Berlin (Germany)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Choreographer’s ‘Dog Poop Attack’ on a Critic Inspired This New Play

      by

      At this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival, one production explores an incident that shocked the German theater world last year.On Feb. 11, 2023, the choreographer Marco Goecke cornered a dance critic, Wiebke Hüster, during intermission of a performance at the Hanover State Opera in northern Germany. After asking her about negative reviews that she had written about his past productions, Goecke took out a bag of dog feces and smeared her face with it.That shocking incident, which generated headlines around the world, is the starting point for “The Dog Poop Attack,” a production at this year’s Theatertreffen festival in Berlin.Of the 10 shows at the event, a celebration of German-language theater, “The Dog Poop Attack” has arguably generated the most excitement, thanks to its explosive subject matter and its unlikely place of origin: Jena, a city in eastern Germany that is hardly known as a theatrical capital.After the incident, Goecke gave up his position as Hanover company’s ballet director “by mutual agreement.” He was later suspended from the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Dutch company where he was an associate choreographer. Hüster filed a criminal complaint against him; Goecke was ordered to pay 5.000 euros in damages. And while he has issued public apologies, Goecke has remained more defiant than contrite, and disturbingly equivocal: He has both admitted to overreacting and also tried to justify his behavior.“The Dog Poop Attack” mulls over the incident, the attention it generated and what it says about the state of the performing arts in Germany. The play’s premise is simple: A troupe of actors at a provincial theater hope that mounting a production has the idea of making a production about the infamous affair will help them gain wider attention. This meta-conceit recalls backstage farces like “Noises Off” and “Waiting for Guffman,” but this show, devised and written collectively by the six performers, the director Walter Bart and the dramaturg Hannah Baumann, does something so straightforward yet daring that it’s a minor miracle that it works.The production’s gambit is to dramatize the creative process itself. For the bulk of the evening, the actors — playing themselves, or thinly fictionalized versions of themselves — dramatically narrate their email exchanges about how to stage the show. The lively way they put their brainstorming, discussions and quarrels onstage, along with a healthy dose of irony, makes for provocative and absorbing theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Aribert Reimann, Masterful German Opera Composer, Is Dead at 88

      by

      His works, which were radically individual, were among the most celebrated of the late 20th and early 21st century.Aribert Reimann, whose powerful operas based on works by Shakespeare, Kafka, Lorca and others made him one of the most significant opera composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, died on Wednesday in Berlin. He was 88.His publisher, Schott Music, announced the death.A prolific composer with widely performed works, particularly his operas and songs, Mr. Reimann (pronounced RYE-mahn) was revered for his ability to fuse complex and often challenging modern music with lyrical texts. His works were frequently devastating in their emotional impact, sounding like organic expressions of the human voice.“Like few other composers of his generation, Reimann knew how to tell stories in his operas which directly affected us humans living in the 21st century,” Dietmar Schwarz, the manager of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, said in a statement.Mr. Reimann enjoyed a close relationship with the opera house. Five of his stage works were performed there, most recently his ninth and final completed opera, “L’Invisible,” which was based on texts by the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck and premiered in 2017.Another stage work, based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” was planned for 2025 but was unfinished.A performance of Mr. Reimann’s ninth and final opera, “L’Invisible,” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2017. Five of his works were performed at the theater.Lieberenz/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      René Pollesch, Provocative Force in German Theater, Dies at 61

      by

      His avant-garde work, short on character and plot but long on verbal high jinks, could be irreverent, even goofy, but it was always intellectually serious.René Pollesch, a prolific playwright and stage director whose work — intellectually serious yet irreverent, chatty, goofy and riddled with pop culture references — made him one of the most significant forces in German theater of the past three decades, died on Monday in Berlin. He was 61.His death was announced by the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz theater, where he had been artistic director since 2021. No cause was given.Mr. Pollesch (pronounced POL-esh) wrote roughly 200 plays and directed virtually all of them himself, often at leading theaters in the German-speaking world. But while his plays lit up stages in places like Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna and Zurich, he was most closely associated with the Volksbühne, a publicly funded playhouse in what once was East Berlin, that had a reputation for daring and provocative theatermaking.Mr. Pollesch took over leadership of the theater after years of managerial turmoil set off by the dismissal of the company’s longtime artistic director, Frank Castorf, in 2017. When Mr. Pollesch arrived, two others in the top post had come and gone, and the theater was craving stability.In his two and a half seasons at the helm, he staged nine original plays, eight of which remain in the theater’s repertoire. The most recent, “ja nichts ist okay” (“yes nothing is okay”) premiered on Feb. 11.A scene from “ja nichts ist ok” (“yes nothing is okay”), the most recent play staged by Mr. Pollesch at the Volksbühne. It had its premiere on Feb. 11. Thomas Aurin, via Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-PlatzWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Criticism of Israel at Berlin Film Festival Stirs Antisemitism Debate

      by

      The backlash to some winners’ speeches at the festival shows how polarized and fraught Germany’s culture scene has become.When Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra walked onstage at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday night, they had come to talk about more than movies.Abraham and Adra, an Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking team, had just won the festival’s award for best documentary for “No Other Land,” a movie about Palestinian resistance to Israeli campaigns in the occupied territories. It was “very hard,” Adra said, to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.”He called upon German lawmakers to “stop sending weapons to Israel,” before Abraham called for a cease-fire and an end to Israel’s occupation.The audience, which included the culture minister of Germany, Claudia Roth, applauded loudly, and there were whistles and cheers in the hall.In the days since, Abraham and Adra’s speeches have become the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate in Germany around whether public statements by filmmakers, musicians and other artists should be described as antisemitic if they don’t line up with Germany’s official stance on Israel.Scores of German journalists and politicians have denounced the speeches. On Sunday, Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, said in posts on X that the filmmakers’ statements were filled with “intolerable relativization,” because they left out any mention of Hamas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      A Film Festival in the Back of a Taxi

      by

      The TaxiFilmFest is partly a protest over the miserable state of Berlin’s taxi industry. But it’s also a celebration of the cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.Some of international cinema’s biggest names gathered on Tuesday night at the Berlin International Film Festival as the event honored Martin Scorsese with a lifetime achievement award. Before accepting his trophy, Scorsese listened as the German director Wim Wenders gave a laudatory speech to an audience including celebrities and local dignitaries.Just around the corner, parked in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, a group of Berlin’s taxi drivers crammed into the back of a worn-out taxi van to watch a double-feature capped by Scorsese’s 1976 movie “Taxi Driver.”Klaus Meier, who has been driving a cab in Berlin since 1985, handed out bottles of soda and beer, popping the caps with the blade of a pocketknife. Irene Jaxtheimer, who runs a taxi company, passed around homemade popcorn. A generator outside the cab powered a modest television, a DVD player and a small electric heater.The unconventional screening, just outside a centerpiece event for one of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals, was part of the makeshift TaxiFilmFest. Running through Sunday, it is partly a protest over the miserable state of the taxi industry these days and partly a counterfestival to celebrate the taxi cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.It’s also in objection to an exclusive partnership deal between the festival, known locally as the Berlinale, and the ride-hailing giant Uber to ferry filmmakers between the city’s movie theaters during the event. The deep-pocketed Silicon Valley company has drawn the ire of traditional cabdrivers the world over, and the protesters who packed in for the TaxiFilmFest screenings were railing against what they see as a too lightly regulated rival.Beeping horns from the busy street outside — some of them coming from sleek black Uber vehicles emblazoned with the Berlinale logo — blended with the street scenes from “Taxi Driver” playing on the tinny television speakers. “Ah, I really miss those mechanical fare boxes!” Meier said as the fares ticked away in the onscreen cab of the movie’s unhinged antihero, Travis Bickle, who drives around mid-’70s New York with growing hatred and menace.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Musical Performances to See in Europe This Winter

      by

      Concert halls and opera houses in Vienna, Berlin and beyond are offering fan favorites (“Die Fledermaus”) and surprises (an operatic “Animal Farm”).The winter opera and classical music season in Central and Eastern Europe balances holiday classics with rarities and even some fresh works. Opera houses and concert halls from Vienna to Berlin to Prague are presenting a varied program of old chestnuts and new discoveries. Here is a selection.Munich“Die Fledermaus,” Bayerische Staatsoper, through Jan. 10Barrie Kosky’s new production of Johann Strauss Jr.’s most popular operetta, “Die Fledermaus,” a New Year’s Eve favorite in much of Europe, is one of the most eagerly awaited events of the season here at the Bavarian State Opera. Mr. Kosky, an Australian director with a wide-ranging résumé — his recent successes include “Das Rheingold” in London and “Chicago” in Berlin — stages Strauss’s infectiously tuneful farce with energetic panache and a dash of camp. Vladimir Jurowski, the Munich company’s general music director, leads a spirited cast headed by the German star soprano Diana Damrau. The dynamic performances, carefully controlled chaos of Mr. Kosky’s staging, and a few unpredictable touches make this 150-year-old work seem fresher than ever. The Dec. 31 performance will also be streamed on the State Opera’s online platform. For the more traditionally inclined, the company is also bringing back August Everding’s sumptuous 1978 production of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (through Saturday).Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Golden Cockerel,” performed in Lyon, France. The Komische Oper in Berlin, where the production will play this winter, has a long history with Slavic repertoire.Jean Louis FernandezBerlin“The Golden Cockerel,” Komische Oper Berlin in the Schiller Theater, Jan. 28-March 20A new production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Golden Cockerel” at the Komische Oper Berlin is the first premiere to be led by the company’s newly minted general music director, the American James Gaffigan. This riotous and surreal take on the fairy-tale opera by Mr. Kosky, who ran the Komische as artistic director from 2012 to 2022, has also graced stages in Aix-en-Provence and Lyon, France, and Adelaide, Australia. In Berlin, it becomes the company’s latest foray into Slavic repertoire after inventive and gripping productions of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” and Shostakovich’s “The Nose.”“Rusalka,” Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Feb. 4-22Antonin Dvorak’s 1901 opera “Rusalka” hovers on the edge of the standard repertoire. The lyrical and soaring aria “Song to the Moon” is better known than the rest of this dark and symbolically rich adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo directs the first new production of “Rusalka” at the Berlin Staatsoper in over half a century. The British maestro Robin Ticciati, music director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducts the lush and frequently melancholy score.Vienna“Animal Farm,” Wiener Staatsoper, Feb. 28-March 10The Russian composer Alexander Raskatov’s “Animal Farm” arrives at the Vienna State Opera in late February, in a production by the Italian director Damiano Michieletto. Reviewing the work’s world premiere in Amsterdam earlier this year, Shirley Apthorp, the Financial Times’s opera critic, praised Raskatov’s “violent, compelling sound-world, percussive and angular, full of unpleasant truths” in this operatic setting of Orwell’s famed allegory of the Russian Revolution. The British conductor Alexander Soddy leads the work’s Viennese premiere.Franz Welser-Möst and the Wiener Philharmoniker, Feb. 22-26In the first of five February concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic, Franz Welser-Möst, the former general music director of the Wiener Staatsoper and longtime leader of the Cleveland Orchestra, tackles Mahler’s towering and elegiac Ninth Symphony at the Wiener Konzerthaus. On subsequent programs, performed in the Musikverein, the Austrian maestro leads the Viennese in works by Ravel, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berg, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.West Side Story, Volksoper Wien, Jan. 27-March 24In late January, music by Leonard Bernstein will resound through Vienna’s opera houses. Shortly after the American director Lydia Steier unveils her “Candide” at the MusikTheater an der Wien, a new “West Side Story” arrives at the Volksoper, the city’s traditional operetta and musical stage on the other side of town. (The house’s other productions this season include “Die Fledermaus” and “Aristocats.”) For the director Lotte de Beer’s rendition of the quintessential American boy-meets-girl musical, performed in a mix of German and English, the Puerto Rico-born, New York-raised choreographer Bryan Arias updates Jerome Robbins’s classic dance moves.“Katya Kabanova” at the National Theater in Prague, featuring, from left, Jaroslav Brezina, Eva Urbanova and Alzbeta Polackova. Zdeněk SokolPrague“Katya Kabanova,” The National Theater, March 22-27Leos Janacek’s searing 1921 opera about the emotional unraveling of an adulterous wife in 19th-century Russia returns to the National Theater in Prague in a production by the provocative Catalan director Calixto Bieito, who is famous for his unorthodox interpretations of classic operas. Jaroslav Kyzlink, a Janacek specialist, leads the psychologically raw score and Alzbeta Polackova, a much-loved soprano with the company, tackles the vocally and emotionally punishing title role.Bratislava, Slovakia“Hubicka (The Kiss),” Slovak National Theater, March 1-June 8In honor of the 200th anniversary of the great Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s birth, the Slovak National Theater presents his 1876 opera “The Kiss.” Once among the composer’s most popular works, “The Kiss” has long been eclipsed by Smetana’s earlier comic opera “The Bartered Bride,” and is remembered mostly for its lilting lullaby. With Andrea Hlinkova’s new production, the Slovak National Theater, which, coincidentally, was opened in 1920 with a performance of “The Kiss,” hopes to change that.Budapest“Bartok DanceTriptych,” Hungarian State Opera, Feb. 1-24Three works by Hungary’s great modernist composer Bela Bartok comprise this new ballet, choreographed by a trio of creatives. Laszlo Velekei, the director of the Ballet Company of Gyor, in northwestern Hungary, tackles “The Wooden Prince,” a pantomime ballet (a work half-danced, half-mimed) that premiered at the Hungarian State Opera House in 1917. Bartok’s second (and last) ballet, “The Miraculous Mandarin,” caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1926 in Cologne, Germany, because it depicted a girl forced into prostitution in a seething modern metropolis. In her production, Marianna Venekei, a longtime member of the Hungarian State Opera, explores the psychology of the work’s motley crew of city dwellers. Rounding out the program is the “Dance Suite” (1923), originally a concert piece and here choreographed by Kristof Varnagy, whose varied résumé includes projects with classical ballet companies, contemporary dance troupes and even Cirque du Soleil. Writing about the short movements that make up the “Dance Suite,” Bartok said his aim was to “present some idealized peasant music.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      ’Linie 1’ Captures the Soul of Berlin

      by

      “Linie 1” has been running since 1986 and just celebrated its 2,000th performance. Its cast of kooky dreamers and misfits still capture something special about Berlin.On April 30, 1986, “Linie 1” (“Line 1”), a rock musical set in Berlin’s subway, premiered at a 367-seat theater in what was then West Berlin. In a rave review of the show, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel praised the show, about a small-town girl who arrives in Berlin in search of her rocker boyfriend, as both “cosmopolitan and exportable.”“The German musical has emancipated itself from its American role models in a clever, mature and very Berlin way,” the paper’s critic, Hellmut Kotschenreuther, wrote.“Linie 1,” which was written by Volker Ludwig, has remained a Berlin fixture ever since, and it regularly sells out at the GRIPS Theater, the independent playhouse where it has run for the last four decades and where, last week, the show celebrated its 2,000th performance.It’s not hard to see why “Linie 1” has been so well-loved and durable. Natalie, the show’s naïve protagonist, resembles Dorothy from the “Wizard of Oz.” But her Yellow Brick Road is the grimy U1 subway, or U-Bahn, line, which she rides back and forth between the districts of Charlottenburg and Kreuzberg.While searching for the Berlin musician who passed through her West German town and knocked her up, Nathalie meets drunks, prostitutes, drug addicts and other colorful characters in the big, bad city. There’s very little plot in this revue-like evening for 11 spirited performers. Many of them resemble quick-change artists as they fly in and out of Mascha Schubert’s fabulously retro costumes — neon tracksuits, jean jackets, leggings, nylon ski jackets — to inhabit the show’s 80 roles.The protagonist of “Linie 1,” Natalie (Helena Charlotte Sigal), has traveled to Berlin from her small town to look for her rocker boyfriend, Johnny.David Baltzer/BildbuehneThe performance that I attended a little over a month ago (number 1,994) was delayed by a half-hour because Dietrich Lehmann, who has been a cast member since the 1986 premiere, arrived late: He had forgotten he was performing that evening. While Lehmann got into costume, the audience grabbed beers and snacks at the bar. No one showed the slightest irritation at the delay.When the show finally got underway, the crowd was fired up, applauding their favorite sketches and characters, or singing along. (One singalong number simply lists the stops of the U1.) It was a level of audience involvement I haven’t experienced outside of “The Rocky Horror Show.”Birger Heymann’s score, performed by five musicians (billed as the “No Ticket” band) is infectious and very ‘80s, with prominent saxophone, synthesizer and drums. But some of the most upbeat numbers deal with urban alienation, missed connections, insecurity and loneliness. Even at their most rocking and tuneful, the songs are often laced with vulgarity and shot through with anger.One of the showstoppers is “Wilmersdorfer Witwen,” a beer-hall march sung by fur-clad widows (four men in drag) spending their pensions from their long-dead Nazi husbands at West Berlin’s signature department store, KaDeWe. They see themselves as the defenders of an older Berlin and lament the good old days before the city was invaded by Turks, communists and squatters.“With God and the press on our side / Our city will soon be wiped clean / Just like 50 years ago,” they sing in a grotesquely caustic cabaret number. (Dietrich, the actor who arrived late, played one of the Nazi widows, as well as a racist man and a homeless drunk.)According to the theater, over 600,000 people have seen “Linie 1” at the GRIPS. The show has toured in Dublin, Jerusalem and Mumbai (as well as a 1988 stop at the Pepsico Summerfare arts festival in Purchase, N.Y.), and local productions have popped up around the globe, often in translation: throughout Europe and in Canada, Brazil and South Korea, often in versions adapted for local audiences. According to the GRIPS, “Linie 1” has been seen by more than 3 million people worldwide.By some cosmic coincidence, a few days after the Berlin production of “Linie 1” surpassed the 2,000 performance mark, the city’s public transportation service, the B.V.G., premiered a musical of its very own. “Tarifzone Liebe” (“Fare Zone Love”), a glitzy, hourlong show played two performances at the Admiralspalast, a theater nearly five times larger than the GRIPS. (It was also livestreamed on YouTube.)In what has got to rank as one of the nuttiest P.R. stunts in recent memory, the B.V.G. commissioned “Tarifzone Liebe” to win the affection of locals, who love to complain about Berlin’s transit network. Interest in the show was sky-high, and tickets sold out fast. This approach to turning I.P. into art, or at least entertainment, is similar to the one Mattel took with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster “Barbie”: create something witty and self-deprecating about your product to increase brand visibility.The musical was developed by the commercial music producer Not A Machine (and its composers Fabian Reifarth and Kolja Bustorf) and the result is a very slick, Broadway-style product that befits the promotional nature of the show but is bewilderingly at odds with the B.V.G.’s track record of dysfunction.“Tarifzone Liebe” (“Fare Zone Love”) is a P.R. stunt commissioned by Berlin’s transport authority to win the affection of locals.Isa Foltin/Getty Images for BVGThe polished production was a far cry from the endearing scrappiness of “Linie 1.” And whereas “Linie 1” does not shy away from serious themes, or from exploring Berlin’s dark side, “Tarifzone Liebe” was a spectacle-driven revue whose catchy yet generic songs were punctuated by short scenes featuring puns and word play that would make the creators of Broadway’s super-corny musical “Shucked” blush. It was also extremely sappy; at one point in “Tarifzone Liebe,” two characters croon about “A one-way ticket to love and happiness.”As fun and good-natured as it was, the show proved little, except that Berlin’s transportation authority has a great sense of humor about itself. “Tarifzone Liebe,” which features a subway, streetcar and bus as characters, ended up being a love letter to the B.V.G., rather than the city it serves.What’s remarkable about “Linie 1,” nearly 40 years after its premiere, is how much of the show’s depiction of Berlin still rings true. The city is no longer divided, punk is dead and there are few Nazi widows left, and yet the Berlin of “Linie 1” is still shockingly familiar. Although it is a time capsule is many ways, the musical still captures Berlin’s abrasive charm, and its kooky cast of dreamers and misfits remains recognizable.Like with the city itself, you are won over by the show’s rough-around-the-edges quality, its lack of sentimentality and its anything-goes ethos. Musical theater isn’t a genre associated with incisive urban and social commentary, but “Linie 1” feels like one of the very few musicals that channels the soul of a city. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘Chicago,’ With Nary a Finger Snap

      by

      Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of the 1975 musical adds a touch of burlesque and a dash of Bertolt Brecht.The seedy, culturally vibrant and rapidly modernizing Berlin of the 1920s was nicknamed “Chicago on the Spree.” That moniker sprang to mind recently during the premiere of a masterful and muscular new production of “Chicago,” directed by Barrie Kosky at the Komische Oper Berlin.“Chicago,” a “story of greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery,” to quote the prologue, is the longest-running show currently on Broadway, but it got a very mixed reception when it opened there in 1975. Many of those early audience members were uncomfortable with Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse and John Kander’s use of musical showstoppers in the service of an amoral satire, and the show’s jerky and pastiche-like narrative technique.For his production, Kosky has gone back to the original concept of the show as a musical vaudeville with a heavy dose of bile and a dash of Brechtian alienation, while also embracing burlesque elements. Michael Levine’s dazzling set is outfitted with nearly 7000 light bulbs, which intelligently frame the actors, and the action, in frequently changing configurations that suggest a nightclub, a prison cell and a circus ring.Many of the costumes in Kosky’s production give a nod to the musical’s roots in burlesque and vaudeville.Barbara BraunThere are definite echoes of Kosky’s darkly glittering take on “The Threepenny Opera” from 2021. But this “Chicago” is not another radical rethinking of a canonical work, nor is Kosky clearing the cobwebs from an aged classic, as he did previously with “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Candide.” This “Chicago” is simply a damn good show, with an attention to choreography and musical verve rarely found outside Broadway or the West End. The production offered further proof, if any was needed, that Kosky has made the Komische Oper — which has always embraced various forms of music theater — the best place for classic American musicals on the continent.The show, performed in a limber German translation by Helmut Baumann and Erika Gesell, is impeccably cast. Katharine Mehrling, an acclaimed chanteuse and regular Kosky collaborator, brings the right mix of naïveté and tenacity to the role of Roxie Hart, the washed-up chorus girl whose trial for murdering her lover catapults her to stardom. As her jail mate and rival vaudevillian Velma Kelly, Ruth Brauer-Kvam gives a sexy, assured performance. She’s also the cast’s truest triple threat, singing, twirling and acting her way through the evening without breaking a sweat.Jörn-Felix Alt brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as Billy Flynn, the shyster lawyer who orchestrates media circuses for his female clients. Andreja Schneider makes a sassy, straight-shooting Mama Morton, the crooked warden of Cook’s County Jail, while Ivan Tursic doesn’t overdo the pathos as Roxy’s chump of a husband, Amos.The music, performed in its original 1975 orchestration, sounds fantastic played by a full orchestra — a luxury you rarely get on Broadway. The conductor Adam Benzwi shapes the music with precision and vitality, and his band gives the changing temperatures and moods the score requires.Jörn-Felix Alt, center, brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as the lawyer Billy Flynn.Barbara BraunHandsome and sleek, the staging is as stripped-down as some of Kosky’s other recent productions, but he also knows when to pull out the stops. Mehrling makes her bold entrance in “All That Jazz,” trailed by a dozen dancers hiding behind red ostrich feather fans. Kosky brings back the razzle-dazzle in the final number, “Nowadays,” when Roxy and Velma are outfitted in the sparkliest suits legally permitted onstage. In between, Victoria Behr’s costumes provide plenty of other fresh and smoothly executed ideas, including orange silk robes for the prisoners and surreal touches like masks of oversized heads and cartoon lips.The choreographer Otto Pichler, credited as a co-director, crafts sparkling dance numbers for the soloists and his 12-person troupe with nary a finger snap, twist or slow-motion hip roll in sight. This is a welcome choice, since anything that is overdone — even a style as vivid as Fosse’s — can become fossilized.After the Komische Oper opened its season with a monumental production staged in an airport hangar, “Chicago” is the company’s first show at the Schiller Theater, its temporary home, in the west of Berlin, while lengthy renovations to its historic house continue.Luring audiences to the other side of town this season doesn’t appear to be an issue: Even before opening night, virtually the entire run of “Chicago” had sold out.ChicagoThrough Jan. 27, 2024, at Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More