An operetta revival at De Parade, but Coen Bril’s personal performance is quiet for a while

The Hague, beautiful city behind the dunes. And also: the most beautiful place for the traveling festival De Parade. In the Westbroekpark, a beautiful and well-arranged site, with a beautiful green entourage, and a relaxed audience – that also makes a difference. But here too it concerns theatre, theater and music, as was apparent from the three performances that were visited this week. Two of them even breathe an unadulterated operetta atmosphere, a genre that seems to have started a revival.

That operetta can also lead to having fun at nothing, unfortunately becomes visible and especially audible in Three, four, flirt with mir by Het Zuidelijk Toneel & Club Gewalt. The five performers took a short story by the Viennese writer Johann Nestroy as the starting point for a great operetta show. You know it: men in dresses, women with mustaches and chest hair, constant role changes and wigs, lots of wigs. Silly story about a gardener who becomes secretary to a chic countess, plus some confusing love affairs. Love half-and-half – it really is. Loud too: sung loudly, played loudly, but danced well, that’s for sure. These performers deserve better material.

Steef de Jong – the operetta’s advocate – does have that material in-house. His performance a lieutenant is a turbo version of Oscar Straus’ operetta A Walzer Traum (1907). This story also partly takes place in Vienna, the city where De Jong himself will be making this operetta this autumn at the Wiener Volksoper. In preparation, he is now on De Parade with a performance that resembles a seminar and preliminary study at the same time. De Jong has made a meter high sketchbook full of cardboard characters and set pieces. In the past year he already made the original two-man operetta flower duel and the whirling Steefs O. Show† a lieutenant seems to have been made a little too quickly. Perhaps useful as an introduction to that prestigious Viennese premiere, especially for fans who will soon be unable to travel to the Volksoper.

In which a lieutenant When all kinds of love affairs arise in a fairytale world, the young theater maker Coen Bril opts for a very personal approach. In the musical performance Eromenos (a co-production of Het Nationale Theater & De Passant) he tells about his meeting with a boy who fled to the Netherlands because of homophobia. From there he dives into history and ends up with Emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous, the beautiful young man who met his fateful end.
The unconditional love of the man and the boy still serves as an inspiration for young queers like Bril, who halfway through his performance holds an inspired and gradually furious monologue about being different and being rejected in a heteronormative world. Besides him musician Mees Vervuurt is invaluable. Together they have created music theater that is as atmospheric as it is fragile, which silences all the cheerful summer noise on De Parade for a while.