Popular Music Theatre under Socialism

Mgr. Pavel Bár, Ph.D., was born in Trebíc, Czech Republic, has an MA in Theatre Studies from Charles University in Prague and a PhD from the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he’s currently teaching and researching musical theatre history. He is the author of monographies From Operetta to Musical (Popular Music Theatre in Czechoslovakia since 1945) and Karlin Theatre: From Variety Shows to Musicals; his articles have been published in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals. Together with his colleague Michael Prostejovsky he creates and presents Czech Radio’s weekly show about musical theatre “Muzikal Expres”. He is also a theatre practitioner – as a dramaturg he has frequently collaborated with the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava, in October 2016 he became dramaturg of the musical company at JK Tyl Theatre in Pilsen. He has co-translated Kálmán’s operetta The Czárdás Princess and also Billy Elliot – The Musical into Czech and co-written the original Czech musical The Phantom of London.

Roland H. Dippel (born 1964) has been active in theatre, music and art since his studies of theatre science and German Language and literature at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University in Munich. Since 1992, he has had engagements as a dramaturg for music theatre, concert and dance at the Zwickau Theatre, the Hof Theatre, the Augsburg Theatre, the Osnabrück Theatre, the St. Gallen Theatre and the RoStock Volkstheater. He was engaged as a cultural manager and director for independent opera Productions (e.g. J. Offenbach Fantasio and P. v. Lindpaintner Der Vampyr near Schloss Maxlrain / Upper Bavaria) and for interdisciplinary cultural projects (performances in the Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche Osnabrück, Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren and others). As a PR consultant and dramaturge he has worked for the composer Wilfried Hiller and numerous cultural institutions. Roland H. Dippel is a speaker and author e.g. for Richard Wagner and the surrounding area (Bavarian Radio, R. Wagner Associations), Italian opera, operettas and musicals created in the GDR (e.g. Theatermuseum Vienna 2011, BR, MDR, University of Freiburg), folk theatre and music, customs and traditions, etc. He was a freelancer for the Bavarian Radio (12 theme programmes “Saints in Music”, etc.) and writes regularly for specialist magazines.

Gyöngyi Heltai (PhD) is a theatre historian and currently a Hungarian Visiting Professor at the Department of Drama of the University of Alberta. Heltai graduated from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) where she studied Hungarian and Russian Literature and Cultural Anthropology. Heltai defended her PhD thesis enTitled Usages de l’opérette pendant la période socialiste en Hongrie (1949–1968) in 2006 at Laval University (Québec, Canada). Between 2006 and 2017 she been teaching at the Atelier Department of European Social Sciences and Historiography of the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest). Her primary teaching and research areas are: Hungarian Theatre History, History of Hungarian Popular Culture (operetta), Culture of the Socialist Era and Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Magdolna Jákfalvi is a Hungarian professor of Theatre History at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest. She is the co-founder of the Theatron (Journal of Theatre studies), the Philther-hub ( www.philther.hu ) and in 2018, the Kálmán-project. She has published several books and articles on the topic of theatre theory re-evaluating the ways in which politics of memory interact with theatre – under an authoritarian regime. In the last decade, her researches focused on the State Socialist practice of Hungarian Theatre after World War II, on the sovietised reception history of the performances, on the transformation of the Viennese operetta into nationalised one.

Wolfgang Jansen ist Theaterwissenschaftler und Germanist. Er unterrichtet an der Universität der Künste Berlin und gilt als Pionier bei der genreübergreifenden, zeitgeschichtlich grundierten Erforschung des populären Musiktheaters im deutschsprachigen Theater (Revue, Operette, Varieté, Musical).

Zsofia Lelkes studied German Studies in Debrecen, Hungary, and in Marburg a.L., Germany, and Theatre Studies in Berlin, Germany. She wrote her thesis on the role of folk dances and amateurism in the post war theatre structure in Hungary. She is a member of the research group STEP (Project on European Theatre Systems in smaller European countries) founded by Dr. Prof. Andreas Kotte and Dr. Prof. Hans van Manen.

Swetlana Lukanitschewa, PD Dr. habil., is a private lecturer and research assistant at the Institute for Theatre Studies at the Free University of Berlin. She studied Theatre Studies at the Russian Theatre Academy (GITIS) Moscow, 2001 PhD at the Institute for Theatre Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, 2012 Habilitation at the Institute for Theatre Studies at the Free University of Berlin. From 2016, head of the DFG project Aus dem Geiste der Bewegung geboren. Moskauer Kammertheater von Alexander Tairov im Spannungsfeld zwischen Russland und dem Westen. Most recently published: Wenn die Flöte Hamlets kritisieren könnte, Kritik als Theater in der Sowjetunion der 1930er Jahre. In: Theater als Kritik. Ed. by Gerald Siegmund et al., Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2018, pp. 375–384. – ‘Seht, was ich für ein Engländer bin . . . ’, Zum Auftritt des russischen Homo Ludens auf der europäischen Bühne des 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Spiele spielen. Ed. by Friedemann Kreuder et al., Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2018, pp. 63–78.

Jacek Mikolajczyk is Theatre director and translator. Artistic Director of the Syrena Theatre in Warsaw, a lecturer at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. In 2012–2013 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He translated many musicals, such as: Rock of Ages (2019, Syrena Theatre in Warsaw), Next to Normal (2019, Syrena Theatre in Warsaw), The Witches of Eastwick (2018, Syrena Theatre in Warsaw), Nine (2017, Musical Theatre in Poznan), Sister Act (2016, Musical Theatre in Poznan), The Addams Family (2015, Musical Theatre in Gliwice). He debuted as a theatre director in the Gliwice Musical Theatre with the musical The Addams Family by Andrew Lippa in his own translation, for which he received a prestigious Golden Mask award in the category of the best director. This performance was also recognized as the best music performance of the year by the Jan Kiepura chapter of the Theatrical Music Award. He directed musicals: Rock of Ages (2019), Next to Normal (2019), The Witches of Eastwick (2018) and The Addams Family (2018) in the Syrena Theatre in Warsaw and Sister Act (2016) and Nine (2017) in the Musical Theatre in Poznan. He is a graduate of cultural studies at the University of Silesia, music theatre direction at the State Academy of Theatre Art in Cracow, and the Academy of Music in Cracow. As a doctor of humanities, he is also active in the field of science. In 2010, he published the book Musical nad Wisla [Musical at the Vistula River], the first and so far the only monograph of Polish musical.

Daniel Molnár is a theatre historian focused on theatre entertainment in Central Europe. Starting his career as a performance artist, he went on to obtain a clown degree in 2005 and a PhD in history in 2017. He has curated three exhibitions about the former Budapest nightlife; in February 2019, his latest, Red Stars – Showbusiness during Hungarian Stalinism and the socialist revues, opened in the National Szechenyi Library accompanied by a monography of the same Title. After working for the Budapest Operetta Theatre in season 2016/17, he moved to Berlin where he did his practice in stage directing at the Komische Oper in May 2019.

Prof. Valentina Sandu-Dediu graduated in musicology from the National Music University of Bucharest in 1990. She has been teaching at the same institution since 1993 (professor of musicology and stylistics). She wrote over 30 studies, 300 articles, and 10 books: Rumänische Musik nach 1944 (Pfau Verlag, Saarbrücken, 2006); Alegeri, atitudini, afecte. Despre stil si retorica în muzica (Ed. Didactica si Pedagogica, Bucuresti 2010/2013), Octave paralele (Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2014), În cautarea consonantelor (Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2017). She has authored Series of programmes for Radio Romania. She also plays the piano in chamber music (CDs released in Romania with Aurelian Octav Popa, Irina Murersanu, Diana Mos; in Germany/Neos with Dan Dediu, and in Boston/ Albany with Ray Jackendoff). Valentina Sandu-Dediu was a fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, she is rector of New Europe College, Bucharest (since 2014), and received the Peregrinus-Stiftung Prize of Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften in 2008.

Dr. Katrin Stöck studied musicology as well as theatre studies and German literature at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Leipzig. She worked as a research assistant at the musicological institutes of the Universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Leipzig and conducted a research project on Portuguese music theatre at the musicological research institute CESEM of the Universidade Nova in Lisbon in 2013–15, where she was a member of the research group “Teoria critica e comunicacao” up to 2020. From 2015 to 2018 she was a research assistant to the Rectorate’s representative for the Reformation Anniversary 2017 at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where she was mainly active as a congress organizer and lecturer. Her dissertation “Musiktheater in der DDR” was published in 2013 in the KlangZeiten Series of the Böhlau publishing house. Scenic chamber music and chamber opera of the 1970s and 1980s. Together with Paulo Ferreira de Castro and Gilbert Stöck, she edited “Estes sons, esta linguagem”, Essays on Music, Meaning and Society in Honour of Mário Vieira de Carvalho, Leipzig 2015, and since 1998 she has also been a member of the editorial board of the revised new edition of the Riemann-Musiklexikon, ed. by Wolfgang Ruf, Mainz 2012. Her research and work focuses on Music theatre of the 20th century, music history of Portugal, music theatre studies, music history and cultural policy of the GDR, Czech music history as well as applied musicology: music theatre and concert dramaturgy. Beginning with the 2019/20 season, she has been working as a concert and music theatre dramaturg with the Theater Nordhausen / Loh-Orchester Sondershausen GmbH.

Aleksandra Zajac-Kiedysz, PhD, is a lecturer at Academy of Music in Gdansk (course: history of musical) and at Vocal Training and Acting Studio in Gdynia (course: history of musical, history of teatre). Her main reaserch interests are history of musical theatre in Poland and history of wordwide musical theatre. She’s the author of monograph devoted to Musical Theatre in Gdynia and many of articles about popular music theatre. She received the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland scholarschip and the Marsal of the Pomeranian Voivodship scholarschip. She participates in Conferences at home and abroad (as an e.g. Song, Stage and Screen XII at University of Surrey, Great Britain).