By the end of the first act, I felt like I was eating vanilla ice cream â smooth, pleasant, a little too safe. By the second act, I discovered that beneath that pale, so-so cloud hid chili, lemongrass, coconut, and cardamom. The show was just getting warmer and hotter, and oh, did it deliver.
The turning point was Leash performed by MichaĆ Kocurek â and after that, Monday morning turned into Friday afternoon. Suddenly, the action locked into the right gear and didn’t let go.
The plot carries the weight of history on its shoulders â and it does so with surprising grace. Two brothers, two lives, two versions of what it means to stand for something. Franek (Mariusz Ostrowski) and Mietek (MichaĆ Kocurek) are the engine of this story: two tectonic plates moving in opposite directions, and everything worth watching happens exactly at the fault line. Equally stubborn, equally devoted â just standing on opposite ends of the same burning bridge. Franek: humble but restless with curiosity. Mietek: uncompromising, sharp as a knife. Together, they make you forget to breathe.
The backdrop is the PoznaĆ June 1956 â the first mass worker protests against the communist government in the Polish People’s Republic. A revolt was brutally crushed, leaving at least 79 dead and over 600 injured. Local history, local streets, one of the most important events in the city’s story â now on a musical stage, set to the music of Maanam. It’s a daring, even audacious choice. And it mostly works.
Accompanying the two brothers is a group of young workers (Aleksandra Daukszewicz, RadosĆaw Elis, Kacper JÄdrzejewski, Urszula LaudaĆska, Emil Lipski, Bartosz SoĆtysiak â
his OMG moments are perfection â Tomasz Szafraniak, Magdalena SzczeĆniewska), each with their own personality. And here’s where the gears grind a little. They were too enthusiastic, too glee. I was missing the exhaustion and quiet fury of workers stepping into the street with raised fists. To put the Joker’s words through my own filter: why so NOT serious? Next to the brilliant Monika (Katarzyna Tapek) and the astonishing Anna Lasota as Death, they looked more like cheerful dwarfs searching for Snow White than oppressed young workers ready to risk their lives. Though â and this is important â the premiere energy might have taken over. First nights do that. The flaws appeared briefly, then vanished under a very glamorous rug.
And what was on top of that rug? Glad you asked.
Barbara Olech’s choreography, for one â fresh, light, modern, alive. The movement isn’t dance in any traditional sense; it’s more like breathing. It gives the show both frivolity and force, sometimes within the same eight counts. Then there are Maanam’s songs from the seventies shining as if newly minted, their lyrics rewritten by history and time into something bigger, sharper, more aching. Ćukasz Damrych re-designs what you know and invites you to another musical universe, you would love every second! The lighting (BogumiĆ Palewicz) and visualization (Karolina Jacewicz, Mateusz Kokot) don’t decorate the plot â they build it. There are moments where the light alone tells you what the characters can’t say out loud. It shifts, it cuts, it holds. Light here is architecture â and it carries the weight.
Director Jerzy Jan PoĆoĆski takes us into a world thick with history, in a city full of it â and he never lets us forget where we are. The show is soaked in regionalism, even in its language, and it fits like a glove that was made for this hand specifically. Characters speak to us, break the fourth wall without ceremony, and suddenly the audience is no longer watching â we’re inside the plot, complicit, implicated.
This is the kind of show that asks you to remember. What happened here. What people had to endure. What it costs to eventually bring something that looks â even briefly â like freedom. I hope it keeps asking that question for a long time.
Photo: D. Stube
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