a musical fairy-tale
Who wouldn’t know Beauty and the Beast, one of the most beautiful European romantic fairy-tales? After its famous adaptations, such as Jean Cocteau’s film or the theatre play by František Hrubín, the “Disney” film by director Kirk Wise renewed the interest in this topic at the beginning of the 1990s. Alongside its theatre version, however, a similarly well-made German version has appeared at European theatres. Its author is the excellent German composer and arranger, Martin Doepke, who has created a really remarkable work in cooperation with librettist Christian Bienek and text writers Elke Schlimbach and Grant Stevens. After an extraordinarily successful German premiere in Koln am Rhein in 1994, Beauty and the Beast made several highly popular tours all over Germany – one of them was a successful tour conducted by Brno City Theatre under the direction of Stanislav Moša and with Igor Barberic´s choreography, taking in Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria.
The main innovation in this story of a merchant who becomes the prey of the feared, freakish-looking ruler of a deserted castle and who has to promise to give him one of his three daughters to get his freedom back is its location – the originally French fairy-tale is set in the sleepy environment of a typically German village. This is where Beauty, the youngest of the three daughters, dreams of being taken away from provincial boredom – and therefore is willing even to serve the Beast. However, this isn’t taken well by a clumsy young man, Gustav, who has been thinking about Beauty for a long time, and therefore he organizes a hunt for the Beast in which the whole village happily decides to take part. At the last minute, though, Beauty realizes that her unclear feeling for the Beast isn’t compassion but love…
