Trivia / Elisabeth

• Acting for Two:
  • For the principal roles, the same actress usually plays both Elisabeth's mother, Ludovika, and Frau Wolf.
  • In many productions, the actors whose characters only appear in one scene (Helene, the wedding guests, Elisabeth's relatives...) also play the Todesengel. The Takarazuka productions have some Black Angels playing Frau Wolf's girls, implying that Death is behind Franz Joseph's seduction.
  • Rudolfs show up in the ensemble in the first act, usually with a fake mustache. The bootleg with Anton Zetterholm as Rudolf even zooms into his face during crowd scenes.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation:
  • There's an official English version of "Ich gehör nur mir". The less said about it, the better.
  • The demo of "Shades of the Night" (Die Schatten werden länger) borders on this.
  • Most songs have at least one fan translation. Some of them are remarkably good, and some are this trope.
• Cast Incest: Sophie Blümel and Marjan Shaki played Hélène von Wittelsbach in the same production as their real-life husbands, Thomas Hohler and Lukas Perman. Duchess Hélène is aunt to Crown Prince Rudolf - Hohler and Perman's character.
• Cut Song: Various songs tend to be dropped or added, depending on the production. "Schwarzer Prinz" is absent from most productions from 2013 onward, and replaced with "Kein Kommen ohne Gehn". ^note On the Raimund Theater revival cast recording, "Kein Kommen" is titled "Rondo - schwarzer Prinz", though. "Hass" is frequently dropped, for... well, obvious reasons ^note It involves Antisemitism. "Éljen" also tends to be dropped.
  • The Japanese, Hungarian, South Korean, Essen and Stuttgart productions, meanwhile, go in the opposite direction and add a song ("Die Verschwörung"). And curiously enough, "Wenn ich tanzen will", despite being one of the show's Signature Songs, was only added to the show a decade after it premiered.
  • Even in the productions that keep all (or most) of the songs, the lyrics tend to vary. Sometimes dramatically — there are at least three different German versions of "Ich will dir nur sagen", and some lines are frequently cut from "Wir oder sie".
  • "Jagd" appears in the original Vienna production and the Hungarian productions, but was cut from all other versions.
  • "Wie du (Reprise)" is cut from the Takarazuka versions.
• Dawson Casting:
  • The musical covers Elisabeth's life from when she was a teenager to her death, so both tropes are inevitable for the actors playing Elisabeth and Franz Joseph.
  • Some of the actresses playing Sophie are obviously too young to be the mother of the actor playing Franz Joseph.
  • The Takarazuka Revue productions have an adult playing young Rudolf.
• Fake Nationality: All over the place.
  • The most notable case: All three of the principal Elisabeths in the German/Austrian productions (the Bavarian princess who became empress of Austria) are Dutch - Pia Douwes, Maya Hakvoort, and Annemieke van Dam. Actual Austrians are rare in the cast.
  • The real Luigi Lucheni was Italian. In the musical he's almost always played by a German actor (or a Turkish actor, in the case of Serkan Kaya).
  • Inevitable in the international productions. The Japanese versions (both Takarazuka and Toho) have Japanese actors playing Austrians/Italians/Germans. Ditto with the South Korean versions.
• Filmed Stage Production: Has had several proshots in various languages. The most notable ones are:
  • Vienna 1992 (starring Pia Douwes and Uwe Kröger; this is a dress rehearsal rather than an actual performance)
  • Vienna 2005 (starring Maya Hakvoort and Máté Kamarás)
  • Essen 2002 (starring Pia Douwes and Uwe Kröger; a recording of Pia's last performance in this production)
  • Budapest 2004 (starring Kata Janza and Szilveszter Szabó)
  • The many Takarazuka versions (as of 2022 there have been ten, not including concert versions)
  • Toho 2016 (two different performances, one starring Mari Hanafusa and Yuu Shirota and the other starring Mari Hanafusa and Yoshio Inoue)
• Follow the Leader:
  • It seems Michael Kunze got the idea for the show after working on the German translation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical Evita; there are way too many similarities between the two shows to ignore this. One can say that Elisabeth is virtually Evita on a grander scale.
  • Similarities to The Phantom of the Opera (also translated by Kunze for the Viennese/German premiere) are also prevalent, particularly with the Viennese revivals.
    • The leading ladies' names get musical motifs to go with them. "Christine, Christine..." "Elisabeth..." (sung by Death and Franz Joseph), and "Elisabeth, Elisabeth!" (sung by the chorus of the dead).
    • A Möbius strip Shout-Out even occurs with Sisi's famous star dress: Emmy Rossum's Think of Me costume in the 2004 movie is a near-duplicate of it.
    • Ich will dir nur sagen (the reprise of Ich gehör nur mir and act one finale) is a three-way song with Death, Elisabeth, and Franz Joseph. Death is dressed in black and sings to Sisi from within a mirror, which the Phantom also does prior to leading Christine into his lair for the famous title song.
  • Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay went on to write two more similar musical biopics about Marie Antoinette and Queen Elizabeth I. (Yes, they wrote two musicals about famous European queens named "Elizabeth/Elisabeth.")
    • Marie Antoinette proved to be an extravagant flop in its original format before undergoing extensive revisions for its South Korean premiere in 2014 and Lady Bess (Queen Elizabeth I) has not been performed outside Japan as of 2020.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Elisabeth is beloved in Japan, to the point that Takarazuka stages one performance (with different troupes) nearly once a year, each of which get their own DVD. The popularity can attributed to Zuka emphasizing the romantic angle between Death and Elisabeth, the signature sparkly aesthetic and Lighter and Softer direction, and the array of beautiful actresses (Death is typically the main attraction with his androgynous beauty, the I Just Want to Be Loved trope being added to his motivation, and his interactions with Crown Prince Rudolf.) Toho also does mixed-genders performances that are Truer to the Text ^note including Hass, which is basically early antisemitism in song form.
  • Mate Kamaras also developed something of a following in Japan. He even appeared as Death on the Toho production for a time, and later starred in at least one other Japanese musical.
  • Mark Seibert has a sizable Chinese fanbase, partially fueled by him performing as Death there on tour.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Takarazuka productions have Lucheni adlib at the start of act 2, before "Kitsch".
• Missing Episode:
  • Good luck finding a full video of the Finnish production. The only evidence it ever existed is a few clips, photos and audios from it.
  • The 1997 Takarazuka shinjin kouen was never fully recorded and only a few clips survive from it. This is especially irritating for Zuka fans, because Death in this version was played by Nao Ayaki, who would later become Top Star of Moon Trope (and played Death again in 2005).
• No Export for You: Don't hold your breath if you're expecting an English-language production any time soon.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Brothers Aeneas and Timotheus Hollweg alternated the role of Rudolf as a child.
  • In the 2005 Takarazuka production, Nao Ayaki (Death) and Oto Ayana (young Rudolf) are sisters.
• Role Reprise:
  • Pia Douwes played Elisabeth in the 1992 world premiere in Vienna, and later reprised the role in the 1999 Dutch (The Hague) and 2001 German (Essen) premieres. She later played Elisabeth again in subsequent German productions in 2006 (Stuttgart) and 2008 (Berlin). Most recently she returned to the role in the 2017 Dutch concert production and a similar Austrian concert staged at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna.
  • Máté Kamarás played Death in a Hungarian production before reprising the role in the 2005 Vienna revival. He later played Death again in both Hungary and Japan.
  • Several former Takarazuka actresses (Mari Hanafusa, Jun Sena, Hana Ranno, and Reika Manaki) who played Elisabeth while part of the Revue have gone on to play Elisabeth in Toho productions.
  • The vast majority of the cast for Elisabeth in Concert reprise their roles, either from normal or concert productions. The only aversion for 2022 is Abla Alaoui, new to the role as young Elisabeth - which is also the first time there has ever been separate actresses playing young and old Elisabeth. Usually, Sisi is played by one actress from beginning to end. Pia Douwes tried this for 2019, but it was most likely deemed breaking the suspension of disbelief as she is far too old to play a young girl, so Abla Alaoui is switched out with Maya Hakvoort in the middle of "Ich gehör nur mir" for 2022.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The earliest Toho productions added a new song, which was translated into German as "Zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit". At least one version of the German translation was recorded and can be found on Youtube, but the song itself never appeared in the German productions. It was later cut from Toho productions too.
  • An early version of "Wenn ich tanzen will" was written, called "Wenn ich tanz". It has similar lyrics but a different tune, and although recordings exist it was never used in the show.

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