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About The Festival

The 44th Stage Song Review will take place between 15 – 24 March 2024.

This year’s edition of the festival combines classis performances by creators of stage songs and new sounds of this genre. The program includes both Polish and foreign productions that set innovative trends in the theatre and music.

This year, we begin the festival with the unique Gala that integrates socially engaged theatre with a spectacle full of glitz and glamour. “Man of Paper. Anti-Opera on credit” directed by Jakub Skrzywanek, is a co-production of the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw and the Stage Song Review. This year’s Gala will discuss the important topic of economic exclusion, focusing on housing problems. It will be funny, serious, but above all, with lots of music.

Concerts by Kaizers Orchestra and Ben Caplan are for lovers of unconventional sounds and seekers of surprising content, both visual and textual. Kaizers Orchestra combines energetic rock with elements of Eastern European folk. The songs are written in Norwegian, in the Bryne dialect. Ben Caplan is described as a musical poet, who uses willingly Eastern European and Jewish folk traditions in his work. Most often, he performs solo, but he will perform with his band during the festival.

There will be well-known stories during the festival, using original artistic means as well as stories aimed at commenting current issues. “Hamlet on the Road” by The Radost Theatre in Brno, directed by Joanna Zdrada, refers to a classis story presented by a travelling acting troupe, presenting “Hamlet” with the help of puppets, sometimes using old translations of the text. “Mothers. A Song for the Time of War”, directed by Marta Górnicka, is a play about the violence against women during the war. Twenty one heroines, including refugees from Ukraine, Belarusians and Poles, sing children’s and old songs, shout out their helplessness and sense of injustice as well as their disagreement with the roles imposed on them by the war regime.

This year’s edition of the festival tends to “review” the essence of stage songs and also look at new ideas for their interpretation. Performances with traditional narration include: “Licence for Lyricism” by Jacek Bończyk (poetry by Tuwim, Stachura, Kaczmarski, among others), “Wherever-vibrations on Grechuta” by Mariusz Kiljan, “Absence” with songs by Ewa Demarczyk and also, to some extent, the band Dylan.pl and its performance of Bob Dylan’s songs. On the other hand, there will be artists experimenting with sounds and words: Kury, Basiński Band & Fiction and Karolina Czarnecka, the winner of the 35th Song Interpretation Contest, with her new “Freak Show” project. The winner of the last year’s KAIP Grand Prix, Marina Mashtaler, will also perform as Kwit/Квіт with the project called “The florist”.

An integral element of each edition of the festival is the Song Interpretation Contest. At the beginning of the February, in eliminations closed to the public, the PPA Artistic Council will select the participants of the II stage. They will sing in front of the festival audience on 15 March. The finalists selected on that day will perform in the first part of The Finale Concert, which takes place on the 23 March. They will be assessed by the jury composed of: Magdalena Miśka-Jackowska, Dorota Pomykała, Katarzyna Szyngiera, Mariusz Kiljan and Marcin Macuk. The second part of The Finale Concert is “Top of all Times or Quest for an Eagle’s Shadow” with songs from the 90s.

During the Stage Songs Review, viewers cal also watch performances by independent artists. Off Stream presents premiere performances, selected for production through a script contest. This year, ten off performances will compete for Toucan Off and Toucan Audience Off. The Jury of the Off Contest will include: Aleksandra Gronowska, Adam Karol Drozdowski and Marcin Liber.

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