Mendy - the wusical

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Helge Schneider. Writer and director of Mendy - the Wusical.

Mendy - das Wusical is the first play by the Mülheim jazz artist Helge Schneider and a commissioned work for the Bochum theater . Under Schneider's direction, it premiered on April 17, 2003 with the Bochum Ensemble and was performed with great success for a long time.

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The play parodies the horse magazine Wendy , which was made for young girls . For legal and parodic reasons, Schneider twisted the name of his piece and called it Mendy - the wusical .

The plot describes the obscure events in the life of the main character Mendy and her family. The father has been in a wheelchair since a riding accident with Mendy's talking horse Mocca. The corpulent mother, called "Lady Mama", has an affair with the farm servant, which she does not hide from her invalid husband. Through a chain of unfortunate circumstances, she accidentally kills the servant with an ax. The father sells Mocca to a butcher in order to buy spare tires for his Porsche with the money. To save her horse, Mendy takes Mocca's place on the slaughterhouse. Father, mother and butcher agree to the exchange. The following night the father, plagued by remorse, runs over his wife on the way to the slaughterhouse. There he frees the animals and Mendy, but is killed himself. In the final scene, Mocca confesses to his owner Mendy that he is not a horse, but a person.

Whenever a person dies in the play, death appears in the figure of the "black bird" and takes a white cloth with the inscription "soul" from the dying figure.

About the piece

The unusual piece combines the naive children's world of the Wendy books in a humorous way with topics such as social rejection, illness and death. The hyperbole of the scenes and characters repeatedly creates almost classic moments that refer beyond nonsense and slapstick to a deeper level of the piece. For example, during the bedroom scene , the mother recites the Rilke poem "Loneliness". The figure of the black bird is related to the classic idea of ​​the raven as a messenger of death.

The piece is available both as an audio book read by Schneider and as a TV recording on DVD. From February 23, 2007 to November 9, 2007, Mendy - the musical was performed for the second time in Germany at the Thalia Theater in Halle .

actor

Schauspielhaus Bochum

The actors of the performance at the Schauspielhaus Bochum were:

The musicians:

Wusical Team Ruhr Area

The actors of the performances of the Wusical Team Ruhrgebiet:

The musicians:

reception

“The true Helge Schneider fan will love this play. For others it may be a bit too exhausting in the long run. (...) An absurd story for all pony farm fans and splatter fools. Helge Schneider is the Peter Jackson of the Ruhr area after all. "

- Jasmin Lütz, laut.de

"Helge Schneider relies on horses, his stupid as well as crazy story (collaboration: Andrea Schumacher) seems to have escaped a teen magazine (...) It is especially in the parquet that people are cursed. Because "Mendy - das Wusical" is also a Trojan horse with which the artistic director Matthias Hartmann lets the fun culture of his predecessor Leander Haußmann back into the house. Applause from the scene thundered after ten minutes, and when at the end the "I am a person" foamed to a "We are the world" parodying hymn of happiness, the television cameras were already in the front row. "

- Andreas Rossmann, FAZ

"Helge Schneider keeps what Helge Schneider promises."

- Konrad Heitkamp, ​​Die Zeit

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jasmin Lütz: Absurd story for pony farm fans and splatter fools. laut.de, accessed on November 18, 2014 .
  2. ↑ Andreas Rossmann: The horse sings the blues. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 18, 2003, accessed on November 18, 2014 .
  3. ↑ Konrad Heitkamp: Nowadays totally humane. Die Zeit, February 12, 2004, accessed on November 18, 2014 .