"Kafka - The Musical" Has World Premier In Victoria, Canada
To think that I have lived long enough for this. And yet (I dare say) Kafka himself is just as glad he is dead before this occurred. But then, he was tone deaf, so maybe it would not have bothered him.
Not that I can go across country for the event, but I do like the premise. Centring around Kafka's "women" is an, er, novel approach. Not much is made of Kafka's great and constant success with women, their affections and their bodies. Franz - after all - only brooded afterwards.
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Staging of Kafka musical a global first
By Adrian Chamberlain
ON STAGE
Kafka the Musical
Where: Little Fernwood Hall, 1923 Fernwood Rd.
When: To Dec. 16
Tickets: $10, $14 at 250-5906291 and ticketrocket.org ($2 online surcharge)
It all started as a joke, really.
Murray Gold says Kafka the Musical is rooted in a conversation he had back in the late 1980s, when he was 20. At the time, it seemed musicals were being made about all sort of unlikely figures. (Anna Nicole Smith, Jerry Springer and Rocky Balboa are all subjects of musical theatre.)
"I said, 'Wouldn't it be funny if poor Franz Kafka had that done to him?' It would be almost like being trapped in one of his own terrible contrivances," Gold said from his Manhattan home recently.
Kafka the Musical is being staged by Theatre Inconnu, a small Victoria company known for adventuresome theatre. BBC Radio first broadcast the musical last year, but this marks the first time Kafka the Musical is performed as live theatre.
The central figure, played in Victoria by Prem-tim Plakolli, is Franz Kafka. A tremendously influential 20th-century author, Kafka is best known for The Metamorphosis. In the 1915 novella, a salesman awakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Today, not surprisingly, the term "Kafka-esque" is often used to describe surreal and disturbing situations.
The idea of the musical tickled Gold because of the strangeness of Kafka's writing and his pop-cult status as a symbol of human alienation (somewhat like Munch's The Scream).
About Dale
I owe my life to Hitler, though I never met the man. My father was paid to stop Hitler, so there is no conflict of interest. I was given a thunk on the back o' the head by God when I was fifteen, and within a week began to write. I haven't stopped. My first...
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