First there was the TV documentary, then came the book and the film and now there’s even the musical: the tragic story of the disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean island of Aruba in 2005. But does that story really lend itself to entertainment?

Natalee – The Musical, conceived and performed by Dutch students with the Amsterdam PIPS Lab theatre company, focuses on the worldwide media coverage of Natalee’s disappearance. “It’s about the media hype”, director Thijs de Wit says. “No questions were asked about the motives that some people used to create this hype – until now”.

The show uses simple techniques to attract the audience’s attention: the small stage features a car, cameras everywhere, and 11 students in beach clothes. Above the stage there’s a large video screen.

Clips
Thijs de Wit says the musical is a performance of clips featuring Natalee Holloway, based on renowned Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries’s TV documentary, with various clips taken from the internet. “We’ve edited these images and put them in a different sequence, turning them into something completely different”, he says.

Hype
Mr De Wit got the idea for Natalee – The Musical after he had become intrigued by the commercial media hype that surrounded the personal suffering of the Holloway family. “Although I do recognise the intense suffering the family had to go through, there are numerous girls like Natalee”, Mr De Wit says.

“You don’t hear anything about all those other girls that are missing. Natalee’s case has been blown out of proportions and I don’t understand why”.

The show starts with a wall of thunderous music, with lyrics that are almost impossible to understand – but that’s deliberate, Thijs says. “I don’t want the audience to ask themselves any questions during the first 15 minutes of the show. They can do that after the show”. 

Tasteless?
But isn’t it a bit strange – tasteless even – to stage a musical show on the suffering of others? Thijs de Wit doesn’t think so. “This case has already been exploited by people who were directly involved, like Natalee’s mother Beth, or Joran van der Sloot [who to many is the prime suspect], and TV and film producers".

“So why shouldn’t an artist be allowed to do the same and turn it into something grotesque?" he adds. "Besides, a musical is the most commercialised form of theatre, so I thought it was appropriate to use that form for a stage production that dealt with commercialisation”.

Frown
Mr De Wit allows the audience to frown on these things, but on one condition: “They should then consider everything else that’s been happening”, he says. “Seven million people [in the Netherlands] watched Mr De Vries’s TV programme, which was much more commercialised than this performance. He sold it to American networks for a lot of money. So who is wrong here?”.

Mock the subject
The show’s audiences have responded well to the musical. “The singing was good and the show was less serious than I’d expected”, says one spectator. Some people do wonder whether it's a good thing to stage such a show, but the answers to this question are positive: “You can do it the way they did it”, says another visitor. “But if you do it any other way, it will be difficult. You clearly see they are mocking the subject itself. It’s not dealing with what actually happened to that girl. This is just a fun, crazy show”.
 

Listen to a Newsline interview with Thijs de Vries

Photo by ANP