Munich: Lukas Nimscheck stages the musical “Bürobiester” – Munich

Lukas Nimscheck is underestimated if you only know him as the moderator of the ARD children’s program “Tigerentenclub” or as a coach in the mini-singer competition “The Voice of Germany Kids” or from Your friends. With these Rappelkiste rappers, he once said himself, as a singer he was “the surface clerk”, i.e. responsible for the pleasing, melodic basis: “Whenever it sounds a bit cheesy, it’s from me.” Nimscheck is the nice big brother in German children’s rooms. Nothing against it, he plays the role brilliantly, precisely because it suits his nature.

He only does what he enjoys, he says. It’s part of the success of his hip-hop gang that your friends have been “through the roof” for eleven years now, all five albums have charted high and the halls are filled with fans big and small, but also follows a plan.

Nimscheck knows what’s popular and how to stage it. Anyone who has ever been to a Deine-Freunde concert remembers an extremely silly fashion show there or how you had to cower very, very quietly in the dark because the evil janitor wanted to blow up the party with a flashlight. “It’s important to me, even if I’m going somewhere myself, that there aren’t just people standing around on a stage,” says Nimscheck, “there have to be pictures of some kind, maybe little stories. I’m not the classic concert-goer. I need someone who takes my hand and leads me through the evening, I want someone to think about every minute dramaturgically to entertain the audience.” And such a person is Lukas Nimscheck.

At just 33 years old, he already has an amazing range of jobs to show for himself: singer, presenter, musician, music producer, of course, and then there’s composer, lyricist and director for musicals, cultural entrepreneur and operator of the “Escape Room” game Skurillum on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn , for which he designed the story and scenery together with his musical colleague Heiko Wohlgemut (“Der Schuh des Manitu”).

He never learned theater as an apprenticeship, he absorbed it. After graduating from high school, the native of East Berlin did an internship at Hamburg’s crime theater Imperial, where he experienced that stage doesn’t have to be as important as “Intrigue and Love” in high school, but can also entertain in a British way. He then ran the office of the Reeperbahn Renowned Theater Schmidt for many years as an assistant to the management. He founded two years ago with his best friends from the St. Pauli Gang “The Musical Makers”a theatrical production company in which everyone involved either writes, composes, directs or acts, and all somehow at the same time.

The current hit among their four plays is “Bürobiester”, which they are now playing at the Werk 7 theater in Munich. It was a flash action in the summer of 2021: with the authors Franziska Kuropka and Kathi Damerow, he locked himself in a basement in St. Pauli for four weeks: “How can we get out when all the Corona crap is over? We need a piece , which is a party and doesn’t burden people.”

Funnily enough, they then gave the home office nation a wild office revue (“with bitch terror”) about the workforce of the “Wuffins” food company. His boss had a homage party organized for his 40th birthday, but only four people attended. The actors Sarah Matberg, Franziska Kuropka, Kathi Damerow (all were active in the Schmidts Tivoli theater, for example in the long-running hit “Heiße Ecke”) and Mario Saccoccio (“Alladin”, “Moulin Rouge”) also bring momentum to the box by the fact that they simply fit their favorite songs from Britney Spears to Lady Gaga to Marianne Rosenberg into the plot.

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“We’ve never had so many requests for a play,” says Nimscheck, the director. After the success of the first season at the Theater WestAnd in Braunschweig, he is now looking forward to his first guest performance, the Werk 7. He has been watching with interest how the musical industry leader Stage Entertainment will be performing here in Munich with “Fack ju Göhte” and “Amelie”. wanted to set up a new, hip location and ultimately failed. He considers the fact that the Werksviertel Mitte is now running the theater itself under the direction of Nellie Krautschneider to be a “unique opportunity” for the industry.

“As a young person from entertainment culture, my view of the German theater landscape is very pessimistic. Everything is decided by godlike artistic directors who don’t even let you into their business. For me, they belong.” He would prefer an impartial house with a fresh team like in Munich. “Even if not that many people know about it, the musical scene in Germany takes a very close look at what’s happening there.”

Because it needs space for upbeat, pop culture, fast pieces, the musical scene is just breaking up for it. Nimschek doesn’t just like Halligalli, he wants to recognize the “attitude” of the makers on stage. For example, in his comedy “Gabi – vom Leben geschlagert” about a singer shaken by the fall of the Wall, his experience in the GDR also played a part (he had a Stasi file as a baby because of his grandfather, an Olympic trainer).

He and Kuropka received the German Musical Theater Prize for the lyrics about hormonal confusion, but also strokes of fate in “Jana & Janis” (which could not start in Plant 7 because of Corona). And in “Wir”, his rainbow-colored “Feelgood piece” about family and life planning for homosexual couples, he incorporated his own experiences as a gay husband.

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Many theaters would have rejected the piece, not “sexy” enough, rather “difficult” material. “But it has developed into a crowd pleaser,” says Nimschek, “because it’s funny too.” He still lacks such daring original compositions in Germany, “although many authors have four or five such stories in the drawer, but they cannot realize them because they are busy with some promising film adaptation”.

At his company’s own “Musical Open Air” in Braunschweig, he is bringing “Jana & Janis” back on stage this year, along with the sequel to “Bürobiester”: the supermarket play “Kassenkracher”. It’s the mix that counts, the Braunschweig crowd is going along with it, he says and believes: “It can also work in Munich.”

Office Beasts, Premiere March 27th, Plant 7, Werksviertel Mitte, www.eventfabrik-muenchen.de/werk7theater-erleben