Diversity, imaginative classics and continuing courage for engaging with new formats are the key components of the Bremerhaven 2024/25 season
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The municipal theatre of Bremerhaven introduced its 2024/25 programme across its sections of theatre, music theatre (opera, operetta and musical), concert season, ballet and theatre for children and adolescents. Some collaborations between sections were highlighted, such as the components of purpose-composed music for the theatre productions of a new version of Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters and for a new version of The Trojan Women by Euripides (with music composed for the opera’s women’s chorus). For the first time in Bremerhaven, an opera for children, Gold! by Leonard Evers, will be presented in the separate venue of the Youth Theatre.
The leading soprano and tenor of the last few seasons, Signe Heiberg and Konstantinos Klironomos, around whom much of those seasons had been built, have moved on, giving way to new casting and programming considerations. The core of the new productions is formed by ‘classics’. First up is Puccini’s Turandot, for which the leading roles of Turandot and Calaf will be sung by guest artists, conducted by Marc Niemann, the company’s general music director, and directed by Philipp Westerbarkai, whose 2022 Bremerhaven production of Verdi’s Macbeth was shortlisted for the German Theatre Prize (Faust).
Soprano Victoria Kunze, the Liù in Turandot, will play Eliza Doolittle in the production of My Fair Lady, the classic musical of the season, conducted by the company’s specialist for operetta, Hartmut Brüsch (see review of The Merry Widow here). The second operatic classic for the season is the new production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, with Kunze as Susanna, and introducing a new company member, soprano Kristín Anna Guðmundsdóttir, who will be making her debut in the role of the Countess. First Kapellmeister Davide Perniceni conducts this production.
Perniceni also conducts the revival, from the 2023/24 season, of Humperdinck’s Hänsel and Gretel, and a further new production, the 2011 musical Catch me if you can, composed by Mark Shaiman, which is based on the Steven Spielberg-film of the same title with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. This production will feature tenor Andrew Irwin as Frank William Abagnale Jr., Till Nau directs, known to Bremerhaven audiences from his 2021 production of the musical Chess. Finally, Marc Niemann conducts the world premiere of the opera Peer Gynt by Estonian composer Jüri Reinvere. Johannes Pölzgutter directs (see the review of his Bremerhaven production of Dvorak’s Rusalka, 2023, here)
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe