Viva la mamma!

Lead Donor of the GNO

The Greek National Opera joins the 61st Dimitria Festival, Thessaloniki's largest and most historic cultural event, scheduled for 1 to 26 October 2026. The GNO will present a diverse programme ranging from opera and melodrama to shadow puppet opera and a cine-opera pastiche at the Royal Theatre and the Ceremony Hall of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, offering audiences the opportunity to discover and enjoy rare works, new productions, and highly successful performances. The GNO’s participation in the 61st Dimitria Festival’s programme is part of a Framework Agreement between the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Thessaloniki institutions.

Epic costumes, epic misunderstandings, epic laughter! The successful comic opera Viva la mamma! – a fresh and subversive take on Gaetano Donizetti’s Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali (Conventions and Inconveniences of the Stage, 1827) – is presented under Sofia Paschou’s direction. Odd sets, stunning costumes with endless trains, and human vanity take centre stage, while a select cast of opera singers and actors delivers an unexpected situation comedy filled with misunderstandings, bountiful humour, and sarcasm.   

Viva la mamma! brilliantly satirizes the endless confrontations and vanity prevailing behind the scenes of a music theatre company. The plot focuses on the preparations for a performance that test everyone’s nerves and relationships. A semi-amateur troupe struggles, against all odds, to stage an opera performance; their effort, however, derails because of the signers’ whims and strife, the ploys of a desperate tenor from abroad, and, most of all, the arrival of the sweeping “mama”
Agata, the mother of the second protagonist in line, who barges into rehearsals demanding revisions and new music written especially for her daughter – until the entire production ultimately ends in blatant failure.