Estonia awash with Georg Ots fever

The role of adored singer and his fate as heroic Soviet artist still divides opinions

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By Kirsikka Moring
     
      It is as if Georg Ots has been reborn. The Tallinn concert hall is filled with awestruck fervour. Five thousand spectators rise spontaneously to give a long, standing ovation.
      Ots steps forward and humbly bows his head again and again.
      Another hero joins him in the limelight: Ots’s oldest friend also appears in front of the exuberant crowd. The old dog gracefully negotiates the slippery stage.
      The final act of Georg, the most successful contemporary Estonian musical, has just ended. This massive spectacle, written by Urmas Vadi and directed by Andrus Vaarik, has filled every available seat at each performance.
     
In reality, the audience’s favourite is Estonia’s top singer of today, the warm-voiced Marko Matvere, who has been unanimously praised by Estonian critics as a charismatic performer.
      Matvere assumes the role of Ots so completely that he even physically resembles him. But what is most important is that he neither copies nor imitates: he just sings Ots’s beloved classics as his own interpretations.
      He also manages to make the arias of Otello, Don Giovanni, and Giulio Cesare sound rich and colourful.
      Ots’s singing is the force that binds the musical and the audience together.
     
The librettist's view on the work of Estonia’s national hero has sharply divided its audience.
      Vadi has not written the musical into a nostalgic epic, and he does not bring a saint onto the stage. Ots is spun around like a bear in Moscow’s huge circus, whose director is Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev himself.
      The musical is politically very provocative, digging up the traumatic past of Soviet Estonia. What is even worse, the musical has not even been made in sombre tones, but rather as a full-blown parody, where Estonians wearing T-shirts wave shovels at the Russians.
     
The presence of Nikita and his agents around Ots is emphasized, wearing anything from sunglasses to scuba gear. This kind of farce is too much for some.
      The venue itself gives the musical a historically controversial atmosphere. To get to the concert hall, one must ascend dozens of decorated steps, and be part of the bustling crowd, as one had to at Bolshevist political concerts.
     
The style of the show brings to mind the symbolism of Berlin’s Komische Oper. The fantastic theatrical antics have upset some of the critics and spectators.
      Enormous, comical crowd scenes are brought onstage, where female Stalinist gymnasts seduce Ots in a submarine kingdom. Jellyfish, mermaids, and fish are his mistresses.
      It has a connection with reality, since Ots was only barely saved from drowning as a boy.
      Everything else in the musical also alludes to reality, but facts and people are brought into an exaggerated fantasy world. Ots wanders the world, singing. The blue-and-white Estonia train shuttles frequently between Tallinn and Moscow on canvas backdrops on the side of the stage.
     
Everyone is fighting over Ots: the KGB, the women, the children, even the fish. His accompanists worship their hero insanely. In reality, Ots’s only female accompanist, Vaike Vahi, was a stylish, cool and businesslike woman.
      The KGB claims that Ots is an American hypnotist, who has been cloned and copied. Ots’s sexual orientation is investigated, since homosexuality was a criminal offence in the Soviet Union.
      Ots is a hero only to outsiders. He permits himself to attempt death several times. And that works well on stage.
      The musical capitalises on its own inventions so much that it is easy to understand why everyone does not like it, especially the ones who wish to see their own hero.
      Ots sings in dark sunglasses. He is half blind, since the high command ordered that he should be illuminated with 3000-kilowatt lights.
      Whether this is true or not is not important in the performance. What is important is the portrayal of the loneliness, breakdowns, and fatigue of an adored singer in the midst of the Soviet circus.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 30.11.2005  

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KIRSIKKA MORING / Helsingin Sanomat
kirsikka.moring@hs.fi