Bajaga Makes Surprise Appearance at BELEF Closing

After nearly two hours of singing and dancing on the Sava Centar stage, another voice joined in, and it took the audience only a few bars to realize who they were actually watching. On Saturday evening, September 12, Momcilo Bajagic Bajaga joined the cast of the musical “On the Other Side of the Pillow” and sang the title song together with them, in a completely unplanned moment, right as the 33rd Belgrade Summer Festival (BELEF) was supposed to close quietly.

The production that closed BELEF is not new. Terazije Theatre had already staged it for a string of sold out shows, and the musical is built from thirty songs from Bajaga’s catalog, woven into a story set in the early 1980s. The plot follows young Belgrade of that era, its city romances, and the buzz of Terazije Square that almost no one remembers firsthand anymore, only through the songs that outlived it.

The book is credited to Stevan Koprivica, who described the show as “an urban fairytale set in the Terazije triangle,” while Jug Radivojevic directed. Around them is a team that turned nostalgia into craft: arrangements by Aleksandar Sedlar, set design by Aleksandar Denic, choreography by Milica Cerovic, costumes by Tanja Radisic. The lead roles belong to Milena Zivanovic and Slaven Doslo, joined on the Sava Centar stage by Danijel Korsa, Zarko Stepanov and Vladan Savic.

Why Is This Musical Returning to Big Stages?

Because it does not sell the 1980s as a museum piece, it sells them as material for a story that still works today. The difference between a jukebox musical that just strings hits together and one that builds a real dramatic arc out of them shows up exactly in moments like this: when the audience recognizes the song before it recognizes the scene, then stays to follow both through to the end. “On the Other Side of the Pillow” makes that difference, which is why it moved from Terazije to the city’s largest indoor stage, not the other way around.

Tanjug reports that around three thousand people watched the show at Sava Centar, while Telegraf writes that the hall was filled to the last seat without giving an exact number. The difference is more in wording than in substance, but both figures point the same way: BELEF did not close modestly, it closed with a production the hall’s capacity clearly did not hold back.

What set the evening apart from previous performances was not the show itself but a gesture that no festival material had announced in advance. When the author of the songs steps onto the stage of his own musical and sings a number alongside actors who normally perform it without him, the line between a concert and a theater production briefly disappears, and that is exactly what the jukebox format rarely manages to do. Srpske.rs first announced this BELEF performance back on July 30, but without a single mention that Bajaga himself would take the stage.

Closing a festival with an institutional program is routine and, as a rule, forgettable. This was not that. Not because of how many people filled the Sava Centar hall, but because of a moment no schedule had planned for: the author stepped down from the position where he had built other people’s roles and, for a moment, became one of the performers of his own story. For a musical already running its second string of sold out dates, that is confirmation the story still carries the hall, not just the songs that built it.