Everyone wants to see the Pope! After a successful run of sold-out performances, the legendary operetta I Want to See the Pope! by Theophrastos Sakellaridis is touring Greece under Natasha Triantafylli’s direction, featuring an outstanding cast of opera performers and musicians.

The operetta I Want to See the Pope! (1920), which generated strong reactions upon its initial release, 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 to 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 idealisation of certain social institutions are sharply satirised. 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.