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For a second consecutive year, the Greek National Opera is travelling to Thessaloniki to participate in the 60th Dimitria Festival – the city’s most historic cultural event – with remarkably successful productions. As part of the GNO’s programme agreement with the Ministry of Culture and other Thessaloniki institutions, five opera, dance, music theatre, and musical productions will be presented there in October 2025, offering a diverse and high-quality artistic programme for all ages.
The legendary operetta I Want to See the Pope! by the renowned composer Theophrastos Sakellaridis, a highly successful production of the GNO Alternative Stage, is travelling to Thessaloniki to take part in the 60th Dimitria Festival. Directed by Natasha Triantafylli, the work will be presented in two unique performances at the Theatre of the Society for Macedonian Studies on 4 and 5 October 2025. The Thessaloniki City Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Nicolas Vassiliou.
The operetta I Want to See the Pope! (1920), which generated strong reactions upon its initial release, fully explores Theophrastos Sakellaridis’ modern bourgeois themes. The composer also penned the libretto, which is a domestic adaptation of Maurice Hennequin’s farce Les joies du foyer (1894). The plot features a newly married bourgeois couple whose relationship is disrupted during their honeymoon trip to Rome when the young wife expresses the desire to see the Pope up close!
The work’s style, language, characters, music, and rhythm reveal a captivating stage world where hypocrisy, exaggeration, exhibitionism, and the unquestioned idealization of certain social institutions are sharply satirized. The audience witnesses a wedding, the expectations of the newlyweds and their relatives, and a Pope who—although he never appears—remains the unseen protagonist of the show throughout its duration, serving as a reminder of the fact that confusion, mix-ups, and the pitfalls of established values are often inextricable parts of human desire.
