You never had to fear too much grey from basta. Consistently, the five guys in the best age supply their audience for years with lively songs, stunningly funny stories and subtle ballads and thus work steadfastly on the cultural coloring for a colorful republic of Germany.
That this happens a cappella, so only with voices, is almost a minor matter. Entire orchestras and bands are created before the inner eyes and ears of the audience. Here, too, it is the (musical) richness of colour, the sovereign access to all imaginable genres and styles, which distinguishes basta so much.
After wowing us at their last show "Free Signs" with the office shanty "Cut, copy & paste", they give us this time with their dance number "Reggaeton im Altersheim" another so improbable as ingenious combination of two worlds, which are not to be separated from each other after one hearing.
These madcap yet fitting combinations, along with her stunning stage presence, are something of basta's trademark: "Kranke Männer" combines classic hard rock with masculine snivelling, "Mein Auto" alpine Ländler romance with a satirical hymn to man's best friend, the car.
Apropos satire: The fact that basta's social criticism is never presented with a raised forefinger and moral sermons, but always sympathetically and with a mischievous smile, is their great strength.
basta don't butter us up. That it's hard sometimes, this life, they know and sing about that. But they show us that we have the right to smile about all the impositions. "Life is not a wall tattoo" they say, and the fact that this sentence is almost suitable for a motto itself is another typical basta irony.
No, basta take life seriously and humorously at the same time, and that's something you first have to imitate them. They wring a new perspective out of every painful, sad or even mundane situation and make it more beautiful in the process. And what may have seemed normal, mundane and grey to you one day or the other, you see at the latest after a visit to a basta show: in colour.
Further information: https://www.neues-theater.de/programm/veranstaltungen/811/detail/show.html
