Winter time is musical time.
Everywhere, large and small theaters are advertising their new music theater productions and posters are announcing the forthcoming guest performances of lavish touring productions.
Musicals not only promise glitter and glimmer in the dark season, they are also an important economic factor in the schedules of privately run houses, with many publicly financed city and state theaters enjoying the appeal of musicals in recent years.
Because, ideally, they appeal to several generations - from grandchildren to grandmothers - and not only at Christmas time, but also at Easter or at the end of a season.
Christian Riethmuller
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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While a popular musical on the schedule may also be a marketing tool for municipal and state theaters to win and inspire new audiences for the direct power of stage operations, for privately run theaters the musical in the schedule is often decisive for the weal and woe of a season and sometimes beyond.
For example, Daniel Nicolai, director of the English Theater Frankfurt, says that the economic success of the musical productions, which his house has always included in the program at the turn of the year for many years, has a direct impact on the following season: "If the musical was a crowd puller, then In the new season I can have a bulkier or a completely new spoken theater piece staged and don't have to think about financial ruin right away."
But the annual musical is not only an important item in the calculation of a rather small house with around 300 seats like the English Theater, which is focusing on the classic "Sister Act" this season. Also big cultural temples like the Semperoper Dresden, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden or the Alte Oper Frankfurt owe tens of thousands of visitors to the musical performances every year.When the cats purr in the Alte Oper from December 20th, the most famous junkyard in stage history is illuminated and Andrew Lloyd Webber's worldwide success "Cats" begins, that's it but not an in-house production, but the proven cooperation with a company specializing in live entertainment, the Mannheim-based BB Promotion GmbH.
Founded in 1987 by Michael Brenner as an event agency, BB Promotion relies on cooperation from the outset, including with Köln-Musik, the operating company of the Cologne Philharmonic, where the Cologne Summer Festival has been held since 1988 as probably the most important platform for the presentation of new musical productions, dance shows or cross-genre live entertainment formats.
Brenner's company, which was still a small family business at the time, engaged dance greats such as Rudolf Nureyev or the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and put out feelers to Broadway early on to present hits like "A Chorus Line" at guest performances in German cities.