The world’s theatre-loving audiences owe this evergreen stage production, now a cult musical, to the inspired co-operation of Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. The first European performance was given in London’s West End in 1958 and it has been staged in Hungary since 1969.
The special feature of this performance is that the Kiégő Izzók visual team uses inventive projection and various visual elements to add colour to the performance.

What else is needed for an operetta but wonderful melodies, an exciting story and lots of love? And we are certain to get all these when a work by Franz Lehár is staged. This is especially so in the case of the Merry Widow with its world famous melody in the frame of a bitter-sweet love story. After many years Hanna Glavari, a wealthy widow, once again meets Danilo Danilovits, the love of her youth. They have both changed over the years: the woman has become suspicious and hard-hearted, the man cynical and dissolute. Past errors and present grievances prevent the two people who were made for each other from finding the way to each other easily. Theirs is the story of a love born and revived with great difficulty, set against the background of a small South-East European state where the politicians are manoeuvring to cope with an economic crisis, for their own survival and that of their country.

The music and story of The Merry Widow are imbued with passion, an unadmitted, suppressed and erupting passion. Perhaps that is why it always has such a powerful impact on both audiences and performers. It was first performed, with success, in Vienna in 1905 and in Budapest in 1906, launching it on its triumphant way. It is played on opera and operetta stages around the globe and it is said that there is not an evening when it is not performed somewhere in the world …

Now, after an absence of a few years, The Merry Widow is returning to Budapest rejuvenated in a new production, with new performers.

Surveys in recent years have shown that the bittersweet story of Abigél is one of the most widely read books in Hungary and the film version of the novel has been regularly screened on various TV channels for decades, always with high viewer ratings.
The novelist, a living classic, has received many requests in recent years to authorise a stage production of the novel but she always rejected such plans. But after seeing the première of The Masked Ball written and directed on the basis of her novel by the Operetta Theatre’s talented young director Szilárd Somogyi, Magda Szabó was enchanted. Seeing the well deserved success she simply said: “Let it be. I give you my daughter, Abigél!”