Review: Mörköooppera

Monsters and multi-instrumentalism for the whole family

The Groke Opera at the Helsinki City Theatre offers musical theatre for the whole family for all the senses. An uncompromisingly well-executed children’s musical is also watched by adults with wonder and admiration, laughter and emotion.

Marjatta Pokela’s songs have been played in Finnish schools and daycare centres for generations. Pokela’s 1980 Groke Opera has certainly never been so magnificently staged: the version adapted for the Helsinki City Theatre by director Kimmo Virtanen, choreographer Jyrki Karttunen and dramaturg Merja Turunen has been successfully updated for the modern audience in terms of expression, sets and music.

At the beginning of the story, the Groke leaves his northern fairytale forest to adventure into the world of humans, the “Mölliäinen”, ending up in Helsinki and the corridors of the Parliament House. Mörö’s Journey is actually an opera in the sense that you don’t hear the actual speech – you only get comprehensible text during the songs. Or not, Mr. Bean’s gibberish-like rambling combined with the dizzying acting expression makes the slapstick plot twists between the songs quite understandable to both young and old viewers.

And let us remove the burden of worries from the shoulders of parents who are weighing whether they dare to take the youngest members of the family to this performance. Dare, because despite his name, this Groke is not scary or even mean, but rather a sympathetic, curious tramp.

The Groke is played by Sanna Majuri, who has played numerous star roles in HKT’s mega-musicals on the big stage, and has also worked as a voice actor in musically ambitious animated films.
On the stage of the Groke Opera, Majuri will be accompanied by a most skilled team of HKT performers, especially in the field of dance. The only male actor in the ensemble, Heikki Sankari, is, like Majuri, the most familiar dubbing voice for children from animated films and television series.

Alisha Davidow’s lavish costumes and fantastic set design are built on the stage into an edible world of colours and shapes, with which William Iles’ lighting resonates in the same key. The interfaces between set design and light disappear in the case of solutions such as illuminated shadows and “orchestra apple” lampshades.

The sound, created by sound designer Aleksi Saura, is tender, and the bass register rumbles convincingly without unnecessary hatching. The brand-new surround system on the small stage is presented in a rain sequence where the viewer really feels like they are in the middle of the rain.

The new stage mechanics of the theatre building, which was renovated in the autumn, have also been harnessed to serve the working group’s visions: the fast-moving and silently rotating stage with its lifts allows for increasingly mischievous stage images.

The songs of the Groke Opera have become classics that already live a life of their own – the most famous, of course, is “The Groke It Went to the Circle”. Of HKT’s working group, special mention must be made of Lauri Schreck, who has recently arranged all the pieces of the work and is responsible for their implementation on stage alone, and who rose to prominence as a multi-instrumentalist in the Talent Suomi finals a couple of years ago.

Like the performers, Schreck, who plays in a full costume and mask, is a “musical worm” hatching from a giant apple that is part of the set design, and moves quite smoothly in his live studio consisting of dozens of instruments and aids.

Schreck, who teaches band work at the Sibelius Academy, is a virtuoso with both the concert kantele and guitars. As a one-man orchestra, he throws in a bar or two of a sturdy synth carpet, then a mellow bass ostinato, and finally an inventive rhythm from Roland’s multipad, on top of which you can then start icing the whole with more acoustic strings and percussion.

In Schreck’s hands, Pokela’s music is updated from its almost 40-year-old appearance to the present day. In the 2000s version, we also hear relevant metals and raps, but not uncomfortably glued on – “when this is what it’s supposed to be” – but as part of a multifaceted soundscape that features echoes of rock, mechanical pop, ambient and folk music.

The Groke Opera will be performed until mid-May, and the performance will return to the repertoire after the summer break.