Grička vještica rock-opera (1979)

After great success of the first croatian rock-musical "Gubec-beg" (so called "rock-opera") the same authors Karlo Metikoš (music), Ivica Krajač (lyrics) and Miljenko Prohaska (orchestration) decided to continue in similar style and bring another famous novel to a musical stage. Where classic historical novel by August Šenoa was the inspiration for the "Gubec beg" this time authors turned their attention to story about witch hunt in Zagreb during Austrian-Hungarian Empire. And this is where biggest problem lies.

First woman journalist in Croatia, Marija Jurić "Zagorka" wrote her "Grička vještica" (The Witch from Grič) as a novel published chapter by chapter in weekly newspapers. It was a huge hit and perhaps best-known croatian pulp fiction book, but its success also forced Zagorka to continue her soap opera forever, eventually finishing with seven books that are clearly hard to edit for a theatre stage. Surely, literary critics always considered this novel a low-entertainment that could never even compete with works by other academic authors but this never prevented audience to buy "Grička vještica" to this day,its still in print. Back to musical: I honestly don't understand how on earth these guys ever expected to have seven-books-saga presented as two-hour piece,because it has hundreds of characters and cutting it at the corners makes a story just confusing. Ivica Krajač had idea to use different dialects for ordinary crowd and aristocrats to make point about different classes - it sounds good on the paper, not so great on the stage. Add priests singing in latin and it's all a mess. In order to squeeze story somehow, composer Karlo Metikoš had short two-minutes songs for everybody,making this musical one long procession of too many characters - I read the books and still felt confused while watching live performance.

Audience was very enthusiastic because of success of "Gubec beg" and even this musical was popular,although not as half as previous one. The cast was largely kept the same,with booming baritone Branko Blaće now playing Captain Siniša who fights the law,crowd and superstition to protect strong-headed Countess Nera (Radojka Šverko) from the burning stake. Since the main female role in "Gubec beg" (Josipa Lisac) was at this time invited by "Atlantic Records" in US, the role of love potion selling witch went to another strong rock vocalist Zdenka Kovačićek who is actually the most interesting singer here,but she has only two short moments. The rest of the cast comes from "Komedija" theatre and they are fine,though hardly anybody got enough space to shine.

I had this double LP as a child and loved it enough to actually memorize the lyrics but from a distance of some 30+ years I can tell that authors perhaps took the wrong story for their second musical because neither music nor lyrics make coherent result. It sounds as patchwork of ideas, no doubt because lyric writer was a continent away from composer who lived in US with his girlfriend and only occasionally they would get together to work on this. Sadly,they never wrote another stage musical.