The four men dressed in widow’s weeds of black bombazine had hardly stepped on to the stage when the first yelps of delight rippled through the audience at Berlin’s Grips theatre, an intimate 360-seat venue in the west of the city. By the time the quartet in drag have locked arms to kick up their heels, the mixed-age crowd is clapping in time to the oompah beat.
The Wilmersdorf Widows song is to Volker Ludwig’s musical Linie 1 (Line One) what All That Jazz is to Chicago, or Time Warp to The Rocky Horror Picture Show: the catchy showstopper that brings the house down.
At Grips, a theatre with a strong political ethos, it did so for the 1,975th time last week since its premiere in 1986, extending its record as Germany’s longest continuously running musical, barring a 20-month pandemic hiatus.
The show’s seemingly never-ending popularity in Germany can be explained by the fact that it is both a musical and an anti-musical in one, crossing the gulf between child-friendly entertainment and serious theatre in the way German drama rarely does.
Its strange mix of catchy tunes and political commentary may also explain its unfamiliarity to the anglophone world. For one, it’s hard to imagine an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that first tricks its audience into cheering on friendly grannies, only to then brutally reveal them as the bitter widows of Nazi officers.
“Berlin’s drowning in Turks and asylum-seeker scum,” they sing. “There is only one answer: beat them like a drum / A new strong man is what we need / To properly clean up our streets / Like fifty years ago, tee-ree tee-ra tee-ro.”
“After that verse, the clapping usually stops,” said Tim Egloff, the director of the musical’s new staging, which premiered this spring and has already sold out until the end of the season. “The mood in the auditorium is different, the spectators’ gaze has been sharpened.”
At the cinema, modern musicals have become the ultimate form of movie escapism, transporting viewers to Mamma Mia’s Greek islands, La La Land’s Hollywood or the snowy glaciers of Frozen’s Arendelle. Ludwig’s vision for Line 1 was to dramatise the everyday.
“We tried to investigate the problems in the lives of our audience and put them on the stage,” he said. “We wanted more realism than you would get from normal musicals.”
The entire three-hour show plays out on west Berlin’s U1 underground line, which used to run from glitzy Wittenbergplatz to grotty Schlesisches Tor in the years before the Berlin Wall fell.
On an early morning train, a young girl arrives in the metropolis from provincial west Germany to search for the 1980s rock star boyfriend whose child she is carrying. Instead, she encounters a panoply of lowlifes: tramps, pimps, drug dealers, school dropouts, voyeurs, punks, skinheads and hippies, played by a cast of 11 actors.
The divided city’s cold shoulder eventually becomes a warm embrace. By the time the runaway heroine is reunited with her lover, his glam and glitter have lost their appeal. “I have to see you again”, he tells her at the end of their underwhelming reunion. “Me too, at least because of the alimony, eh?” she replies, now speaking in coarse Berlin dialect.
Less a plot-driven play than a series of cabaret sketches, Line 1’s love story is repeatedly undercut by the characters, who step into the carriage to talk or sing about more existential woes. Contemplations of suicide, fears about unemployment and a bourgeoisie still seething with Nazi-era resentments feature prominently.
A visit to Grips today still reveals some of the intended continuity between scenes on stage and Berlin life off it, not least because spectators leaving through the theatre’s doors spill directly into Hansaplatz U-Bahn station and a melee of the musical’s stock characters.
Egloff, whose restaging is the first in the play’s near 40-year history, has tweaked some of the characters and songs but not its 80s period setting. The female protagonist Natalie (Helena Sigal) is less passive than in the 1988 film version, her drug-dealing city guide Bambi (Eike Onyambu) less macho.
The overt racism and Third Reich nostalgia of the Wilmersdorf widows is quote-marked with a sudden cut in sound and change of lighting, perhaps out of fear that younger viewers might no longer recognise the caricature now that most of the real-life Nazi pensioners are dead.
“Young actors are more critically aware of the material they bring to the stage,” Egloff said. “There’s a higher expectation to take a stand.”
But the show’s live soundtrack is thick with retro sax and vintage synths, its shoulder pads pointier and zebra tights tighter than they ever were. The political zeitgeist that Line 1 evokes is still that of a cold war pressure cooker in which counterculture lifestyles rub up against the ghosts of German history – rather than of the modern city that hipsters, venture capitalists and refugees pass in and out of.
During the interval, a group of teenagers in the back row debated whether the musical shouldn’t be set on one of the lines that now connect the old east and west: “The U1 is sick, but the U8 is on another level”.
Luckily, Ludwig’s characters and Birger Heymann’s songs still shine. There’s “It’s wonderful to be alive”, an atypically optimistic hymn to the blooming linden trees at Görlitzer Park, still performed with a Fred Astaire shuffle by the same actor who played the part in 1986, 83-year-old Dietrich Herrmann. “You sit in front of me”, a potty-mouthed chorus number in which commuters hum fantasies about their fellow passengers, zips along in Bahar Meriç’s minimalist choreography.
Nuria Mundry’s rendition of Maria’s Song, an unofficial Berlin anthem that has been covered in recent years by local punk band Beatsteaks and rapper Sido, had both septuagenarians and post-millennials in the auditorium dabbing their eyes.
Because for all its political ambition, Line 1 is a musical that always understood the importance of pleasing its audience. “Young people in the theatre are always a challenge, especially if you want to do political drama,” Ludwig said. “They are usually quite noisy throughout the play. And if they get bored, they simply get up and leave.”
