Bajaga musical arrives at BELEF in Belgrade's Sava Centar

The record Momcilo Bajagic Bajaga released in 1985 was called Sa druge strane jastuka, The Other Side of the Pillow. The same title now belongs to a musical staged by Terazije Theatre, which plays Sava Centar on September 12 at 8 p.m. as part of the 33rd Belgrade Summer Festival (BELEF). The borrowed title is more than a poster line. It announces the method: this is not a biography of the songwriter, it is his catalogue treated as raw material.

The setting is early 1980s Belgrade, and the frame is the so called Terazije triangle, the few downtown blocks that were both an address and a stage for one generation. Thirty songs carry the story of the people who moved through it, performed with the choir, the ballet and the orchestra kept on stage alongside the actors for the entire show. That staging choice is not a technicality. It decides how an audience will hear songs they have only ever met through speakers.

Who made it

Jug Radivojevic directs, Stevan Koprivica wrote the book and the dramaturgy, and Aleksandar Sedlar handles the arrangements and conducts. Choreography is by Milica Cerovic, costumes by Tatjana Radisic, and the set is by Aleksandar Denic, a designer whose name has for the past fifteen years turned up more often on German stages than Serbian ones, largely through his long partnership with director Frank Castorf. Putting that kind of visual thinking inside a domestic musical is a story in itself, since an aesthetic that served demolition in Castorf’s theatre is here asked to serve a genre that usually wants a clean, fast picture.

The cast includes:

• Slaven Doslo
• Milena Zivanovic
• Danijel Korsa
• Zarko Stepanov
• Vladan Savic
• Igor Damnjanovic
• Elizabeta Djorevska
• Kristina Savic

Why Bajaga’s songbook suits the stage

Because it is written in the third person. His songs from that stretch tend to come with a character, a location and a small piece of action already built in, which is exactly what a dramaturg has to invent when working with a confessional writer. Koprivica’s job is not to add meaning to the songs but to build a walkable arc between them, and that is where jukebox musicals usually break. Thirty titles is a lot of material, even for a full evening.

What changes once the show leaves its home stage

The Sava Centar hall is far bigger than the theatre’s own, and that is not only a question of seat count. A musical assembled for a room where a whisper carries has to rebalance everything in a large auditorium, from the pace of dialogue to the ratio between orchestra and voice, and a live band placed in full view is a deliberate risk rather than a comfortable option. So the question worth carrying into the hall is whether an urban miniature expands in that space or thins out in it.

There is an irony in the geography, too. A show about the Terazije triangle, played by the house that sits on Terazije, crosses the river into a building conceived as the opposite of everything that triangle stood for. If the direction uses that, it gains a layer the home stage could never have given it.

Tickets and date

Tickets are on sale at Ticket Vision outlets and online at tickets.rs. There is a single performance, on September 12, which makes this a festival event rather than one stop on a touring schedule.

For BELEF, now in its 33rd edition, programming a domestic musical instead of an imported title is a statement about editorial policy, not a gap filled at short notice. That is the angle worth watching, rather than the nostalgia the name Bajaga switches on by itself.