The Cat Demon

After housing the Dorian Gray musical, which gathered a cult following in the 1990s, from March 16th, the Emmerich Kálmán Hall will be the venue for a raucously funny musical comedy. The performance is full of surprises, in addition to its mysterious joke of a genre, not least because for multiple members of the creative team, this is their first time working in the Operetta Theatre.

 

 

The director of the performance, head director of the Nyíregyháza Móricz Zsigmond Theatre Göttinger Pál is also working in the Budapest Operetta Theatre for the first time. He said he?s curious and excited about starting rehearsals, even though he knows the company, what?s more, he attended the Academy of Film and Theatre Arts together with Peller Anna and Szemenyei János. Musical theatre is not terra incognita to him, after earning his diploma he directed the operetta Mickey the Magnate, but he stages operas and musicals as well in Budapest, Cluj Napoca and a number of Hungarian towns. ?I have dabbled with the genre, but I don?t consider myself a bona fide musical theatre director,? he demurred, before elaborating his plans for Cat Demon in 2018.  ?The performance will be playful, filled with humour. It?s about a single woman aged around thirty, who rents a new apartment and tries to understand why he life is not going the way she wants it to. She has to struggle with various annoying obstacles, from failed relationships to IKEA furniture that?s impossible to assemble. This makes her very relatable and incredibly likeable. Anyone who?s had a day where from dawn to dusk misfortune piled upon misfortune, who staggered from roof leaks to missed meetings to busted tires will understand that after a while, we start to suspect that some conscious and malicious spirit is playing tricks on us. This is where the Cat Demon comes into the picture."

The playwright Karafiáth Orsolya has been fascinated by the world of legends, myths and fairytales for a long time, she found the story of the Cat Demon in a collection of Tibetan legends. First, she wanted to process the theme in a magical realist novel, but then she ended up creating a musical. What else inspired it? She partially created the protagonist Orsi as a reflection of herself: ?I also had a kitten names Rigó, and I borrowed the characters in the play from my surroundings.? She said, revealing the inspiration behind the curious figures living in the little sublet house.  The Cat Demon?s character ? although originally it was genderless ? is a man in the musical, a man who causes heaps of trouble and complicates Orsi?s life even further. The author has published multiple successful books, both prose and poetry, but this is the first time a work of hers benefits from a classical theatre environment. Previously, Karafiáth?s works were read in public performances, but were not staged theatrically.

 

The extravagant purple and blue costumes of Cat Demon were designed by Kovács Andrea, deriving inspiration from the premier?s venue, as the characters are going to wear the colours and decorations of the interior of the Emmerich Kálmán Hall. But that is not all, they will also have marvellous props and wigs, for example Oszvald Marika will wear, among other things, an entire chandelier.