Musical House Iscariot starts where predecessor Judas ended: “Musical can be a lot more than ‘The sound of music’”

Flanders is gaining a new player in the musical landscape. On Monday afternoon Iscariot was presented in Antwerp: a new, small-scale musical producer who wants to continue the story of the Judas Theater Productions, which closed down in 2022. That house made its own musical creations for fifteen years and could count on structural subsidies or project subsidies from the Flemish government for a while. When the house received negative advice during the subsidy rounds in 2022, the books closed. Successful productions such as Lilies and Josephine B., who still play at home and abroad, will be followed by Iscariot, which largely consists of the same team as Judas. By making use of the tax shelter scheme, Iscariot hopes to be able to work independently of subsidies. “We had to fight for those operating resources for too long, which deprived us of the space to create for years,” says initiator and composer Sam Verhoeven. “We want to make a new start with Iscariot, not coincidentally the family name of the Biblical figure Judas, but in complete freedom, without being tied to committees and subsidy files.”

The Flemish musical landscape today mainly consists of Studio 100, with major spectacle productions such as ’40-’45 and Red Star Line and some producers such as Deep Bridge, who stage Flemish adaptations of international productions such as Hair spray or Mamma mia. Iscariot wants to provide an artistic counterbalance with original creations, for which it writes the music and lyrics itself. “The field is very fragmented today,” Verhoeven continues. “We want to once again be a house with a fixed value, with unique productions in an intimate setting. In this way we may perhaps fuel the development of other new creations, which is rather the exception in Flanders. In this way we hopefully show young people that musicals can be a lot more than what they know The sound of music.”

Homage to Ann Christy

Three musicals are in the pipeline for the next two years, the first of which is Babes, which will premiere this fall at the Fakkeltheater in Antwerp. Next season is I live for you ready, a tribute musical about singer Ann Christy. The fact that Iscariot opens with two accessible productions shows that it initially wants to play it safe. “It is mainly an impetus to be able to mold our own genre again,” says Verhoeven. “We have enough knowledge and experience to make a realistic assessment of what is now possible. In Flanders, for example, there is not really a tradition of touring cultural centers with musicals, and we hope to change that. But we will start in our own, safe theater.”