Looks like the Warsaw authorities have excelled themselves yet again with the planned New Year’s Eve (Sylwester) Party. Over the last week there have been mutterings around the city that the party will be moved from the traditional site of Plac Defilad around the Palace of Culture to the rather austere Plac Konstytucji.
The reasons stated are that Plac Defilad is not a suitable venue as the Palace of Culture imposes too much on the event and makes it difficult to make the party look good on television. This is a pretty incredible argument considering that one of the most amazing and beautiful sights in Warsaw is the Palace of Culture lit up by a fantastic pyrotechnics show at midnight. When we see Sydney harbour bridge, the London eye, San Francisco Bay or the Brandenburg Gate bathed in multi-coloured light, no matter where we are we know which country’s celebrations we are watching. In the same way many people would see the iconic PKiN surrounded by crowds of revellers and know that we are watching Warsaw’s party.
Unfortunately we seem to be going through another period of disassociation with this ‘gift’ from Stalin, what with the plans to surround it with taller buildings in order to hide it, the proposed name change of the surrounding square and now moving the New Year celebrations to the, quite frankly, boring Plac Konstytucje. Of course the main sponsor of the event, Polsat, will now be able to surround the concert stage and environs with masses of their advertising, which will truly look much better on worldwide television. Warsaw City has also invested 3.8 million PLN towards the party and is expecting in the region of 200000 party goers to attend, official figure for last year’s Plac Defilad event was a meagre 20000.
Strangely enough the evening’s events, rather than simply being seen as a farewell to 2008 and welcome to 2009 is also being marketed as having been influenced by the year’s runaway movie success of the Abba inspired ‘Mamma Mia’. Stars who will be performing on the night are being encouraged to sing their favourite Abba number and negotiations seem to be underway in an attempt to get Kayah and Edyta Gorniak to sing ‘Dancing Queen’ as a duet ('Drama Queen'would be more apt for those two). Some crazy marketing guy reckon that the inclusion of Abba material in the proceedings will bring more people to the event as Abba’s music is loved by both genders, the gay community and all age groups, so that means that everyone in Warsaw will be crowding onto Plac Konstytucji on Dec 31st (apart from my Uncle Antek who doesn’t much care for Abba and will be staying at home with a bottle of vodka and his dog Barney) .
The way things are going it would probably have been more suited if the most popular movie of this year had been ‘Oh Brother, Where art thou?’
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