Review: Va va de ja sa!
True Finns pinpricks crown fresh Lillanrevy
HELSINKI. After a break of 20 years, Bengt Ahlfors has returned with a revue at Lilla Teatern and it was not a day too soon.
What was they and so! With its freely applied theme of hindsight, it is admittedly a bit uneven, but when it is at its best and the ensemble burns off from the hips, it drops treats that you greedily swallow with body and hair. A good revue should both entertain and be relevant – Lillanrevyn can do both. .
What was they and so! is a well-played and coordinated revue. The scene changes are perfect, the tempo well thought out and varied. Most of all, however, I am impressed by Bebbe himself, who still performs such high-quality speech and song lyrics. In addition, he has mastered the difficult art of composing with both his own and borrowed music in the score, music that bassist Ville Herala and pianist and arranger Kaisa Kulmala accompany with both finesse and big heart. .
With Emma Klingenberg as a guest artist, Jonna Järnefelt finds herself in the company of an equal musical co-star with her own stage charisma and great sparkle in her voice. Joachim Wigelius and Pekka Strang also get along well with the cheeky Eero Saarinen on loan from the Helsinki City Theatre and with the freelance actor Nicke Lignell.
Ralf Forsström, a partner with Ahlfors since the sixties, is responsible for a warm and friendly set design with his cloth troops, while his costumes are sometimes downright ingenious. Jakob Höglund’s choreography is tailored to the ensemble’s expertise.
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Pinpricks and parodies.
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If some sketches are good-natured, well-intentioned and generally charming, such as the one with two talking trees and the one with the meeting of two trams in Helsinki, the mood gradually turns upwards by several degrees when politics comes into the picture.
It is impossible not to laugh at the parody of the three self-confident Finland-Swedish ladies who paint themselves into a corner when they try to choose Finland’s Lucia according to an absurd principle of equality, as well as when a modern-day Maria’s (Klingenberg) Annunciation hour strikes in a sketch about so-called “assisted reproduction”.
It also burns really hard in The Bobrikoff Brothers. What are we going to do with these Finns? and in the scene with the jetset’s plastic surgeon (Wigelius) with waste problems caused by liposuction of corpulent ladies. .
Time for laughter is served when Helan (Saarinen) and Halvan (Strang) meet during their lunch break, to clash in a language quarrel where the two representatives of our majority and minority language bang each other on the head with all the known tools they have learned to identify over the years. .
The climax of the revue is in the sketch Sannfinlandia to the tune of Sibelius’s complete Finlandia. In it, a victorious Timo Soini (Saarinen) rises from the depths of the waste container to burst out with the rest of the ensemble in national costume in a loud song of praise – interleaved with a lot of “perkele” and a few “jytschky” – to the Finland of the lake cabin, sauna, sausage, Koskenkorvan and all the kicked out Negroes.