I Want to See the Pope! | Crete

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The legendary operetta I Want to See the Pope! by Theophrastos Sakellaris continues its successful tour around Greece, directed by Natasha Triantafylli, with the participation of an excellent cast of opera singers and musicians.

The operetta I Want to See the Pope! (1920) 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 in 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.