Charlie Chaplin spent a million and a half dollars to shoot his favorite film, City Lights (1931). And it took 22 months, with many stresses, layoffs, rehirings, like Virginia Cheryl, who played the blind florist. There was a scene that was filmed 342 times.

But the silent romantic comedy, which was made by the popular “homeless” during the heyday of talking cinema, reached about five million dollars. It was considered one of the best films of all time. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it #11 on its list of the 100 best American films, and a year later it was voted “the most romantic comedy ever made”.

On the 23rd of the month City Lights will be staged as a musical at the National Theatre, on the stage of Kotopoulis Rex, with music by Thodoris Oikonomos, lyrics by Stavros Stavros and directed by Amalia Bennett. “Another musical”, as recommended by its creators. Unlike the film, the first scene does not begin with the unveiling of the monument, but introduces us to Chaplin on stage. The child of artists, father – a musical singer who abandoned his family, and mother – a singer and actress, Chaplin learned a harsh life from an early age. On one of those nights, he rescued his alcoholic mother, a restless mother who tried to sing on stage but lost her voice and was booed by the audience. The producers pushed the five-year-old boy onto the stage, and when he began to sing, he captivated the audience.

Continuous movement

Why did the creator take the story from City Lights instead of working on a new one, we asked the composer Todoris Oikonoma, who co-wrote the adaptation with Amalia Bennett and Nikita Milivojevic. He was touched by this story, he replies. “Emotion (movement) in art plays a big role, because we lack it. In my 2011 collaboration with Bob Wilson on The Odyssey, I was fascinated by the daily workshops he gave to us. How the viewer can perceive everything by the movement of the body. In our new job at the National, we put that into practice. Continuous movement in a show full of music, staged from the first to the last minute, ”he emphasizes“ K ”.

He elaborates that he only keeps the plot from Chaplin’s creation. In the musical, which we will see, original music and songs. “We just took a really cool story directed by the magician Charlie Chaplin and do something completely different musically. I’ve only seen the film once and what moved me was the concept of love and giving. The hero steals money from a rich man, even going to jail to help a blind flower seller.”

“Such a romantic story in our time is like opening a window to a garden that no longer exists,” says composer T. Oikonomu.

What Chaplin allusions remain relevant? “The relationship between the rich and the poor worries us even today, at a time when we were scared by the pandemic, and now we are scared by the possibility of a new world war. We are already seeing a clash of great powers, economic power over the lives of the people who die every day in Ukraine. Such a romantic story in our time is like opening a window to a garden that no longer exists.”

The hero who resists

According to the plot of the film, an unemployed Charlo in America of financial collapse falls in love with a blind flower saleswoman and does everything to provide her with money for the operation she needs. In a world given over to the pursuit of money, the hero resists, fights, survives, dreams, falls in love, proposes.

How will this novel touch a new generation that faces violence in their daily lives at school, in the family, in society as a whole? “What are we going to do in such a climate? How do I deal with my 10 year old son and his friends who decide to listen to trap? One way to convince them is to see the other side. To show them that I know very well how the melody moves. It doesn’t exist in real life. You see, the melody today is considered obsolete, something old. In response to what is happening in our time, we make a work full of melody. It’s like we’re shooting a romantic but film noir that has fragile, colorful songs that are very fast-paced and humorous. It has something from the times of Weyl and Brecht.”

Eight years in music and professionally from the age of 16, studying piano at the Athens Conservatory, postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Music in London, collaboration as a pianist and arranger with Mikis Theodorakis, Thanos Mikroutsikos, Giannis Markopoulos, Nikos Mamagakis, participation in Lucio concerts Dalla, Lara Fabian, Justin Hayward and many theatrical collaborations, Thodoris Economou credits the music industry’s “fat cow era” as the cause of its downfall. “There was so much grass that the cow burst. The quality of Greek music has fallen. But there are musicians, old and new, who try, but we don’t know them because their work is not recorded. The Internet is chaotic.”

So the trap has found ground to fly? “There have always been cracks in the house of music, it’s just that once people knew the joy of listening and reading, and also sweeping up any dirt that got into the house. Today, the genre feels dominant in an empty house. However, let’s be optimistic, the future belongs to the young.”