012): “Dear Barrie .
.
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Love you all!" She came to address "heartfelt words" to Barrie Kosky, "not as a farewell, no, we wouldn't accept that at all," but to say thank you for the music and the proof, "what for it's a pleasure to sing, play and perform with you".
That was (note, the Minister of State for Culture is positioning herself) "really big opera, that comes before really big cinema for me".
In the year of the candy storm, the Australian director Barrie Kosky – self-description: “gay Jewish kangaroo” – became artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin.
Now that his house is about to undergo an extensive and incalculably long renovation phase, he hands over his position to the dual leadership of Susanne Moser and Philip Bröking.
A blessing for the Komische Oper
Kosky was a boon to the Komische Oper.
He took over the house with an occupancy rate of less than seventy percent, today it is around ninety percent.
From an opera where selfish directors had driven audiences and even a general music director away, Kosky made a family opera - "one for all" - with sensual, mostly clever, highly professional and always entertaining theatre.
His farewell production, "Barrie Kosky's All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue", is exactly that again: entertainment in tonally opulent arrangements by Adam Benzwi, with costumes by Klaus Bruns, which are not stingy with sequins, rhinestones and ostrich feathers, and choreographies by Otto Pichler, who set gestural punch lines to the music and tease unexpected movement jokes out of the cuts and designs of the costumes (let's let the striped bell-bottoms flap around).
The music roars, whispers and touches the heart: the beautiful Soviet thaw hit "Podmoskownyje Wetschera" is available as a Yiddish cover version "Bloye nekht fun Tel Aviv".
"Theater is a dream factory," says Kosky in his colorful German, "Theater isn't reality, it goes deeper, it's an enigmatic shamanistic wonder."
And he holds on to this miracle, in the midst of war and pandemic.
"We all need to be a little meschugge so as not to become completely farrigt," says his review.
An old Jewish joke says: "When a festival is over, the English just go, but they don't say goodbye.
The Jews, on the other hand, say goodbye, but simply don't go.” Barrie Kosky said goodbye in Jewish: he will stay with the Komische Oper as in-house director.
Lucky!