Photo: Private. Labelling Dollarprinzessin a discovery is interesting, because it demonstrates that this once super successful composer and even his top hits are not familiar anymore for more biographical information on Leo Fall, click here.
Even as shoe-shining boys. She considers herself a self-made woman who invests her own fortune on the stock market, runs her own office, bosses her own staff around, and demands the same respect as any man gets. Putting the story of the Couders on stage today β with the glorious Leo Fall music as your guide β should be a fun exercise.
But the young stage director Matthias Reichwald, in his first operetta outing, seems to have problems with taking this story seriously.
Instead of showing us a detailed social satire β that dares to lovingly ridicule everyone β Mr. Reichwald ignores the social hierarchies in the story, he lets the characters move around aimlessly most of the time in fantasy costumes by Tanja Liebermann in fantasy sets by Jelena Nagorni. Nothing is ever clearly defined. Alice Couder. Does Mr. Reichwald believe that operetta stories are not real stories?
In this staging, the various characters come on, sing their song, leave, come back in a new outfit, sing a duet, and leave again. The cast assembled is not one of actors anyway, they are all classically trained singers. So you get, as a new soprano in Leipzig, Nicole Lubinger as Alice, singing with a strong voice and some lovely sotto voce in between, playing the billionaire daughter like an shop window dummy.
