New Year’s Eve premiere of Chicago have begun

We continue our tradition of ending each year with a special New Year’s Eve premiere, and for the last day of 2023 a famous Broadway-born musical is being prepared. It’s the legendary musical Chicago, the Hungarian version of which is now in rehearsal, directed by Zoltán Puskás from Novi Sad.

Chicago tackles timeless problems, timeless questions. With a certain cynicism, it approaches the show character typical of the musical genre, painting an accurate picture of the fake, hypocritical world of the suddenly popular celebrities and stars that we may be familiar with from the media. It also confronts us with the common experiences of today, how corruption has a society-shaping power, how justice is sometimes a sham, how manipulative the media is in shaping the public consciousness. How today, even the news of murders is only a temporary sensation, because we have become indifferent to death…

Chicago also accurately captures the general phenomenon where form dictates content, where the presentation and context of an event seems more important than the event itself. That in the maze of manifestations by YouTubers, Tick-Tock stars and empty-headed fashion dictators on various other social media platforms, all human values and life itself have become relative, only the scandalous are considered real news, and it is almost impossible to separate quality from utterly worthless content.

It would therefore be hard to find a more topical piece of music to illustrate the current state of the world than Chicago, in which even the most heinous crime can be bought, in which evil does not receive its just punishment, in which life is not a rosy dream. For unlike the happy musical stories with their happy endings, here, behind the familiar melodies, spectacular performances and colourful costumes, we are greeted by the disappointing sobriety of reality.

The Chicago team: Zoltán Puskás (director), Zsuzsanna Szőke (set designer), Andrea Ledenjak (costume designer), Ildikó Gyenes (choreography), Róbert Majoros (light designer) and Lőfi Gellért (music leader). Cast: Hajnalka Szalma, Gyöngyi Pál Ferenczi, József Kolcsár, Zsuzsa Gajzágó, László Mátray, Szabolcs Varsányi, Bence Kónya-Ütő, Gábor Erdei, Janka Korodi, Zsuzsanna Vass, Imola P. Magyarosi, Kovács Kati, Mária Fekete, Annamária D. Albu , Gellért Pignitzky, Kristóf Nagy Kopeczky, Dezső Derzsi, Zsolt Fekete, Márton Lóránt-László and Boróka Göllner.