Damn ax!

Pardon me, holy axe, of course, because that's the object of cult worship, after all.

In fact, none of their admirers really knows what this tool looks like, which is why the search for it is as tedious or almost hopeless as the search for the Holy Grail.

Christian Riethmuller

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

But seek and find, even if the ax turns out to be an electric guitar which, like the famous sword Excalibur, can only be possessed by those who prove worthy of it.

This isn't King Arthur these days, but a young dreamer who doesn't really want to fit into the gaudy Gaga world that surrounds him.

Instead of enjoying consumption and the limitless virtual world designed by the software company Globalsoft like his classmates, he writes strange lines of text like "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind" in an almost extinct language called English or stutters stuff like "A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!"

So it's no wonder that the head of the group, known as the Killer Queen, and her security officer, Kashoggi, turned to the young man

who has given himself the name Galileo Figaro, must keep a watchful eye.

This Galileo and his companion Scaramouche could unconsciously still carry within them that power they believed had been defeated, which is called rock 'n' roll.

One of the newest productions

The musical “We Will Rock You”, which can now be seen again at the Alte Oper Frankfurt, tells of this power and the search for it.

If the title says it all in this case, it's not so much because of the story that author Ben Elton fetched and wildly mixed up from Arthurian legends, Huxley, Orwell and Monty Python, but because of the music.

The show, which premiered 20 years ago and has long been one of the most successful jukebox musicals, offers two dozen hits by the English rock legend Queen.

In Frankfurt, "We Will Rock You" can now be seen in a new production of the English original.

The director is Dutch-born Cornelius Baltus, who has made a name for himself with productions of musicals such as “Dance of the Vampires” and “The Lion King”.

He has also directed touring productions of We Will Rock You.

For the new production, he, who has already worked intensively with film directors such as Roman Polanski and has a background in dance himself, has now taken a cinematic look at the piece and has placed the focus on working with the actors as well as defining a corresponding set design.

"I wanted to get away from the fixation on the music and to work more intensively with the actors," he says of the production,

which was a very special challenge against the background of the pandemic: "The auditions were interrupted from one day to the next on March 16, 2020, and then there were only zoom conferences." to be found before the rehearsals could finally begin in autumn 2021.

There was almost six weeks before the play premiered in Berlin in December 2021.

It was almost like a liberation not only for Baltus, but also for Inga Krischke, actress of Scaramouche: "We had waited so long for it, and I really wanted to play the role," says the 29-year-old singer and actress, who lives in the Summer can also be seen at the Bad Hersfeld Festival.

There she plays in the musical "Goethe!".

The musical "We Will Rock You" will be performed from July 5th to 10th in the Alte Oper Frankfurt.