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Munich Residenz Theater: Season start with "Angels in America" ​​from Basel

2022-09-26T12:35:12.804Z


Munich Residenz Theater: Season start with "Angels in America" ​​from Basel Created: 09/26/2022, 2:30 p.m Better soap opera: Florian Jahr (left) and Nicola Mastroberardino in the Basel production "Engel in Amerika", which is now being shown at the Bavarian State Theater. © Birgit Hupfeld/Munich Residenztheater The Bavarian State Theater has started the new 2022/23 season and is showing "Angels


Munich Residenz Theater: Season start with "Angels in America" ​​from Basel

Created: 09/26/2022, 2:30 p.m

Better soap opera: Florian Jahr (left) and Nicola Mastroberardino in the Basel production "Engel in Amerika", which is now being shown at the Bavarian State Theater.

© Birgit Hupfeld/Munich Residenztheater

The Bavarian State Theater has started the new 2022/23 season and is showing "Angels in America" ​​at the Residenztheater.

Simon Stone's production is a takeover from Basel, where it premiered in 2015.

In the end it's all just for show, just a pretty semblance of tinsel and make-up;

that goes for the theater anyway, but also for the polished facade of real life.

That's the message that comes straight out of the stage design.

For Simon Stone's staging of Tony Kushner's veteran cult play Angels in America (1993) presents a series of vanity tables in the background where the actors put on their "character masks".

Simon Stone directed "Angels in America" ​​in 2015 for the Theater Basel

On the other hand, one can brush off the hope that it will be up-to-date: this production had its premiere in pre-war times, namely in 2015 at the Theater Basel when Andreas Beck, who is now the director of the Residenztheater, started there.

Now the performance has also come out in Munich after postponements.

And in fact you need the patience of an angel on this theater evening, which at almost six hours long (three breaks) has the dimensions of a Wagner opera, but is still just a better soap opera.

Angels in America is a better soap opera

It tells of the historical figure Roy Cohn (Roland Koch), who first made a career as a glutton for communists, then as a corrupt and reactionary mafia lawyer and made his homosexuality taboo until his death from AIDS in 1986.

His assistant (Michael Wächter), a Mormon and Reagan voter, is more forward-thinking: He leaves his valium-addicted wife (Pia Händler) for a man.

Of course, one can understand the disease AIDS and the shameful and shy way of dealing with it as a metaphor for a much larger, more comprehensive disease of society: for the disease of a system that is not only faced with the contradiction between moral appearances on the side scene of sexuality and lying-brutal being inherent from the beginning,

Simon Stone refuses a current interpretation of the material

But instead of emphasizing such lines of interpretation (that would be directorial theatre), Simon Stone sometimes hides them behind true-to-life Broadway-style realism, sometimes in melodramatic images with falling snowflakes and red-haired angels in trench coats crashing through the ceiling with bang, smoke and sparks.

In the end, all that remains is the insignificant question of what all this has to do with us today, i.e. with the next gas bill that many people may no longer be able to pay.

It's quite possible that homophile Mormons don't appear to be the most pressing problem in New York in the 1980s.

Friendly applause.

Alexander Altman

Source: merkur

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