Dagen Nyheter 140912
By: JOHANNA PAULSSON
Review. Skarpnäck’s metro sign and brick facades have moved into Cirkus. The orchestra sits perched on the high-rise balconies, and life rolls on as usual before nurse assistant Mona Berglund (Helen Sjöholm) is thrown into the pop carousel. The musical version of Life is a Schlager largely follows the successful movie; key scenes remain despite Jonas Gardell having written both lyrics and a new script.
That it’s almost 20 years since Peter Jöback and Helen Sjöholm last stood on stage together in Kristina from Duvemåla is striking. The Swedish private theater audiences are not exactly spoiled with newly written musicals – especially ones not of the jukebox kind. But if you have Fredrik Kempe as a composer and let him make a song contest cavalcade of hit pastiches – from dance band style to power ballads – you don’t need a string of hits. Then it’s enough with Aldrig ska jag sluta älska dig (I will never stop loving you) known from the film (with music by Jesper Winge Leisner although that’s not really made clear.)
Peter Jöback does an in every way glittering performance as Mona’s hit song crazy brother – the transboundary Candy Darling who partly has a narrative role and is spared from languishing in AIDS, but instead must contend with harassment. Mona is a personal assistant to cerebral palsy David (played by Jonas Helgesson who has cerebral palsy himself) and secretly submits a song that he has written to the Swedish Eurovision Song Contest, becomes a star overnight and forgets all the things that are important in life: friendship, love and honesty. It’s a seemingly sweet story that Gardell successfully combines with blackness, acrid social criticism and celebrity satire.
That a case of illness in the ensemble has costume designer Christer Lindarw deputize in the mingling role of Jean-Pierre Barda becomes a premiere bonus, but most things are in place. Johan Glans (Mona’s stress joking husband Bosse) laps couplet singing with Kvarteret Skatan humour, Måns Möller finds home as the awful record label mogul and obvious Bert Karlsson paraphrase Tony Borg and Frida Westerdahl’s pop rival Sabina oozes of parodic plasticity. Jöback’s parade number Annars vore jag inte jag (Otherwise I wouldn’t be me) is also among the most beautiful things to be heard on the musical stage. It’s a song for all of us who feel we are never good enough, or quite fit in. A song about accepting all the things that makes us who we are.
In the contemporary superlative inflation, it feels more appropriate to speak of Life is a Schlager as genuinely liberating. For this is truly a musical that manages to be both professional and inclusive, amusing and deadly serious at the same time. There might be one or two obsolete humor elements that could have been curbed, but it’s also the dynamic – the oscillations between tears and laughter – that makes this contemporary tale so strong. Life is not a hit song – life is a very, very wonderful musical by Jonas Gardell.