»Fledermaus à trois« nach Johann Strauß

Michael Quast sings, plays and dances »Die Fledermaus« (“The Bat”)

It was back in 1873, when the stock markets crashed, putting an abrupt and dolorous end to the booming economic upturn of Germany’s maturing industrial revolution. And it was in 1873, too, that Johann Strauss set out to make his name definitively immortal: within a few short weeks he had with apparent effortlessness composed what right up to the present day is not only one of the most popular operettas of them all, but also satirises the zeitgeist with unerring accuracy: »Die Fledermaus«. Because »happy is he who can’t recall the things that can’t be changed at all...« is the superordinate motto of this vibrant, waltz-twinkling and eternally youthful farce of mistaken identity. So when Sabine Fischmann and Michael Quast now tackle Strauss’s masterpiece by having the two of them play about ten roles simultaneously, you can be sure to enjoy a congenial serving of broad humour and subtle wit, of musical masterstrokes, waltzes and csárdás, of »happiness« and »willed oblivion«. Or, as the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper enthuses: a »Fledermaus that’s at last as funny as its creator would have wished!«