Review: Päiväni murmelina
An evening of experiences as a theatre groundhog – Helsinki City Theatre knows the difficult genre of Broadway musicals!
In the script, director Samuel Harjanne writes about the mystery of time. Why does time sometimes seem to pass slowly, then quickly, and sometimes also stay still?
In the Helsinki City Theatre’s new musical A Day as a Groundhog , time both moved at a breakneck pace and stayed still. The performance rolled forward with tremendous energy, and yet it was like the hero of this story, Phil Connors, as a spectator.
A day as a groundhog was an experience. It made the moments spent with the performance feel meaningful. To paraphrase Harjanne’s literary rhetoric, the performance created a great whirlwind in the flow of time. Only an exhilaratingly funny comedy can do this.
The joy of expertise flooded from the stage all the way to the audience. Helsinki City Theatre has succeeded in putting together an ensemble whose artists are skilled in making a Broadway musical. At the premiere of The Day of the Groundhog, even due to its exceptional intonation, the tricky Finnish language adapted to the fierce rhythm of the performance like oil to a wheel.
For this, we have to thank Hanna Kaila and Reita Lounatvuori, who made the Finnish translations. Kaila, who translated the lyrics of the songs, has certainly been one of the keys to success.
Over the past hundred years, plays have been filmed in the dark. A day as a groundhog is an exception to this mainstream. In it, the script of the film has been adapted into a play.
The screenplay for the film was written by Danny Rubin together with director Harold Ramis . The film, which premiered in 1979, became a huge success and has been voted one of the best comedies of all time several times over the years.
In an interview printed for the script by Samuel Harjanne and Henna Piirto , Rubin tells how the script of the blockbuster film was adapted into a musical almost forty years after the film’s premiere. It has been a diverse, long and interesting process. It’s worth sacrificing that extra ten euros to the script just because of this interview.
Rubin thought of writing a novel or a series for television from the material from the film script. Eventually, he decided to turn his material into a musical together with Tim Minch , who composed the music and wrote the lyrics to the songs.
Rubin’s choice between different art forms was spot on, at least in the opinion of this writer. The Day as a Groundhog is a bit of a silly adult fairy tale that, like a good fairy tale, contains a lesson, or perhaps rather sharp observations about the laws of human life. So it’s like it’s already made for the theatre.
The story is made for a raucous comedy. Weatherman Phil Connors, a haughty TV celebrity, gets stuck in the back sweat of America, in the small town of Punxsutawney, due to a snowstorm and wakes up again and again to the same marmot day
In the context of theatre, effectiveness is based on direct interaction between performers and audiences. It gives you permission to throw yourself into it and get drunk. Harjanne, choreographer Simon Hardwick and co. with their actors and dancers drew us into the story with the touch of magicians. The amazingly well-executed and lightning-fast transitions from one scene to another were pure magic, the magic of theatre.
There were so many highlights in the performance that they cannot be listed here. However, I was struck by the scene where Phil Connors (Lari Halme) in the story gets lost in a pub drinking with two local drunks (played by Juha Antikainen and Paavo Kääriäinen).
In the discussion about the lives of these drunkards in one-word sentences, the core idea of the play became visible. The drunkard wakes up with a hangover and passes out drunk in the evening. All days are exactly the same days as a groundhog.
But I guess that’s the case with all of us. Adulthood means that repetition becomes the mother of studies. The comic and tragic nature of life lies in the number of these repetitions. For our consciousness-sustaining brains, each day is, in a way, a new new day as a groundhog.
The pub scene was also followed by an absolutely amazingly executed scene in which Connors drunkenly drives his two new acquaintances home in a marmot-driven car with motorcycle police on his heels. The frenzy on stage, charged with wild energy, was mind-blowingly funny.
Also absolutely amazing was the scene where Connors, who doubts his mental health, seeks treatment. The whole spectrum of snake oil dealers from Reiki healers to psychotherapists was involved in the scene.
For example, Halme, known from the TV series A New Day and the Handy Hostess sketches, was amazingly good in the role of Connors. The mobility and elasticity of a man over forty in physically demanding and obviously also very difficult dance scenes was something that should still be admired in retrospect.
Maria Lund also did a wonderful job in the play’s other lead role with producer Rita Hansson. Lund has a lot of the stage radiance that the viewer experiences as a sense of presence.
Conductor Eeva Kontu has assembled a fine orchestra around her. The ensemble has skilled dancers and singing power. A consultant could crystallize the core message of this assessment by stating that the Helsinki City Theatre has developed into a centre of excellence for successful musicals.
The coronavirus epidemic and the restrictions it requires have put a strain on the finances of theatres. A Day as a Groundhog has been a very expensive production. Hopefully, the Helsinki City Theatre and the city and government that support theatres will have the ability and will to hold on to the expertise that created it.