Tears of joy from the director, frenetic trampling in the audience and a garish stage thriller: the new Munich Volkstheater opens its doors for the first time.
It smells of fresh wall paint, but there is something else, very fantastic in the air: the scent of euphoria. The guests who came to the new Munich Volkstheater for the first time on Friday evening exude it in all aisles. Nobody wanted to miss this opening: from the new director of the Bavarian State Opera, Serge Dorny, to the theater heads Barbara Mundel (Kammerspiele) and Ingrid Trobitz, deputy boss of the Residenztheater, the former Resi boss Dieter Dorn to Gasteig managing director Max Wagner.
The latter probably knows best how Volkstheater director Christian Stückl must feel during these hours.
A week ago, as reported, Wagner himself celebrated the inauguration of the Isarphilharmonie and gave a moving speech.
Now Stückl is on the stage in his new realm - and what happens rarely happens to him: The eloquent everything-enablers have no words.
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This is what happiness looks like: Volkstheater director Christian Stückl speaking on stage 1.
© Oliver Bodmer
Close to tears of joy, he has to collect himself briefly while the audience applauds frenetically (!).
You know that it is largely thanks to Stückl that you can celebrate the inauguration of the new Volkstheater at Tumblingerstraße 29 that evening.
Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter praised the artistic director in his speech as the "engine for the whole" and as the "personified joy in playing".
Cheers again, feet trampling - there is not much missing, they would jump from their seats in the auditorium.
A theater opening has rarely been so exuberant.
The Volkstheater cost almost 131 million
You can feel it again, the special solidarity that reigns in this house.
Obviously, it is also unbroken at the new location.
As reported, it had become too narrow on Brienner Strasse.
Therefore - and because the rented building was in urgent need of renovation - the new building was not only necessary, it made sense.
It took three years to build in the Schlachthofviertel, and the project cost almost 131 million euros.
In the future you can use three venues with space for 600, 200 and 99 people.
"Despite Corona, we stayed on schedule and on budget," praised Reiter.
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Sold out: You could already feel the euphoria of the guests in the well-filled foyer of the new building.
© Oliver Bodmer
When he found his way back to language, Stückl also thanks the technical director, Carsten Lück, and the architect Arno Lederer from the Stuttgart office Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei on behalf of his entire team.
He then steps on the stage himself - that is not in the record, he says with a smile, but neither did the “thousand-page” tender for the theater call for “beauty”.
He and his team fulfilled them anyway.
“We thought we'd just give the people of Munich their beauty,” he says and reaps - well, of course: violent cheers.
Marlowe's "Edward II" exposes power politics
Then stage technician Korbinian closes the red velvet curtain for the first time - and it takes a few minutes until the backdrop is ready for the first performance in the new Volkstheater.
Christian Stückl staged "Edward II." By Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe: The two hours are a garish thriller that exposes power politics and settles with institutions that pretend to serve people - but all too often brutally drive them out of being human.
The first thing the premiere guests hear on stage 1 this Friday, however, is the happy laugh of Jan Meeno Jürgens as Edward.
And this happy laugh is probably the most beautiful thing that can be heard in a theater at the start.
