HET GROOT NIET TE VERMIJDEN
Het Groot Niet Te Vermijden consists out of 5 men; Louis Kockelmann, Peter Tinke,
Jochem Kroon, Martin Bakker , Sjoerd Plak (and Rien Kroon (director)) who make
music, theatre and jokes together. The current theatre &music company was just a
theatrical amusements band in 1985 but over the years has grown into a proper quintet
of performers. The show I went to is called ‘Save the last dance’ and it is their twelfth
show. What the show really was about is hard to say. At times it was a musical history
lesson with a whole lot of golden oldies and at other times it was just a chain of humour
and dressing up.
The evening started with all of them on stage while the audience could clearly see
backstage and some servants walking around with a broom cleaning the stage. Then
they start with playing and singing. I personally did not know what to expect and did not
feel like having to listen to a bunch of songs I don’t know the entire night . Luckily they
started the jokes pretty soon after that. They were dressed as Indians and were talking
to each other about ‘Life’. Suddenly two of them appear as cowboys and they fight the
Indians. Also to frequently appear on stage was a doll of a woman. One of the men
dances with ‘her’ causing much laughter and later on actually turns into her (causing
more laughter). They made a personal, comic version of Nena’s 99 luftballons with one
of them hanging on to the ‘balloon’ counting down the number
98, 97, 96 etc. which makes him eventually fall. The men form
the band ‘Kukiband’ pretending to be old ladies nagging about
kuki-paste and playing altered songs of Marco Borsato like
‘Binnen’ on their accordions. What was really nice to see was a
rhythm someone played in the background but it seemed as if
the sound was caused by the man touching a row of laser
lights. It went totally synchronised so I was pretty impressed
by that. Then the men appear behind a cardboard impression
of a YouTube video, on which they had to move the white
round progress indicator themselves, and perform another
song. A brilliant move was playing old songs and let the
audience guess what each one was called; mostly the
somewhat older part of the public participated nevertheless
very clever and I did know a few of them. I probably already
forgot a lot of funny things that happened but these were the most memorable at least to
me.