To mock the excited cancel culture debates about who is allowed to talk about what and who and why not with a musical is not a bad idea. The director Yael Ronen, born in Jerusalem, world-famous in Berlin, is having a lot of clever fun with it in her musically absolutely gorgeous production “Slippery Slope” at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. The perfectly shaped fall on the “slippery slope”, the slippery slope of identity politics, is the most relaxed ideology-smashing musical since Mel Brooks “Springtime for Hitler”. And of course the Gorki Theater is the ideal crime scene for this. No other theater in the country has played through identity debates, the still virulent racism, the subtle and brutal games of discrimination against minorities as extensively, intelligently and often penetratively as Shermin Langhoff’s post-migrant folk theater. The political attitude is more than clear, the constant hatred of the Berlin AfD is safe for the theater. But the hardened ideological rulers that often make the debates on sexism and identity politics so unproductive and unbearable, the better Gorky productions counter with self-irony, paradoxes and satirical exaggerations. The Gorki Theater also has some expertise on the second topic of the evening, the accusation of abuse of power in the cultural sector, since the director was the target of a denunciation campaign last season. So it was interesting to see how Yael Ronen would avoid the various faux pas and booby traps on the mined area in her staging. Ronen’s strategy amounts to exactly the opposite: the director steers every faux pas of political incorrectness purposefully and jumps into it enthusiastically: Take that, Political Commissars!
A Roma plays a singer who has assaulted Roma music – so much for the identity-political confusion
The plot of the show is crude, as it should be for musicals, the characters are XXL caricatures, the cliché-comic potential of which the actors turn up to the limit with relish, and then a little further. There is no need to fear subtleties. Lindy Larsson, the self-loving Schlager singer Gustav, proves that the character assassination mechanics of the Cancel Culture sometimes also hit the right ones, toxic masculinity in the bursa variant, so to speak. The long-haired blonde Swede, who dumped pretty much all ethnic music into the worse commercial kitsch and sucked it out for his ego from a klezmer album to Roma ballads and Eskimo chants to a “Haiti Voodoo project” is over his overconfidence stumbled. His pseudo-authentic folklore snuffles are called “cultural appropriation”, that is, encroaching cultural appropriation, the opposite of politically correct and completely out of time. What should the good man sing now, does he have to cover Abba songs until the end of his stage days? The second career killer is his affair with the background singer Sky (stunning: Riah May Knight). The fact that Sky was at times very fond of the old school charismatic and later defended him against allegations of abuse does not change the execution shitstorm. The affair is scandalized as having sex with an addict, and that was it with Gustav’s show fame. Now the cowboy boot wearer, washed away by the zeitgeist, wallows in Larmoyanz, the final destination of narcissistic quackery. One of the many ironic meta-levels of the evening is that the Gustav performer Lindy Larsson himself is also Swede, but also Roma: a Roma plays a singer who has overly appropriated Roma music – so much for the identity-political confusion.
Second storyline: After the affair with the blond Schlager Gustav, Sky becomes an electric star, optically a successful psychedelic combination of Lady Gaga and a Manga character. (For the outfit of madness, I am hereby voting Amit Epstein for costume designer of the year.) Sky’s glamorous appearances on the Gorki stage to high-class electro-boom, next to which Ms. Gaga can pack, are the musical highlight of the show. In addition to the teen pop deity Sky with its 90 million TikTok views, poor Schlager Gustav with his 5000 Twitter followers looks like a discontinued model from the Pop Stone Age. So much revenge on the dinosaurs of the show business patriarchy must have been on the Gorki stage.
It gets funny when Gustav tries to take revenge on Sky with the help of his wife, an influential editor-in-chief (Anastasia Gubareva), which leads to a lot of turbulence and complete crashes. Not only Gustav takes care of himself in the various trip wires. The world star Sky also becomes a victim of shitstorm: How dare she, as a white, use people-of-color beats! Scandal! A reporter is researching feminist porn, where feminism apparently consists primarily of seeing a lot of women. Gustav’s editor-in-chief’s wife owes her career to her editor’s friendship with a minister whose sexual assault she has successfully covered up. Always something going on in a cage full of fools.