A review on the DIWAN’s comedy night with Michael Niavarani, Maryam Akhondy and “Banu”
“I am so exhausted. I just cannot believe that I have been the fastest sperm around, and on top of that even a Persian sperm: Hello! Is there a cap around anywhere or what?”
The whole DIWAN team did a countdown for the past months, weeks and days waiting for the great moment – belakhare and sarandjam, finally, on December 17th, we managed to get Austrian-Iranian cabaret artist to visit Cologne for a benefit performance. How many people would come anyway? Which location would be suitable? Who could frame Michael’s show with music? Questions over questions the whole DIWAN team was dealing with every day and until they would go to sleep. At that time, prior to Christmas, Niavarani was playing in front of sold out audiences in Austria, staging his adorable comedy called “The (perfect) Disaster Dinner”. It was aired on TV day and night and just at that time, the DIWAN tried to convince him to come to Cologne and to show is best gags of his bilingual show there. Would he actually show up? We shivered until the last moment. But finally, we managed to sell by as much as 1055 tickets, the city hall of Mühlheim was packed until its last seat, and we made people cry and have stomach pain. Those were tears of happiness, because the son of a Viennese lady and a Persian gentleman kept his promise! In his typical profound but rough style, Niavarani explored the ups and downs of his mother and father country, the sense and non-sense of Persian habits and Austrian traditions…. Besides the highlights of his show “Yek Shabe Irani” (an Iranian night) he also read passages from his new book “The Early Worm Has Bats In The Belfry”: Highly amusing, in parts strongly satirical stories about love, women, divorce, liberal market economy, depressions and the Burnout syndrome – “a fashionable disease, actually not existent but having about 20 symptoms. I am in a permanent stage of being overburdened myself. All the time! Since I was born! The birth canal as such was total stress for me. I was so exhausted afterwards that I kept sleeping for a couple of years. We do love the term “burnout” because it points its finger on our work load. It has nearly become a status symbol. If you simply speak about being overloaded at work, you look like a sissy. Even public servants start having a burnout. That is like going to court in a paternity suit against a eunuch!”
Maryam Akhondy and her women’s chorus framed the evening with their music, by singing folk songs about women that were left behind, about untruthful mistresses and the life on the countryside. The evening’s highlight was a joint performance with both artists singing and Michael Niavarani dancing in a perfectly Persian style, swinging his hands and hips at the same time. They sang a famous song by Iranian pop song artist Ebi, called “Khanum Gol” (flower-like woman) in Persian language first and afterwards in a German translation. This finally caused the audience to nearly fall off their chairs: “Oh my flower-like woman, I can’t wait, come and visit me, come over to the other side of the bridge, the tears of my eyes have built a bridge for you, a rainbow bridge… when I think of you, my hands and my heart shiver, I scream out loud a thousand times that I am in love with you…!”
An unforgettable evening and we are counting down hours, days and weeks until we can enjoy Michael back in Cologne again.
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Picture Gallery
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