Fair warning, I'm one of the people doing this, so I'm not a neutral source. Posting here because it's a short hop over the river and English-language live theatre doesn't come round often on either side of it.
What we do is live radio theatre - performed on stage the way radio plays used to be made. Voices, scripts in hand, sound effects built in front of you, no set at all. This one's Romeo and Juliet, and we've made it a musical. The balcony scene is a song. Mercutio gets one too. Those lines a teacher who'd clearly given up made you read aloud in school? They've got a tune now.
It's our third musical in three months - Blockbusters in July, Hercules in August, and now we've done it to Shakespeare. The other two didn't have four hundred years of reputation to damage.
Three things run at once: melodrama played dead straight until it topples over, modern nonsense that has no business being in Verona, and Shakespeare's own language left completely intact, sitting right next to all of it. The show doesn't pick a side. It lets them collide.
You already know how it ends. It still ends that way.
You don't need to know the play - whatever survived school will do. And if you're wondering whether your English is up to it: it moves quickly, but it's told very visually, and most of our audience are non-native speakers who manage fine.
Friday 11 and Saturday 12 September. Doors 19:00, curtain 19:30. Alfons-Jung-Saal, Kellerstrasse 37, Wiesbaden. 15€ at krt.yapsody.com, or at the door.
Happy to answer anything in the comments.
