Croak in Promenadikeskus in Pori, the 17th of March, 2018

After sitting the previous day 14 hours on two flights, the thought of a train trip to Pori and back did not exactly sound like the best idea in the world, but what would one not do for opera! Puppet theatre opera Croak sounded enough like an extraordinary experience, that I simply had to use the opportunity to see the last performance of the opera that did fit my schedule. The opera was a joint effort of Society of Porin Ooppera and Mixed-art association Poike. Croak has two composers: Maria Kallionpää and Markku Klami. They had divided the scenes between themselves and I think this solution worked well: even though the music of the composers was different, they had enough similarities that together they made an interesting entity.

The opera tells a story of both ugly looking and sounding Croak, who – in order to get good looks and a beautiful voice – makes an agreement with the devil. The drawback is that to keep up the good looks and voice, he needs to keep on killing young women.  According to the agreement he is also not allowed to fall in love; if that happens, he will die. And of course Croak bumps into the sister (Olivia) of one of the young women he has killed, falls in love and Olivia kills him. 

Croak is a puppet theatre opera and all the characters are (big) puppets (puppet design Viktor Antonov), similar in style but every single one of them still looks different. The opera singers sang next to the puppets dressed in black. This created an interesting dilemma to the spectators. I don’t think I was the only one who on the other hand wanted to follow the puppets, but whose glance invariably turned to the singers, too. Anyway, there were lots of visually interesting things to see and you definitely did not grow bored.

Also from the point of view of singing the afternoon was rather good. Unfortunately both the female soloist (Anna-Kristiina Kaappola as Olivia and Merja Mäkelä, who sang several roles) had caught a cold, which could be heard in their voices a bit, but they did manage well in their roles. Jouni Kokora sang reassuringly the role of the Prince, but my favourite was Teppo Lampela’s Wolf. He was in his element in this devious role and the howling of the wolf was superb.  All in all my first puppet theatre opera turned out to be well worth the trip to Pori and I hope these performances will not remain the last ones of this opera. And it would be great to see some more puppet theatre opera in the future.