Last night was the closing night of Uitmarkt, an open-air festival of sorts held on an island just north of Amsterdam's Central Station. I went because some friends wanted to go see the Cirque du Soleil show there at 10:30, a show for which some well-known Dutch DJ was supposed to be spinning. What it ended up being was the DJ alone in the middle of a stage, looking quite small and fairly dorky as he danced in front of a huge screen showing highlights from Cirque du Soleil shows. We stayed around for a while, hoping that at least one person in a garishly-patterned leotard would roll across the stage, or climb around on the trusses, but the only Cirque was du Video.
The most amazing part about Uitmarkt, therefore, was the show immediately before Cirque. I wasn't entirely sure what was going on when I arrived: several singers with giant puppets were putting on a spectacle on stage, and the entire crowd (a couple thousand, is my guess) was singing along to lyrics projected on the huge screen. This was confusing, since no one in the crowd was under 14 or so, and the beer tents couldn't possibly have been well-enough stocked to get that many adults to sing so enthusiastically along to a children's song.
Here are the lyrics to the song:
"Hup daar is Willem
met de waterpomptang
want Willem is niet bang
hooooooooooy!"
Then the MC started talking, and I understood enough of the Dutch to realize what was going on: this was a gigantic sing-along to various show tunes. I still don't know what the puppets were from (is there a Dutch Avenue Q?) but I recognized the next song, because "Age of Aquarius" is pretty distinctive, even when the lyrics are all in Dutch. Then came "I've Had the Time of my Life" from Dirty Dancing (with dancing!) and "High Flying, Adored," from Evita. The lyrics to the latter have possibly the best Dutch translation: "Hoog, vloog je te hoog." To really get the effect, you have to say it out loud, remembering that in Dutch, g is pronounced as a glottal fricative (like the ch in German "ich," but even farther back in your throat).
We all had certain songs we wanted them to perform, ranging from Annie (Allan, from Scotland) to Oklahoma! (me). But we were disappointed (though not much) when they announced they were going to end with Les Mis. I got ready to march in place to a Dutch version of "Do You Hear the People Sing," but they had another idea: depressing us with a 7-minute rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream." Not one person in the crowd held a lighter above their head, so I have to assume that the Dutch version of the song isn't INCREDIBLY SAD AND BLEAK like the English version.
All of this reminds me of the German musical "Tanz der Vampire," which was based on a Roman Polanski film and scored by Jim Steinman, who basically recycled all his existing music for the show. This resulted in what is possibly the most hilarious and ridiculous foreign-language version of a song ever. (It is because I like you that I am linking to the 4-minute version rather than the 7-minute version.) It's like Phantom of the Opera, only with more biting.
Tanz der Vampire is actually playing in Berlin right now, so Jesse and I could have seen it, but for some reason we failed to do so. This doesn't bother me very much at the moment, but I'm sure it will haunt me in years to come.
Or, not.
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I learned a new German word that day.
We were on a choir tour to Europe, and after having spent several days in Budapest we had arrived in Vienna the day before. We had a night off from performing so we were encouraged to go out. Most of the groups opted to go to the symphony, but a few of us hadn't yet had enough of going to see shows in a language we didn't understand (after standing through a full length opera the night before), and were excited to check out the musical about vampires for which we had seen a billboard.
We went to the show, excited to see what seeing a musical in german would be like. As the curtain went up, we were immediately drawn in to the show and entertained by its many wonders.
I was blown away by the incredibly high production values of the show -- three-dimensional ornate set pieces would fly in, rise out of traps in the floor, and variously rotate and/or slide into place to form full-stage settings appropriate to a musical about dancing vampires.
In one of the early scenes, the professor character, ostensibly an "old-man" has a solo in which he gets faster and faster in tempo and higher and higher in pitch, all while dancing through a set consisting of one of those private libraries with the rolling ladder, picking books out from here and there and tossing them at the other actor. At the end of the song, he suddenly jumps from an already extremely high note to a note that must have been at least another octave higher -- impossibly high, really, and unbelievable for an old man. But, the audience loved it, and we did too.
Though we didn't really understand the words, the vampire story doesn't really require a lot of nuanced text to get across, and things like the garlic necklaces that the townsfolk handed out to each other were good ways to let us know what the next dance sequence was going to be about.
All in all it was pretty entertaining, and hey, the music was catchy. But, as we approached intermission, something started to nag at us. Something was very familiar about this music, though we couldn't quite put our finger on it and we certainly couldn't understand the words they were saying. We wondered if maybe some of the tunes had been maybe partially based on other songs. We checked the program and, though we couldn't translate the bios completely, we were able to make out that the composer's credits included songwriting in the US. So, as intermission ended, we decided -- that must be it, we must somehow recognize his style from other songs he had written.
But then the second act started, with the biggest number of the show ("Totale Finsternis"), and any doubt we could have had as to whether we were on the right track with the pop song composer thing was immediately erased. It started out with a big symphonic opening, but then proceeded to include the entire song "Total Eclipse of the Heart." You might not think it would be, but actually, with the full chorus backing the leads over the rock-orchestra accompaniment, coupled with our disbelief that this was actually happening right there in front of us, it was a pretty amazing experience. And we'd learned what "finsternis" meant in a way that we'd probably never forget.
We all bought original cast recordings on the way out of the theatre.
I do wonder if one of us had actually spoken German and understood what was going on through the whole show whether it would have been quite as good, but the Austrians seemed to like it, and so I wholeheartedly encourage you to see it if you get a chance. I did lament not being able to bring friends from Boston to see it and wished that they would have toured the German version to the US instead of creating a terrible English version instead.
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