2023-10-04 08:32:46
The inspector is moving once more, starting on Saturday in Vienna’s Ronacher. The United Theaters Vienna are once once more bringing the story of Falco to the stage. “Rock Me Amadeus” is the name of the new musical. Director Andreas Gergen portrays the Mozart punker as “shy, sensitive and a thinker”. He is played by Moritz Mausser – and he “sounds exactly” like the falcon.
To the outside world, Hans Hölzel was exuberance personified. But inside him things often looked different. When his song “Rock Me Amadeus” reached number 1 on the US Billboard charts, the Viennese’s mood was legendary. “I’ll never do that once more. It’s over now.” The new musical, which bears the title of his global hit and which celebrates its premiere on October 7th, shows how torn this Falco really was.
“The essence of Falco is an artist who tries to do his art well,” says Moritz Mausser at the media rehearsal to the APA. “And the person behind it never really fully lives up to this claim for himself. I believe that these various forces tore at him and tore him apart.”
Four scenes were shown at Tuesday’s presentation, and it’s uncanny how closely the Vienna-born, Baden-raised actor can replicate the falcon’s distinctive vocal color. “That bit of falling back, that leaning backwards, that relaxedness, he always had that in his language,” says the 23-year-old, for whom the role caused several sleepless nights. “I didn’t take it lightly,” said the artist. “Fortunately, people who have met him also say, ‘hey, you sound just like him in the scene when I had that conversation with him’. That’s the highest praise I can get.”
The musical traces the rise and fall of the pop artist, from young musician to global star, and of course it all begins in Vienna’s U4 in the 1980s. Three teenagers appear on stage in bell-bottomed jeans and leather jackets. One of them is the young Hans Hölzel, who wants to start a solo career while we hear the hit “The Sound of Music”. Of course, the big hit songs won’t be missing, but “we didn’t want a compilation show,” says director and author Christian Struppeck, who worked closely with the Falco Private Foundation and the managers Markus Spiegel and Horst Bork. There will also be four new songs written by Falco’s producers Bolland & Bolland. Such a song is the power ballad “Live your dream”, sung by Katharina Gorgi, who plays Falco’s wife Isabella in the piece.
The falcon’s conflict is also reflected in the Ronacher’s stage design, where you can admire a sea of mirrors bathed in blue with glowing LED edges. At one point, a seven meter high Falco head is pushed into the room. The idea behind it was a “large psychological space,” says Gergen. “Our stage is a space for reflection,” said the director. “On the other hand, it’s also like a microscope under which the figure of Hans Hölzel is placed, and we break it down into different parts in order to really examine who this guy was,” emphasizes the German: “Namely, shy, sensitive, and a Thinker.”
It is not the first time that the music of the artist, who died in 1998, has provided the soundtrack for a musical. Already in 2000, both the high-tech stage spectacle “F@lco – A Cyber Show” directed by Paulus Manker in the Ronacher, and Elmar Ottenthal’s “Falco meets Amadeus” celebrated their premieres in Berlin.
“There have actually been several approaches, but they were in the direction of a review and didn’t really tell the life of how we do it, i.e. a theater piece with music,” says director Struppeck to the APA. He was interested in the torn person behind the fictional character: “He was a brilliant artist and lyricist and actually completely different from this extroverted, shrill fictional character, which later became his downfall because he always had to play her.”
(SERVICE – “Rock Me Amadeus” – The Falco Musical in Ronacher, premiering on October 7, www.musicalvienna.at/de/lp/falco)
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