The punk operetta ‘Tulip Town’ is a gender-fluid feel-good party, but the casting falls short

Steef de Jong appears before the still-closed curtain in punk clothes, holding a keytar, and delivers his own joke about operetta: a genre born from youthful rebellion, immediately dismissed by older people as noise. That is the spirit behind ‘Tulip Town’, his punk adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s 1868 operetta ‘L’île de Tulipatan’. Yet the new show does not come together as completely as his earlier productions.

The story itself is an excellent choice. Prince Alexis and Princess Hermosa fall in love, only to discover that the prince is actually a princess and the princess is actually a prince. The confusion becomes both comic entertainment and a sharp challenge to fixed ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman. That theme still fits easily into 2026. Punk clothes and makeup suit the material, while the actors’ 19th-century costumes worn over them provide an additional joke.

The main weakness lies in the casting. Ilse Warringa, who plays Hermosa’s mother, and especially Rop Verheijen as Hermosa seem to belong to a different theatrical world from De Jong, who plays Alexis’s father. Their performances push so far into extremes that the production’s irony disappears. Daniël Cornelissen, as Hermosa’s father, and Thor Braun, as Alexis, fit the tone better.

De Jong’s affection for operetta is appealing partly because he embraces everything slightly strange about the genre. He does not try to hide those oddities through overacting. Instead, he often points them out through the fourth wall, leaving a layer of irony in both his direction and his understated performance. That makes it easy to enjoy the genre’s playful side without having to resolve every awkwardness yourself.

Musically, however, ‘Tulip Town’ does not quite convince. The cast consists of singing actors rather than acting singers, and much of the vocal writing stays in a half-spoken lower register. When the music rises, the strain becomes clear. The punk numbers are meant to sound raw, but instead reveal uncertainty. Having actors pretend to play guitar or violin also proves unconvincing. Still, the story itself is genuinely warm.

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There is a music genre that emerged because young people wanted to rebel against the established order, in which genders became fluid, and that older people immediately labeled as noise. Indeed: operetta!