This month, we catch up with Søren Møller, Artistic and Managing Director at Fredericia Theater and New Works Development Center Uterus in Denmark, about their current production of 2013 Festival show, The Sandman, by Robert Taylor and Richard Oberacker, and their upcoming production of 2012 Festival show, Bleeding Love by Jason Schafer, Harris Doran and Arthur Lafrentz Bacon. Both shows will be performed in rep as part of Fredericia Theater’s season.
THE SANDMAN:
Drawn from the more nightmarish fantasy of E.T.A. Hoffmann, author of “The Nutcracker,” comes a new and darkly comic musical tale—The Sandman. When Maria, the wife of an ingenious German clockmaker named Albert Strauss, engages a new nanny, Fraulein Kaeseschweiss, to care for the two children, Nathaniel and Theresa, a series of bizarre and unnatural events begins to unfold. As Theresa falls mysteriously ill, a flamboyant and unconventional physician, Dr. Copelius, is summoned upon the nanny’s recommendation. The doctor comes with a young ward in tow, Clara Stahlbaum, recently orphaned after her entire family was incinerated in an inexplicable Christmas tree fire. And as the Strauss family is thrust ever deeper into chaos, the sinister and Machiavellian forces at play are gradually revealed—forces from which only the children may be able to save them.
BLEEDING LOVE:
It’s always night, it’s always cold and nothing ever grows. A cloistered teen cellist must find a live rose in order to thaw the frozen heart of the rebel punk next door. An eclectic score, ranging from Broadway to classical to rock, beats within this wickedly demented, post-apocalyptic musical comedy.
You are preparing something that is almost never heard of: two world premieres of two new musicals in rep, which happen to both be past NAMT Festival shows. How did you come to the idea of doing the shows in rep?
Getting people to see new material is not always easy, and being situated 100 minutes out of Copenhagen, I think it is attractive for more people to take a trip here to see two new shows in a day. Also—having specialized in digital set design, we can shift the setup for the shows much faster than with a more traditional setup. And seeing almost the same cast performing two very different new musicals in one day is a real treat. Also—how often do you get to hear two brand new Bruce Coughlin orchestrations in a day?
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