Over the summer months, all of the publicly funded state and municipal theatres, as well as Landesbühnen and some privately owned theatres have an institutional holiday season of six to eight weeks. Over those weeks, many festivals of opera, theatre and dance spring up across Germany, many in picturesque or extraordinary locations away from the conurbations. One such festival has been taking place every summer since 2014 in Wismar, a beautiful city of some 43000 inhabitants on the Baltic Sea. The city has been well-known to a wide German TV audience from the crime series SOKO Wismar, which has accumulated around 500 50-minute episodes in 21 seasons since 2004. The programme is full of aerial views of the city and surrounding landscape, and recurring characters in the series reflect local history. The chief inspector is called Reuter, a reference to a popular local dialect poet and the hotel and restaurant named after him. One long-serving inspector’s family name was Börensen, a hint at the historical times when Wismar belonged to Sweden, and another long-serving inspector’s family name is Poelmann, reminding viewers of the Island Poel, which is close to Wismar and features in many episodes. The annual theatre festival takes place in the huge red brick Gothic church of St. Georgen. The festival is known under the name of Theatersommer Wismar St Georgen. The church seats around 400, and over a month (in 2025 the season ran from 4th July to 9th August) the festival company will present around 20 performances. Across the years, productions included Everyman, Faust, and several plays featuring Nosferatu, in view of the fact that the famous 1922 silent movie by Murnau was filmed in Wismar. In 2025, festival founder and director Holger Mahlich selected and directed The Threepenny Opera by Brecht / Weill.
For the production, the band, conducted by Christopher Noodt, was placed around the organ pipes, quite high above and at the back of the stage. The stage itself was split into two distinct sections separated by a cabaret-style curtain. Characters could emerge and disappear through the curtain, or open it and close it to reveal or hide the larger stage area behind it, which served as the space depicting varying environments, such as the homes of different characters, or the prison, each created with few, simple and unambiguous props. Falk von Wangelin thus created a functional set, together with appealing costumes. The lighting design imaginatively used LED displays, creating strong images that combined different shades of daylight entering through the church windows with the red colour of the brick walls with different intensities and colours of LED.
Mahlich did without some of the conventional components of “Verfremdungseffekt” (alienation effect). He told a straightforward story, trusting the play and the music without the need to add elements of director’s theatre. Across the evening and the characters, Mahlich placed emphasis on the multifaceted nature of the characters, rather than painting them as one-dimensional stereotypes.
Leonard Mahlich as Macheath impressed with a considerable stage presence, suitable for the central character. His Macheath was an appropriately odd mixture: a certain degree of elegance and nonchalance shifted in split seconds to reveal his darker side – after all, he is a serial killer. As the leader of a gang of criminals, he was also sufficiently ruthless to convey that leadership. Spectators might have recognised Leonard Mahlich’s voice from his career as a dubbing actor.
Manon Straché has been known to German TV and theatre audiences for many years. She played Mrs Peachum with gusto, making full use of her hallmark raspy voice, and surprising with some refined and delicate passages in her singing. As with Macheath and other characters, her character was never one-dimensional. There were inklings of motherly feelings, feelings of compassion towards others, but those disappeared as quickly as they arose, making way to the more dominant characteristics of mean greed and heartless egotism.
Jens Wawrczeck has become one of the most frequently heard speakers for audio drama on radio and for audio books, in addition to singing and writing the scripts and directing the dubbing of major films. He also appears on the stage regularly. He played Peachum, the master plotter, the large-scale criminal, with connections across the strata of society, intent of his advantage with every breath he takes, every word he says. And yet there were brief but poignant moments of hesitation, of feelings for those close to him. Wawrczeck’s physicality and his singing served to emphasise the shifty, turn-coat nature of the character
Yvonne Greitzke, too, has been known predominantly from her voice – she is a regular voice artist in dubbing, with many roles played in films by Alicia Vikander, Hilary Duff, Brie Larson, Felicity Jones, and Lily James, among many others. In her portrayal of Polly, she combined girlish innocence and more mature insights into the evil nature of those around her and their actions. Her Polly did not mind her environment at all, was aware of it, was happy with it, overall, and was able to stomach, ignore and put past her any adverse experiences with considerable and at times quite surprising ease. Greitzke impressed with her fully trained belting musical voice.
Greitzke’s voice, trained for musical, was in interesting contrast to the classically trained voice of Anne Elizabeth Sorbara as Lucy. Canadian Sorbara identifies as an operatic coloratura soprano, with the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute as one of her signature roles. Her spoken German was impeccable, and her singing was exciting, suggesting how different to Polly Lucy is on the one hand, and making their similarity even more striking. Both are taken in by the same man, both initially fight each other, both discover what they have in common as women.
Mathias Kopetzki played Tiger Brown. He trained at the renowned Salzburg Mozarteum and has had a wide-ranging career on the stage, in film and television, in dubbing and audio plays and books, as a teacher of acting, and as a novelist. His Tiger Brown was a thoroughly conflicted character: on the one hand, believing in law and order and convinced of his role in maintaining them; on the other hand, yielding to the temptation, if he gets enough money for it, of using his power to support that very crime he is meant to prevent. Shifty, dodgy, and deeply not at ease with himself – in contrast to the criminals, who, without exception never seriously, or for long, doubt that what they are doing is what they like doing best.
Jessy Martens has been a renowned blues-rock singer and brought that experience successfully to her character of Jenny – one of Polly’s mates, but not really, or only briefly ashamed of having betrayed Macheath, Polly’s “husband”.
Astrid Wolfram stood out among the minor female characters as the elderly whore. The various members of Macheath’s gang were expertly played, with great attention to individual detail, by René Kusserow and Frank Markwardt. Winfried Good doubled as gang member Münz Matthias and Filch, one of the beggars in Peachum’s army of beggars. Cyrus Rahbar doubled as gang member Walter and as the jailor, and director Holger Mahlich had a cameo appearance as the pastor.
The production overall was well-paced, full of energy, entertaining and very popular with the audiences, selling out many of the performances.
For more reviews from German summer theatre festivals 2025, go here.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
