Review: Kapteeninkadun tyttö

A look behind the stellar backstage


If there’s one thing the Finnish people love unreservedly, it’s schlager. One could even argue, with Peter von Bagh, that schlager is in a way a reflection of the folk soul itself in all its shifts and metamorphoses.

In other words, it is strange that there have not been more schlager musicals in our country. However, the Helsinki City Theatre is making up for the damage with a vengeance and presents a new schlager-based production a year after the mega-hit Katri Helena , but while the former circled the career of a national icon, Kapteeninkadun tyttö tells a more universal story about the first faltering steps of a career and gives us a glimpse behind the scenes of a star-making scenes.

The creators, Esa Nieminen and Jari Salonen, know a lot about the industry and its anything but rosy reality with profit-hungry agents and producers, sexism and exploitation, and the curse of publicity. It is money that governs and songbirds are often only tools for the selfish aspirations of those in power.

Now, however, Kapteeninkadun tyttö is a distinctly feel-good musical, and even the bad guys – including Sanna Saarijärvi’s superbly portrayed manager – feel relatively modest. The biggest obstacle on our heroine’s path to stardom seems to be her religious mother, a slightly caricatured Marjut Toivanen, while Pertti Koivula’s record company director turns out to be the right wool when things really burn in the knots.

Credible setting

Mirkka, an irresistibly captivating and sensitively singing Sara Welling, wants nothing more than to be on stage and it should be schlager and not rock as the boys in the band ( Tommi Rantamäki and Kari Hevossaari drawn on the barley) prefer.

Schlager is, however, for the hard-core professional Nieminen – who over the decades has made music for all of our biggest names and now in superb style leads his sextet from the keyboard – a stylistic white concept and we get everything from skilful pastiches of more traditional schlager to r&b, gospel, power ballads, country rock and ballads. All made with consistently good taste and a finesse that raises the whole thing sky-high above the amount of smoothed dozens.

Milko Lehto’s direction basically does what it can with a perhaps well-predictable story. The emotions flow without overflowing and the framing is believable in all its schematization, but the dramaturgy sometimes limps precariously – especially in the second act, where there is too much talk and too little singing – and the whole feels unnecessarily drawn-out.

It’s also a bit hard to believe that anyone, even in the early 80s, can be as naively naïve and gullible as Mirkka, but we’re happy to swallow that. And above all, we are happy that Welling chose the theater stage and not the schlager scene.