If you were to pack the 400,000 visitors who saw the musical “Abenteuerland” at 454 shows in Düsseldorf over the course of 17 months into a single performance, the result would be a huge festival of kinship. It invites: the family bonds Pur. And everyone came. Ingo Reidl, for example, the progenitor of the nuclear family, who founded the band an incredible 50 years ago Crusade in the basement of the Pauluskirche in Bietigheim. He has been giving the Pur group the melodies since then, but has withdrawn from the public since 2016 due to a serious illness – the keyboardist appeared in front of 1,100 spectators for the first time in the Capitol Theater.
Rüdi was there too. Pur fans know him from the song “My Friend Rüdi”. He has been the band’s “super fan” for 30 years and even has his own song, in which it is not even discussed that Rüdi lives with Down syndrome, only that he is a cheerful rock chaot: “He has to be there, he grins with happiness / My friend Rüdi lives music.” Hartmut Engler, the undisputed star and head of the large Pur family, wrote this to him. Engler was in the musical eleven times, and only not more often because, as he says, it was a piece from home in Bietigheim-Bissingen to Düsseldorf. Now he has the opportunity to meet himself again: For the first time, “The Musical with the Hits of Pur” is going on tour through nine German cities.
A dream came true for the singer of the band Pur in October 2023. The frontman always had the not entirely vain desire to experience a Pur concert as a spectator. And this musical comes very close to that, he says. Of course, as a close advisor, he was involved in ensuring that 30 of his band’s hits, including the most successful, the title song “Abenteuerland”, were finally able to unfold again in the musical theater. “That was an accolade for us,” says Engler rather modestly and attributes the credit to a new friend of the Pur family: Martin Flohr.
He was already a Pur fan in 1993 when he was 17 years old. Like millions of Germans at the time, he felt touched by the breakthrough record “Seiltanzer”. His first Pur concert gave him a happy feeling of connection and being okay: “You were immediately among friends. No matter whether you were fat, thin or short. No matter what clothes you wore, everyone was welcome.” A bit of the church convention feeling that the Swabian band has always exuded. Significantly, Flohr – who is now a show professional and has brought musicals like “The Bodyguard” to local stages – came up with the idea for the “Abenteuerland” musical on the Way of St. James: He marched without a cell phone, but with an iPod full of his favorite pure songs.
Back in the Palatinate, Flohr wrote down all the songs on index cards and, within seven years, made a jukebox musical out of them. We know this verse play of a hit series from “Mamma Mia” (Abba), “Craziness!” (Wolfgang Petry) or “I’ve never been to New York” with songs by Udo Jürgens (for whom the former teacher training student Hartmut Engler was once a roadie). A separate three-generation story, carried by pure songs, Engler found the idea “stimulating,” even though he was “actually not a big musical-goer.” However, he would have refused his consent for a musical based solely on Pur’s band career.
The fans know anyway and discover in the piece many allusions to waypoints (at the train station not only Paris but also Bietigheim appears on the scoreboard), to lyrics (a broken arm as in “I love you, no matter how that sounds”) or to the beginnings of the student combo. For Engler, the character who comes closest to “young Hartmut” is 17-year-old Alex. Like the Pur singer back then (“Federal Rock Winner 1986”), he has pop star ambitions and wants to perform with his band Crusade (see above) in the club “Opus” (that was the name of the successor band).
But that’s not really the point. Or not just. For each of the 17 Pur albums to date (the 18th, with which Pur will go on tour in twelve months, is currently being created), the 64-year-old songwriter developed a booklet of texts based on his own experiences and feelings in his writing garden shed called “Hirnhäusle” in which everyone should find themselves: from the adored “Lena” (who was supposed to be called Ute after Engler’s partner at the time, but that wasn’t so nice sound) to those in midlife crisis who discover “a gray hair” for the first time, which amalgamates the character of Grandma Lena in the musical.
Martin Flohr knitted the story about a cliché family with their dreams and hardships, a bit like the Beimers from “Lindenstraße”, only in two and a half hours. Mother Petra Schirmer, 45, wants to break out of the “Mahauki” monotony (husband, house, children) by studying marine biology; Widow Lena, 75, wants to fall in love again “when she hears this tango”; and daughter Anna, 16, simply doesn’t want to be bullied at school anymore.
So there stands Anna and sings “Alone in front of the mirror”. And these are the moments that always make Engler cry; Sabine F. from Baden-Württemberg inspired him to write the song 30 years ago. When she wrote him a ten-page letter with her life story. Sabine also came to the Düsseldorf Capitol, met Hartmut Engler for the first time, and they both saw this scene: Anna sings the song, but now in the first person (“I’m not a Barbie doll / my strengths are quiet, hidden”) and behind the mirror frame many dancers begin to mirror their movements. Such changes in perspective allowed Engler to experience his songs from the outside and yet again from the inside.
These emotive songs remain timeless because they adapt to the times and the respective listener. Just like “Abenteuerland” itself, Pur’s signature number that has now sold two million copies: Engler used to understand the song, which came from his children’s essays from the memory with the Hesse quote “Entry costs the mind” as a call: “Design! Have the courage to imagine!” Today it’s actually more of an escapist idea: “Escape from the chaos of the world to a country where you can want things the way you want them to be.”
Adventureland – The musical with the hits from Pur, Munich, Deutsches Theater, Tuesday, January 6th to Sunday, January 18th, deutsches-theater.de/jagdland/
