Budapest to Broadway / Broadway to Budapest

There is a street in Budapest locals like to call their “Broadway” – pesti Broadway – which to the uninitiated may seem like undue fondness for an ordinary thoroughfare, or yet another instance of Hungarian folie the grandeur. Yet, there is a lot more to the moniker than meets the eye.

To be sure, Nagymező utca, i.e., the “Broadway of Budapest,” is home to some half-dozen theaters within two short blocks east and west of Andrássy út. Some of these, such as the Budapesti Operett Színház, are semiofficial outposts of Broadway musicals, whose historical, and often directly filial, connections with Hungary, go back to the very beginnings of the genre.

It all started with Sigmund Romberg. The composer of *Maytime*, *Blossom Time* and *The Desert Song* was born "Romberg Zsigmond" in Nagykanizsa, in southwestern Hungary. Though some call his stage works operettas, Romberg marked the path from the old to the new, from European operetta to American musical comedy. And though few of Romberg's stage works are revived these days, many of their hit songs have become standard additions to the American
songbook.

Other genealogical connections between Broadway and Budapest include the classic musical Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s setting of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, as well as She Loves Me, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s 1963 hit based on Miklós László’s play Illatszertár (Parfumerie). The original play premiered at the Pesti Színház in Budapest in March 1937, and by 1940 it had been turned into a Hollywood movie, unforgettably, by Ernst Lubitsch as The Shop Around the Corner. Apparently, the traffic between Budapest and Broadway in those days flowed decidedly westbound.

Today, Nagymező utca is largely a one-way street where American musicals arrive relatively soon after establishing their hit status on the real Broadway. In addition to the Budapest Operetta Theater, about a dozen musicals play at any given time during the theater season at various venues in Budapest, offering non-Hungarian-speaking visitors an impression of Hungary’s long-standing devotion to the dramatic arts.

One of the Budapest theaters that have gone in for the production of musicals in a big way is the Madách Színház. Currently, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera and his Cats is playing there, as well as Mel Brooks’s The Producers, Chicago by Kander and Ebb, and an original Hungarian musical, Müller-Tolcsvay’s A Christmas Carol (Isten pénze). The Madách ensemble is also presenting a Kurt Weill cabaret evening at Művészetek Palotája

But let’s return to the Budapesti Operett Színház, Hungary’s headquarters for musical everything from Offenbach to Jule Styne. This season, 16 classic operettas and musicals are given in the repertory, but the highlight is Rudolf, a musical based on Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor. With music by Frank Wildhorn and lyrics by Jack Murphy (with additional lyrics by Nan Knighton), this brand new stage work tells the tragic story of Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Rudolf and his mysterious double suicide with his mistress Maria Vetsera at the Prince’s hunting lodge in Mayerling – remember the movie with Charles Boyer? – in 1889.

The venerable Vígszínház, whose 1896 building is one of Fellner & Helmer’s masterpieces of theater architecture, presents the classic Hungarian musical comedy Egy csók és más semmi with one of Hungary’s most multitalented theater personalities, Enikő Eszenyi, in the lead. The work of the trio Eisemann-Halász-Békeffi, this zany story is straight out of Feydeau, and the music and lyrics could have been penned by Oscar Hammerstein and Lorenz Hart. The Vígszínház is also playing Dés-Geszti-Békés’s A dzsungel könyve, a children’s musical based on Kipling’s Jungle Books.

Joining the ever growing number of Hungarian “legit” repertory theaters that have opted for performing musicals – an aspect of the country’s transition to a free-market system – the Magyar Színház is producing no less than four this season: Lerner-Loewe’s My Fair Lady, Szörényi-Bródy’s “rock opera” István, a király (Stephen, the King), and Offenbach’s classic operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld. In addition, Ágnes Balázs’s Andersen, based on the life and the tales of the Danish storyteller is also being given.

Bárka – a somewhat avant-garde venue – is featuring Brecht-Weill’s Threepenny Opera, while the pupils at Budapest’s prestigious theater academy, the Színház- és Filmmûvészeti Egyetem, are performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s eternal Mikado. The student troupe is also producing a two-part revue, Csak egy kis musical (Just a bit musical), which combines highlights of West Side Story and Hair.

Should your travels take you outside the Hungarian capital – Hungary is a very much Budapest-focused country – the Szegedi Nemzeti Színház, the principal ensemble of the country’s second largest city, is performing Jean-Pierre Grédy and Pierre Barillet’s A kaktusz virága (Cactus Flower), with music by Gábor Nádas.

If, after all the light fare, you find you have a yen for “tragedy tonight,” the good news is that Imre Madách’s interminable – and fairly unperformable – 19^th-century epic drama, Az ember tragédiája (aptly titled, “The Tragedy of Mankind”), is not being given this season at the National Theater in Budapest. You may just have to opt for a real play such as Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, or even Shakespeare’s Richard III, which, in István Vas’s sublime Hungarian translation, brings forth aspects of poetics never foreseen by the Bard.

A. Balog