Bodo Wartke

Bodo Wartke: Tender Spot

Abera Kadabera! Clever wordplay, surprising rhyme craft, and virtuosic piano playing — Bodo Wartke’s seventh show offers entertaining musical cabaret and a tongue-twisting slam full of verbal acrobatics. The entertainer and poet uses wonder to counter the power of habit and sets humor alongside old patterns.

Lightness! — Why not? Bodo Wartke hits the tender spot!
In his seventh piano cabaret program, the musician and cabaret artist presents himself as a storyteller who draws absurdly comic episodes from everyday life, with all its inconsistencies, and condenses them in every sense of the word. With extraordinary playfulness and linguistic agility, Bodo Wartke casts a dancing glance at the phenomena of how we live together. He draws from the rich treasure of the German language and elevates its vocabulary with a delicate sensibility.

Problems with a printer turn out to be the identity crisis of a technical device stuck in the wrong body. The “egg hole,” familiar from children’s rhymes, sends the drowsy musician into a hair-raisingly absurd yet philosophical stream of consciousness. And the cabaret artist further develops well-known tongue twisters into poems and short anarchic stories, which he performs as rap with piano or cajon in a variety of musical genres — a tongue-twister slam full of rhythm ’n’ poetry. Once again, the stage artist shows himself to be a musically versatile entertainer, equally at home in pop and high culture, sampling his way through our daily life in both language and music. At times comical in his satirical exaggeration of unrestrained consumer mania, presented as a rap cover of a summer hit. At times provocatively sarcastic in a parody of the annoyance of mansplaining, here as rock ’n’ roll. And also lyrical in a classical adaptation, in which the pianist takes us along in a gentle ode to the moon and, with a backward glance, offers a quiet shift in perspective.

And so, amid all the lightness, serious tones are always present. The songwriter reflects thoughtfully on early-learned, unhealthy behavioral patterns that can shape our lives. He critically examines misogyny and the radical interpretation of religious dogma. Yet the hopeful outlook is not missing either: What might our world look like if humanity’s many tender wounds were healed?

On the way there, there will be slips of the tongue and stumbles. Bodo Wartke welcomes them, for they are part of the journey to the tender spot.

Program and cast