Berlin, Du coole Sau

A big band's idea that turned into a revue

The engine of the show predates the show itself. The Capital Dance Orchestra was founded in Berlin in 2005 under Robert Mudrinic and David Canisius, a thirteen-piece band that plays the swing of the 1920s to the 1940s in period instrumentation and period dress, and whose standard work is the repertoire of the old Berlin dance palaces. Over two decades it has backed guest singers from well outside that niche — Barbara Schöneberger, Katja Riemann, Vicky Leandros, Nina Hagen and the countertenor Jochen Kowalski among them — and since 2013 it has worked regularly with the cabaret performer Bodo Wartke.

In 2019 the band's founders sat down with the singers Sharon Brauner and Meta Hüper and built something with a narrative spine rather than a programme. Brauner supplied the idea, the text and the direction; Hüper took the musical direction and a second lead vocal. The result premiered on 5 August 2021 and has kept the same shape since: a chronological march from the Luna Park of the 1920s to the Berghain of the present, with the loo attendant Adele as the connective tissue between decades.

Brauner has said the starting point was the history lying around on every Berlin street corner, and the wish to write a revue that took in the whole of the last century — nightlife and subculture included — from the 1920s to the 2020s rather than stopping, as most Weimar-flavoured shows do, in 1933.

The four people at the front

Brauner was born in 1969 into a Berlin film family — her uncle was the post-war producer Artur Brauner — and has described herself as coming from a deeply Jewish family without being observant; her parents survived the Holocaust. She has been on stage and in front of cameras since early childhood, with parts in more than sixty television and cinema films, among them Das letzte Mahl, which she also co-produced and which reached German cinemas on 30 January 2025 in over 130 houses. Alongside the acting she has released five albums of her own German songs and Yiddish standards, mixing jazz, chanson, classical material and klezmer, and took the Walther von der Vogelweide prize in 2018.

Hüper came the other way round, from inside the orchestra pit. She trained and worked as a classical violinist in orchestras across Germany before moving into jazz, swing and chanson as a singer and multi-instrumentalist, with credits alongside Till Brönner, Max Raabe and Udo Jürgens. She has played with the ensemble Salut Salon since 2016 and tours a solo programme, Wenn es Nacht wird, in which she moves between violin, melodica and singing saw — an instrument that turns up in the revue too.

The burlesque element belongs to Lola La Tease, a British dancer who began in classical ballet at the Semperoper Ballett in Dresden before joining the showgirls of the Friedrichstadt-Palast, and who is billed as one of the thirty best burlesque performers in Europe. Oliver Hildebrandt handles make-up and costume for the production.

Adele, the part that holds it together

Adele is played by Ades Zabel, an actor who has been a fixture of the Berlin cabaret and drag scene since the 1980s, sometimes solo and sometimes with the comedy group Die Teufelsberger. He is best known for the stage figure Edith Schröder and her coarse Berlin humour, for the Drei Drachen vom Grill cinema trilogy made between 1987 and 1992, and for DJ sets as DJ Adessa Zabel.

The device is simple and it dates the whole evening: Adele starts as a working girl minding a Berlin lavatory in 1920 and is still there, decade by decade, as the fittings and the signage change around her. She reports in broad Berlin dialect on the city's high points and its defeats, from the building of the Wall to its fall, and on the mixture of trash and glamour that the show treats as the local speciality.

How the part reaches the audience has varied. In the November 2023 run at the Tipi am Kanzleramt, Zabel appeared as Adele in filmed inserts between numbers rather than in person. A Tipi date on 25 April 2025 was listed with Ralph Morgenstern and Zabel alternating in the role, and the current tour listings credit Zabel as Adele again.

A setlist built as a timeline

The song order is the script. The Tipi programme opens with an instrumental Ein Lied geht um die Welt and Wir machen Musik, then hands over to Adele in 1920 before Lola, Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß — performed with singing saw and piano — Bublichki and Star von Berlin. Harlem Heat marks the shift to the 1930s, where Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen and Irgendwo auf der Welt sit against Adele's next monologue.

The 1940s bring Sing Sing Sing, the instrumental U-Bahn-Fox and Lili Marleen; the 1950s Koffer in Berlin; the 1960s Berlin, Dein Gesicht hat Sommersprossen. A 1970s scene finds the lavatory abandoned, then Berlin Berlin arrives, and in the 1980s Adele has crossed to the other side of the city for Ich steh auf Berlin and a Chattanooga Choo Choo spliced into Sonderzug nach Pankow. The 1990s cubicle is unisex, with Loveparade and Dickes B, and the last stretch — Die alte Klofrau, Zu Asche, zu Staub and Coole Sau Berlin — leaves Adele as an old woman in front of signage listing several genders. The encores are Das gibt's nur einmal and So geil Berlin.

The first half leans on Friedrich Hollaender and burlesque pastiche; the second half runs through post-war sentiment, the Neue Deutsche Welle of Ideal, Seeed's Dickes B and the techno present.

What the reviews have said

The verdict has been consistent and split down the middle. Reviewing the run at the Tipi am Kanzleramt in the week of 1 to 5 November 2023, Konrad Kögler gave the evening two stars out of five, and was blunt about where the weakness lay: Adele's sketches are broad and the gags often fall flat. He was warm about everything around them — the earworm quality of the material and the city itself functioning as the real protagonist, with the songs carrying the show rather than the comedy or any narrative cohesion.

That is a useful description of what the production actually is. It is not a book musical and does not pretend to be one; it is a themed concert by a thirteen-piece period band with two strong singers, a burlesque turn and a comic narrator, arranged so that the century arrives in order. The 2023 run also established the price band that has held since: advance tickets at the Tipi between 27.90 and 62.90 euros, 24.50 to 54.90 euros on the door, concessions from 12.50 euros.

Where things stand in autumn 2026

Five years in, the show has passed sixty performances in Berlin, mostly at the Tipi am Kanzleramt, plus summer guest dates at festivals and spa theatres — the Wetzlarer Festspiele and the Kurtheater in Bad Kissingen among them. The next step, announced in June 2026, is the first proper national tour.

The autumn leg opens on 6 October 2026 at the Metropol Theater in Bremen, then runs on consecutive nights to the Deutsches Haus in Flensburg on 7 October, the MUK in Lübeck on 8 October, the Mercatorhalle in Duisburg on 9 October, the Stadthalle in Göttingen on 10 October and the OsnabrückHalle on 11 October. Berlin gets four nights from 22 to 25 October, not at the Tipi this time but at the Punch Line Club on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz, with tickets from 44.90 euros. November takes in Rostock, Dresden, Hanover, Dortmund, Siegburg, Aachen, Siegen, Trier and Frankfurt, and a second leg picks up in February 2027 through Halle, Würzburg, Nuremberg, Munich and Stuttgart, with dates listed to 18 April 2027.

Brauner has kept a parallel schedule around it: the Paul Lincke operetta Frau Luna at the Tipi from 24 January to 29 March 2026, dates with her band The Toy Goys, and her Yiddish programme in Jewish communities. The revue is the largest thing she has on, and the first time it has been asked to work in halls rather than in a Berlin tent.