Matchbox: The Musical

A lower-middle class apartment heaves, fit to burst. The AC unit’s stopped working, the TV’s always on. Frappé coffee and cigarettes. The workaday strain of a coffee shop-owning father, and a mother’s overwrought voice. The rhythmic rants of a sexist son, and a brother-in-law’s grand aria. Searing words and burning questions, all re-expressed in musical ways: “What you gonna do about Linda, Vangelis?”

This crushing family massacre – centered on Dimitris, the owner of a coffee shop – soon flares up and, in the space of a single Sunday in August, everything blows sky high. Violence rockets, through the roof. The characters enter and exit this "matchbox" trailed by the desperate songs and strains of their despair. The spouse Maria, the children, assorted other kith and kin – everyone rages against everyone else. And performing solo at the heart of it all: the paterfamilias.

The Greek family we’ve come to love and hate remains unchanged, 20 years on. Its members all “scream” their own theme – each to their own music. The conflicts and dreams, problems and ills that afflict the “sacred” institution that is the Greek family all feature in this polystylistic, high-risk musical spectacle: “War! War! This is war!”

If people didn’t speak but rather sang, what would that be like? And how might “Matchbox” be made a musical? Yiannis Niarros takes up the gauntlet, attempting to answer these audacious questions in the most extreme and groundbreaking of ways. Nine musicians, eleven performers, and an extensive creative team magnify the grotesque realities of Greek family life and – steered by Yiannis Niarros and Alexandros Livitsanos’ original music – present an incredible new version of the legendary “Matchbox”.

When the craziest fantasy comes true...
When the wackiest thought turns to action...
When the most difficult moment is overcome...
When the greatest risk is eradicated…
When the wind of creativity sweeps everything…
When the unimaginable takes shape...
When the absurd takes you by the hand...
When surprise has your eyes rolling…
When little devils whisper in your ear...
When war sings to itself...
When fire goes up in flames...
When the stage is being transported...
When inspiration shows its teeth...
When, after all, the miracle takes place...
Then, speaking from the heart, there is only one thing I can say: MATCHBOX – THE MUSICAL!

-Yannis Economides, Athens - October 2022

What would our day be like, if our morning gasp of boredom was like a fermata in G Major? Or if our typical coffee order, freddo espresso of a Greek extraction, was like an overture for an epic work to come? How would then a Greek musical look like, not with Tony and Danny Zuko as its characters, but Vangelis and Mitsos?

The “Matchbox” by Yannis Economides is a ‘Colosseum of Heroes’, an ideal hotbed to tackle such questions. Emotions so absolute that touch the fringes of the symbolic, and characters so – beautifully – grotesque that can only remind you of something – terrifyingly – familiar… The fusion of these two worlds, ‘musical’ and ‘Economides’, however unconventional and ‘wrong’ as it might seem, turned out explosive in the end. In a work where the collision of characters is its fuel, its musical rendering could not but include the collision of musical styles.

The characters of the Greek family are each one grabbing their gun and head to war. The immortal father/protector/ultra-macho figure of the Greek family has not seized to bark twenty years later, either through psychosomatic violence or through his sexist, light folkish songs. Our ‘little daughter’ carries on body-shaming everyone, to the rhythm of despair and brattiness. The twenty-year-old, not-yet-laid trappers (“my sonny boy, my prince”) are dreaming of threesomes in sex shacks filled with drugs. And we dance to the rhythm, while we dream of a politically correct world. My fear that the pathologies of the Greek family would be dispelled or smoothed out if "Matchbox" was rendered musically, fell by the wayside. As did my hope, that twenty years after "Matchbox," we would all have changed. Ultimately, however, the Greek musical can be hard, realistic and raw, and we still are the Greeks of 2002.

-Yiannis Niarros

Kypseli, apartment building entrance, smell of onion.

2nd floor flat.

Bruckner and Kazantzidis are sitting on the sofa in their flannel underwear, watching “West Side Story” deeply moved, while their beers have turned to hot piss because of the heat.
On the balcony, Antypas is firing up the grill to roast some pork chops, while next to him, Attic is cleaning up the bird droppings, humming “…and I will open my door for you” and sweeping water with chlorine down at the balconies below.
This quietness is interrupted by a hopped-up Peugeot 206 that revs down the street, with the subwoofers blasting “We burned once more tonight, we burned,” making the windows rattling.
Bela Bartók storms out from the flat next door and in a fit of rage curses everyone to hell, shouting “we have a sick person here, enough with your squealing clarinets, it’s noontime!” and then heads off to burn some incense in the corridor.
It’s quiet again, but not for long.
Mozart has gone up the terrace to fix the TV antenna, so he can watch a football game with Olympiakos at 19:00, while his elderly father is yelling instructions at him from the air shaft.
A total n***ouse, no question about it.

How can anyone concentrate to write a music score?

-Alexandros Livitsanos

It’s a Sunday summer morning in an apartment in Korydallos. A family of four lives there: father Dimitris, mother Maria, their son Loukas, and their daughter Kiki are all at home, which they share with the unmarried mother’s cousin Margarita. Dimitris owns a coffee shop and plans to open the shop of his dreams with his wife’s brother Giorgos as a partner. Then, Giorgos appears with disturbing news, along with Vangelis, Dimitris’ employee at the coffee shop, who faces a dilemma about what to do with his girlfriend, Linda. At the same time, son Loukas dreams of having orgies with his new girlfriend Angela, daughter Kiki insults her best friend Katerina uttering vulgar swears, while God-fearing cousin Margarita prays so that the family stops fighting. And suddenly Maria blurts out truths that no one wants to hear. A family massacre soon flares up and on the course of a single August day nothing will remain the same.

-“Matchbox” (winner of the Greek Film Critics Association Award for Best Greek Film of the Year in 2003) was the first feature film to be written and directed by Yannis Economides. The screenplay was shaped by a rehearsal process that lasted more than seven months, with major contributions to its final form made by the cast: Errikos Litsis, Eleni Kokkidou, Costas Xikominos, Giannis Voulgarakis, Ioanna Ivanoudi, Stavros Yagoulis, Angeliki Papoulia, and Serafita Grigoriadou.

-Released in theaters 20 years ago, the film tackled all the social ills of the institution that is the Greek family in ways no Greek filmmaker had done before. Since then, and right through until today, many lines from the film have entered the culture as slogans daubed on walls, pop references, and catchphrases. It turns out that back then, Economides foreshadowed a Greek family state of affairs – you often now hear the phrase: “We’re like something out of ‘Matchbox’.”

-“Matchbox”, coming to the Onassis Stegi Main Stage, marks the first directorial work to be presented there by the actor Yiannis Niarros, winner of the 2018 Dimitris Horn Best Actor Award for his performance in the Yannis Economides play “Sleep, Stella” at the National Theater of Greece.

-The first pandemic lockdown found Yiannis Niarros and the composer Alexandros Livitsanos trying to merge the world of “Matchbox” with that of musicals. And despite the general restrictions of that time, Niarros found the process particularly liberating “because this is an undertaking where there’s no chance of being wrong. Everything is ‘wrong’ already, in the sense that there’s no precedent. I feel our music perfectly reflects the emotions triggered by the film, and expands them too. It’s epic, popular, dirty, dark, hilarious, ridiculous, serious, moving, uplifting – in reality, there’s no easy way to describe it.”