Post Musicals

The International Summer Festival at Kampnagel dedicated its series “Post Musicals” to a genre which had long been equated with intelligent, social-critical entertainment à la George Gershwin, Kurt Weill or Leonard Bernstein. But as musicals became more and more commercialized in the 1980s, the genre and its themes became increasingly shallow and banal. Today, musicals have become an example of profit-making mass spectacles which have aggressively made their mark on the cultural identity of German cities such as Hamburg with their own performance venues and hard-to-miss advertising billboards.
Starting in 2013, the International Summer Festival began to work on producing two musicals with the aim of offering a counter-example to the typical commercialized versions by returning to the original, subversive social analysis of musicals with their high-quality combination of music, dance and theatre. By co-producing international productions, the project hoped to make a far-reaching impact and revitalize musicals as an innovative genre once more.

Musicals:

You us we all (2013)

The American instrumentalist and composer Shara Worden and her band My Brightest Diamond have significantly expanded the sound spectrum of pop music. Together with director Andrew Ondrejcak and the Belgian Baroque ensemble BOX, she developed a pop musical in 2013 in which allegorical archetypes of the Baroque period met the challenges of contemporary situations of daily life. A coproduction by the International Summer Festival and DeSingel, Amsterdam

The Shadow (2014)

Composer and pianist Chilly Gonzales adapted Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Shadow" into a score for chamber ensemble, puppeteers and actors. Together with Canadian director, filmmaker and Puppetmastaz collaborator Adam Traynor he created a visually expressive wordless musical.

With: Chilly Gonzales, Kaiser Ensemble (Musik), Niklas Kohrt, Melanie Kretschmann, Sabina Perry, Philipp Plessmann, Composition: Chilly Gonzales, Director: Adam Traynor, Stage adaption: Adam Traynor & Chilly Gonzales, Shadows: Beau Philippe, Stage: Jens Kilian, Costumes: Bent Angelo Jensen (Herr Von Eden), Choreography: Sabina Perry, Lights: Freddy Niss, Dramaturgy: Michaela Kretschmann.