Blaue Zuckerwatte - Deutsche Oper Berlin
The Prop - Part
Blue candyfloss.
... explained by props manager Karsten Patzer
The Abduction from the Seraglio
A musical comedy in three acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Libretto by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, adapted by Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger. New by Rodrigo García
Conductor: Daniel Carter
Director: Rodrigo García
With Annabelle Mandeng, Flurina Stucki, Georgina Melville, Michael Kim, Matthew Grills, Patrick Guetti et al.
7, 20, 25 November 2021
In our production of Mozart’s THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO drugs feature quite prominently. The naked women being held prisoner in the Seraglio are being plied not only with crystal meth but also with candyfloss. We used candyfloss in a production of LA BOHEME, which is why we’ve got the machine to make it. This time, though, there were some extra things to sort out. Rodrigo Garcia, the director, wanted the candyfloss to be sky-blue in colour, to really ramp up the whackiness of the scene. We had colourings in liquid and crystal and paste form, but we had trouble finding out the exact mix that would give us the right shade of blue, because colour looks different in the glare of the stage to what it looks like backstage, where we did the initial mixing. And because candyfloss doesn’t hold its fluffiness for long, we had to mix a fresh batch every evening and then stick the 18 sticks of it into the Polystyrene blocks for the women to take them from on the night. Of course, the sticks had to be far enough apart to prevent the candyfloss bumping and squashing and they couldn’t be stuck too deep, otherwise the women would have trouble taking them out in a refined way. Anyway, I think we dealt with the candyfloss saga ok, because the women love eating it on stage.
