Week two of the Holland Festival (#HF11) brings a nice mix of highlights and questionable choices.

That the Off Broadway musical Fela! was a success, we could actually expect. For The Dodo, we therefore did not send anyone there either: there are already enough newspapers and other bloggers eager to have a front-row seat to the New York crowd. That they had a good time can be read elsewhere on this site, via the blogstream of the Holland Festival.

Earlier we saw the performances Nya,  Vieux Carré and Via Intolleranza. And Leo Bankersen watched for us the movies of Spalding Grey and Schlingensief.

So instead of going to Broadway, we headed to the smaller theatres, and there we observed a curious piece of Hungarian avant-garde.

The boys and girls of Maladype theatre brought a kind of theatrical sports version of Georg Büchner's classic Leonce Lena, and we were not entirely satisfied with the result. Extremely nice people, though, and their G'mor is infectious.

Much happier we were with the opera Dionysos by Wofgang Rihm. In a setting that seemed to consist largely of the moustache of the controversial philosopher Nietzsche showed the Netherlands Opera to that Wolfgang Rihm can be counted among the greatest composers of our time. "Was this all a dream or the true work of art of the future?" sighed our reviewer Henri Drost at the end of his review.

Opera, too, but different, brought Peter Brook. He made an adaptation of Mozart's masterpiece Die Zauberflöte and did so in a way that theatre lovers know him for: austere, with an absolute focus on the actors' storytelling and acting abilities. Applied to classical singers, that method produces an unusually clear performance, but According to our music critic Mariska van der Meij it did come at the expense of the quality of the music. Spotted an incredibly cute tenor, by the way.

Theatre of a very different order we experienced in one of the numerous empty office blocks on Amsterdam's Zuidas. In the performance Before I Sleep by the British company Dreamthinkspeak, the saddest character of Anton Chekhov's masterpiece The Cherry Garden takes us on a tour of the places in a department store where remnants can be found of the Russia that has now disappeared. Adventurous theatre that made a deep impression.

Deep impressions also left the Japanese company Cheltfish behind. The director of that little club, who looks as nerdy as the characters he shows, told us that alienation works in Japan too. This is one of those performances that makes you go to work differently the next day. A winner in the small theatre.

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