We could have given life to the dragon in this plot in the Chinese way, with a stick, but it wouldn’t have lived up to the magic of The Neverending Story. Because the creatures are essential there…” says Dario Regattieri when he refers to Fújur, the white dragon of luck that appears in Michael Ende’s fantasy novel. And those who say Fújur ??say, for example, Vetusta Morla, the giant turtle who lives in the Swamps of Sadness and who had to be believable in this adaptation of a work that marked an entire generation of children in the eighties. Or the racing snail, the Artax horse and the rock eater. The title arrives now, in November (and will be there until April), at the Apolo in Barcelona – after a successful season in Madrid – turned into a musical and with a local cast of 30 artists on stage (14 are children), plus a dozen musicians scattered around the audience who follow the musical director’s instructions remotely.
These are the reasons that have made the producer of this show become the first madman who dares to introduce animatronics to the theater. This robotic technique that simulates the behavior of living beings with mechanical dolls had been used until now in cinema and other virtual media, as Regattieri himself explains. But in a live show all this is much more demanding. Those who, from inside the gigantic dolls – Fújur ??is made of 50 meters of plush fabric and weighs 600 kilos – make their movements and facial expressions, or are in charge of making them speak, wrinkle their noses and arch a eyebrow in a very organic and tender way, they must maintain total synchrony… “Only the blinking is the product of an automatic device”, confesses this German Swiss producer with an Italian surname and established in Spain, who leads the production company Beon Entertainment and which has Kreat FX to create the animatronics.
It is not, alert, an adaptation of the film of the same name by Wolfgang Petersen. The 1984 film actually covers only the first part of the book, although it has a handcraft of hand-crafted monsters that was commendable. And, with respect to the other two later film adaptations, they don’t even follow the story line of the book and limit themselves to keeping the characters. Instead, this musical is based on the original about the boy victim of bullying who escapes from reality and enters a fantasy novel. And it remains faithful from beginning to end to the archi-translated novel (translated into Catalan by Francesca Martínez i Planas), with the libretto by Félix Amador and the music by Iván Macías.
Regattieri has therefore resorted to the same creative tandem of El tiempo entre costuras, the novel by María Dueñas about the Civil War that he himself had the idea of ??turning into a musical. They are also the ones who carried out the successful The Doctor, based on Noah Gordon’s bestseller. “Because theater is another form of communication”, adds Regattieri, an expert in marketing and “telling stories that make people feel”. Federico Barrios Fierro is the choreographer and artistic director.
Do you want to capture the spirit of the eighties in the choreography?
“Not only that. For me, it is a memory of what I did as a child, but updated, so that it is stronger, and I try to make each number have a choreography with its own personality”, comments the Argentine trained in dance both in Buenos Aires and New York or in the Aula school in Barcelona.
Eight boys and girls alternate to give life to the protagonist, Bastian, while Joseán Moreno gives life to Fújur ??or Elena González to the Child Empress. They sing 16 songs that are part of the soundtrack, including the legendary theme The neverending story. And they act in an environment that surrounds, that makes the spectators participate, they say. The production cost is three million euros. And the intention is to export it to the West End. “From Asia they are showing a lot of interest in the piece”, explains the producer, determined to turn this country into an exporter of its own musicals.
