Severin Groebner now describes himself as a “Viennese Frankfurter”, but because of his career-forming time on the Isar, many still see him as half Munich. Last year he received the Dieter Hildebrandt Prize in the Old Town Hall. If he hadn’t gotten it, the premiere of his new program “ÜberHaltung” at the Lustspielhaus would have been the perfect application.
Of course Severin Groebner is a completely different type of stage pig than Hildebrandt once because of the Viennese dialect and the morbid trains of thought. A pinch of Karl Valentin is added to the long slurp, a remarkable singing voice, which he used again for weird songs with the guitar. He’s not too fond of puns and honors the comedy rule of not leaving a gag untouched. But for a number of solo programs he has combined this entertainment with the kind of attitude that was always the most important thing for Hildebrandt: he gets to the heart of complex contemporary historical and social annoyances in a masterly satirical manner.
This was proven by several passages in “ÜberHaltung”, which should be included in the cabaret “Hall of Fame” if there was one. For example, the TV parody on the subject “Does the triangle have to be so pointed?”, in which the presenter asked a mathematics professor for a triangle with “more points, curves, applications and loden” and, accompanied by absurd conspiracy theories, violently destroyed it to renounce reality. Mechanisms and methods of lateral thinking and “perceived truths” have seldom been more succinctly exposed. No less enlightening is his analysis of the big “we” family, nation (“always founded on blood”) and Europe. Everything fits into the clever framework of an imaginary relationship with the childhood love and foreign correspondent Sumi, whom he follows on the screen as if in a fantasy through the world’s crisis areas. A program for which one would like to bring Groebner back to Munich.