Müjdat Gezen

Fatih, 1953

Halit Müjdat Gezen was born on 29 October 1943 in Fatih, in the old walled part of Istanbul, and first stood on a stage in 1953 in a school play at Hırka-i Şerif primary. The route from there was the standard one for his generation and almost the last time anything about his career would be standard: Vefa Lisesi, where his schoolfellows included the journalist Uğur Dündar and the actor Kemal Sunal, then the theatre department of the Istanbul Municipality Conservatory.

He turned professional with the Istanbul city theatre in 1960 and made his first film in 1962. By 1968 he had a company of his own. What followed was a working life spread across more disciplines than most Turkish actors attempt — something over a hundred films, a long tail of radio and television sketches, a publishing house founded in 1982, a newspaper column in Cumhuriyet between 1986 and 1988, and around forty books of plays, humour and instruction on acting.

Gırgıriye, Homoti and the years of trouble

The work that fixed him in public memory is comedy about neighbourhoods. Gırgıriye, released in 1981 and set in the Roma quarter of Sulukule, spawned sequels and, much later, the television spin-off Cennet Mahallesi, which ran from 2004 to 2007. In 1987 he made Homoti, a science-fiction comedy so far outside the commercial mainstream that it has kept a cult afterlife of its own.

The 1980 coup interrupted all of it. Gezen was briefly imprisoned and his book on the poet Nazım Hikmet was banned. Political friction has recurred: in 2018 he was prosecuted over a remark directed at President Erdoğan during a television appearance.

The institutional half of his career began in 1991, when he founded the Müjdat Gezen Sanat Merkezi as a private school teaching theatre, music and painting, and continued with the Müjdat Gezen Tiyatrosu in 1998 and a television school set up with Uğur Dündar in 2011. He has been a UNICEF Turkey goodwill ambassador since November 2007, took the Muhsin Ertuğrul special award in 2011 and a lifetime honour at the Altın Koza festival in 2022.

The farewell that did not hold

In January 2023, aged 79 and marking seventy years since that school play, Gezen announced he was retiring from performing. It was reported as a jubilee rather than a withdrawal, and it did not stick.

The intervening period has been noisy in an unwelcome way. On 29 January 2026, Uğur Dündar publicly knocked down social-media posts claiming Gezen had died, reporting that he had just spoken to him and quoting him as saying he was in fine health but upset by what was being circulated.

Three months later Gezen was directing and starring in the largest production of his career.

Gırgıriye on stage, forty-five years on

The Gırgıriye musical, written and directed by Gezen, opened at 8.30pm on 15 April 2026 at the Ülker Spor ve Etkinlik Salonu in Istanbul, with further performances on 22 April and 7 May at the Harbiye auditorium of the Istanbul Congress Centre. Gezen does not reprise his own screen part: he plays Emin, the role associated with Münir Özkul, while Perran Kutman returns as Sabahat. It is the first time the two have shared a stage in forty-six years, and video of the company surprising Kutman with Gırgıriye songs when she arrived at rehearsals from the United States did the rounds before opening night.

The company is large and deliberately mixed. Gülben Ergen, Ceyhun Fersoy, Şeyla Halis and Günay Karacaoğlu carry much of the playing; Uğur Dündar appears, as do billed guests including Bülent Ersoy, Ömür Göksel, Selçuk Ural and Semiha Yankı. Choreography comes from Mustafa Erdoğan's Anadolu Ateşi, musical direction from Ali Erenus, set design from Leyla Gezen, and costumes from Gülşah Saraçoğlu and Fatma Bayraktar. It is rated 13 and up, and the seat categories on sale in April ran from 1,200 to 3,000 lira with a VIP tier at 3,500 that sold out.

The night the show stopped

The arena-scale staging is also the production's main line of attack. On 21 April 2026 at the Istanbul Congress Centre, an audience member confronted the production over not being able to see the stage. Gezen came out and told the house that the evening's performance was being cancelled, then went backstage, where he became unwell. The production team announced a postponement, said the decision was taken to protect the artist and the audience, and promised ticket-holders a new date.

The complaints that followed on Ekşi Sözlük over 24 and 25 April were specific rather than general: plastic garden chairs, sightlines that worked only for the first couple of rows, and the question of whether a musical belongs in a 3,500- to 5,000-capacity sports or congress hall at all when the tickets run to four thousand lira. A separate strand of criticism holds that the show is not really a musical, on the grounds that the singing is played back. The counterweight is the sales record and the audience scoring: Gırgıriye holds 4.4 out of 5 across 789 ratings on Biletinial, and the run has been selling out.

Where things stand in September 2026

Gezen is running two productions at once this autumn, both of which he directs. Gırgıriye has been given a seven-performance finish billed as the last chance to see the company together: İzmir on 24 September, the Ataköy Marina open-air stage in Istanbul on 27 September, Kocaeli on 30 September, the Kültürpark open-air theatre in Bursa on 1 October, Zorlu PSM on 12 October, the Bostancı culture centre on 16 October and the Paribu Vadi open-air stage on 17 October.

Interleaved with it is his staging of Sadık Şendil's 7 Kocalı Hürmüz, which he first directed at the TİM Show Center on 28 October 2017 and revived through the 2026 season at the Lütfi Kırdar congress centre and Bostancı, with performances in January, February and March. The current cast is led by Çağla Şıkel, Sarp Bozkurt, Şeyla Halis, Suzan Kardeş and Defne Yalnız alongside Gezen, again with Anadolu Ateşi dancers and a live orchestra; it holds 7.5 out of 10 from user ratings on tiyatrolar.com.tr.

As of 20 September 2026 the on-sale dates span Ankara's Oran open-air stage on 22 September, İzmir's Bornova Aşık Veysel open-air theatre on 24 and 25 September, Bursa on 26 September, Kocaeli's Derince centre on 30 September and 9 October, and Bostancı on 3 October, with prices from 950 lira in Bursa to 2,192 in Istanbul.