Her name is Ellie, she’s sixteen years old and she likes her schoolmate Adam but doesn´t dare to approach him. She has the feeling that not one single person on the planet understands her, and particularly not her mother. Katherine is nearly forty, she is getting married for the second time tomorrow and her hope is that everything will be simply perfect. She would be very happy if her daughter Ellie could understand this and didn´t view her as an enemy. A mother and her daughter. They just cannot see eye to eye and prove incapable of mutual understanding, and so all of a sudden something happens… something strange, crazy, mad… After an argument in which both of them wish for the other to view the world through their eyes, they swap bodies. The spirit of the mother enters the body of her daughter, and vice versa. And so a whirl of crazy and not only comic situations begins as both of our heroines have to spend a whole day in a stranger´s body. The mother tries to deal with the wild environment of a secondary school while her daughter discovers all the duties an adult woman has to manage when it’s one day before her wedding.
Don’t be surprised if the plot seems familiar to you. You’ve probably watched the 2003 film by Mark Waters in which Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis played the main roles. The movie was shown in the Czech Republic under the name Mezi námi děvčaty and it is one of the most popular works in the comedy genre. The story is based on a novel by Mary Rodgers from 1972 which saw its first film adaptation four years later. In this comedy called Freaky Friday, young Jodie Foster starred along with Barbara Harris. In 1995, another film version was created, this time by Walt Disney Studios, and it was aimed at a children´s audience. No wonder this inventive story in which a mother and daughter swap their bodies and experience the craziest day in their lives has found its way to the theatre stage.
The renowned authors of the production – composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey, who were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for their musical Next to Normal – collaborated with the author Bridget Carpenter to adapt the tale, which had already seen several incarnations as a musical show. The musical Freaky Friday had its premiere in 2016 in Virginia, and its Broadway premiere is still under preparation. Brno City Theatre will thus only be the second theatre in the world to have the opportunity to perform it! This exceptionally witty piece, which offers both a grand musical show and an involving story, continues in the tradition of classic, wildly popular titles such as the Witches of Eastwick and GHOST. Petr Gazdík directs, and you can look forward to Alena Antalová or Ivana Vaňková in the role of the mother and Viktória Matušovová as the daughter.
