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This is the story of my crazy weekend December 15-17 2000. If you want to read only about my trip to Tallinn where I saw the musical Tanz der Vampire, read the part about December 16.
Friday December 15 2000
In the evening we had the Christmas party at our theatre. I was really looking forward to it because a lot of exciting and weird things had happened in the previous year's party. This time there were less people, and at first the party seemed rather quiet. I had the leading role in a short play called "Turmiolan Tommi". It's an old educating story about a good man who becomes an alcoholic. Our version was a bit parodic. It was originally meant to be done by people who had never acted before, just done everything else at the theatre. But the original Tommi had fallen ill so I got his part. I'm happy about that because it was a real success, everybody told me I was great.
After the play and a few drinks I started to feel that I wanted to kiss everybody. After kissing or trying to kiss some girls, I told a friend of mine that I wanted to try kissing a guy for the first time in my life. So we kissed and it didn't feel bad at all - though not as good as kissing girls.
We left the theatre at 2 AM and went to a bar. My bus would leave at 5 and I thought that I wouldn't drink much more so that I would be quite sober when I go to the bus. But just before I was about to leave, somebody bought me a drink which I drank. When I rose from the chair, I realized that I was awfully drunk. I’m usually not a drunk, this kind of things happen to me very rarely.
Saturday December 16 2000
First from Turku to Helsinki by bus, then from Helsinki by ship. After all that drinking I had almost no hangover. The trip from Helsinki to Tallinn took about 4 hours. When I arrived in Tallinn, I had about six hours until the show. The weather was sunny and I just walked about the town, not really doing anything special. The medieval center of the city is very beautiful. The bad thing about Tallinn is that there are too many drunken Finnish tourists who just go there to buy cheap booze. Sometimes it seems that the whole city has turned into some kind of holiday resort for the Finns. I believe that a lot of Estonians probably find this very annoying, and hate the Finnish tourists. It's very easy for Finns to go to Tallinn because most people there speak at least a bit of Finnish.
I decided to walk to the Linnahall where Vampires was performed. I saw from the map that it wasn't that far. But when I was walking in the old town, I got lost many times. The Linnahall is a huge place, there were thousands of people. I was wearing the Jim Steinman t-shirt that I got from Jacqueline of Rockman Philharmonic. Nobody said anything about it. I can't believe that nobody knew that Jim was the composer of the show, after all there was the same photo of him in the programme. Maybe they were just too shy to say anything about it.
So the show started... It was incredible to feel the first chords of the overture. At some points of the show I was so excited that I'm glad I didn't faint! I wonder what other people thought of me, I probably didn't look completely sound in mind and body. Some of the music sounded slightly different from the recorded version. I believe the translation was made after the Stuttgart version. The show was completely in Estonian. It's a Fenno-Ugrian language that has a kinship with Finnish (I may be wrong but I think we Finns stole our language a few thousands of years ago from the Estonians). Sometimes I can understand whole senteces of it but mostly I don't understand it at all. For some reason they used the German title "Tanz der Vampire", though there was also the Estonian title "Vampiiride Tants".
All the singers were excellent, especially Jassi Zahharov who played von Krolock. Zahharov is an opera singer but he didn't have any difficulties singing more rocking music. The absolute high point of the show was his "On meie ahnus suur" (Die unstillbare Gier). After this it became even clearer to me that it's one of the best songs Steinman has ever written. Total Eclipse was excellent too. I noticed that some people in the audience were surprised to hear it, after all it's an old hit that most people know. The staging was quite simple compared to something like Whistle Down the Wind in London but it worked quite well. Unfortunately there were some problems with the sounds. There were some interference sounds, and sometimes some singers' voices dissappeared. But on the whole the show was almost incredibly good. Though Estonia is a much smaller country than Finland, I don't think anything like that could be done in Finland.
After the show I went backstage to meet Jarmo Seljamaa who sang in the choir. I heard about a thing that had happened during the show: the money and the mobile phones of the actors had been stolen! Because of this Jarmo didn't have much time to talk to me. So I headed back to the hotel and went to bed because I had to get up early in the morning.
Sunday December 17.
So I got up early and left for Helsinki. This time the trip took less than two hours because it wasn't an ordinary ship but a catamaran. In Helsinki I went to a department store where I bought the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Meat Loaf album for a very good price. Then I went to Turku by bus. I had about an hour to stay at home before I had to go to our theatre where we had a performance of a play called Eurofiksut. I was a bit tired so I wasn't at my best.
Of course I should have gone home and to bed after the show. But I didn't. I went to a bar with some guys from the theatre. There I drank absinthe and talked about very important matters like "Why does masturbation always have to be so orgasm centered". Our director was surprised to see me drinking, he had thought I was a teetotaller. Actually I used to be a teetotaller, then got into bad company. Somebody told me that our theatre does things like that to people. Some years ago there had been some actress who had never drank or smoked. When they had the opening party of her first play, she was more drunk than anybody else and smoked two packs of cigarettes.
T he bar was closed at 1 AM so we went to another bar - a gay bar. All the other guys were gay but I'm not and this was the first time I ever went to a place like that. There we met somebody who had been acting in our theatre. He was introduced to me as "the old prima donna of our theatre", and I was introduced to him as "the new prima donna". At 3 AM the bar was closed. I was very tired and I was quite far from home. I asked one of my friends if I could sleep on his sofa. He said that I couldn't because his boyfriend had told him not to bring home "snoring heterosexuals". So I had to walk home. |
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