Did Didi, the drag queen, really exist? Or does she only haunt the gaps in history? Didi, Didi L´amour Schwarz.
»DRAG! – The Opera« is a music theatre project at the intersection of opera, drag and queer herstoriography. Conceived and premiered by Shlomi Moto Wagner and The House of Mazeltov, the performance brings together live singing, lip sync and orchestra in a contemporary form of opera.
The starting point is the legendary story of Didi, imagined as the first Jewish drag queen in postwar Berlin. Her biography grows out of interviews with Berlin drag queens of different generations and works as an “effective fiction” that makes suppressed and marginalised queer lives visible. Instead of reproducing classic operatic material, the life experiences of queer performers are transformed into mythological opera arias. Verismo arias, electronic beats and queer pop references open up emotional spaces of resonance in which individual and collective stories find a new place.
“DRAG! – The Opera” treats drag and opera as equal, ritualised stage forms and writes erased narratives into the cultural canon from a queer perspective of today.

Shlomi Moto Wagner is an interdisciplinary performer, musician, author and drag queen a.k.a. Mazy Mazeltov, and is developing the piece with Heinrich Horwitz (co director, dramaturgy), Eloain Lovis Hübner (composition), Misha Cvijović (musical direction), Maria Magdalena Emmerig and Charlotte Pistorius (set and costume design).