all on board for floating cabaret

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In winter, migratory birds gather in the red-neck Zurich-Grebes lake, red ridge poacards, yellow-legged gills and much more. But the lake has an even more exotic winter visitor: a big floating beast that is turquoise, weighs 92 tons and shines in the dark.

Every autumn for the last 27 years Herzbaracke, which bills itself “The floating salon theater“, Has brought more than a splash of colors to other steep pages of Europe’s reinsurance center. From its bed between waterfowl draws visitors with a happy combination of music, laughter and glass dishes.

As I approach the Quayside, it looks more or less like a pavilion of excess and extremely lush crickets in search of a square. Inside, she’s her clientele spirits away in Montmartre in the Toulouse Lautrec era: All Belle époque Flounce but with Portholes.

The interior is wooden panel and Persian carpet, lit by a candle mix, vintage chandeliers and table lamps, some of them cold, others with colored glazed. The shadows are full of curiosities: wind gramophones, music boxes, barrel organs, full birds, children’s toys, model boats, a samovar and a porcelain cow.

There is a bar in one end, immersed under a collective holiday and one stage in another hidden behind velvet drapes. Among them is space for 40 clients, many of them enjoying a four -courses dinner, cooked in a kitchen after grass and served by waiters with Flanco Five Pettico. This is followed by the performance of the evening, which these days is mainly music, though there are evenings and theatrical monologues.

The chairman of everything is Federico Emanuel Pfaffen, in the hat and bra. When everyone is gathered, he stands by dinner bell and extremes an extensive, wise speech about love and democracy, before handing over to his partner, Nicole Gabathuler, for details of a menu “so good for you that you will leave this place healthier than when you have arrived”.

Then, after the main course (it IS Well), he presents the show, on the day of my visit, Albin Brun (accordion, clarinet, battery and double bass), who play a miraculous mix of the people of Swiss-Bulgarian jazz.

After that, on the dessert, he tells me that Herzbaracke means “heart attack” in the local dialect, a name that came to him when he was fighting with one of his biggest wooden beams during construction. The Herzbaracke season ranges from early November to mid -March in Quay along with Bellevueplatz, Zurich. Then it moves about 28 km along the coast in the port in the town of Rapperswil, where the run continues until the end of April. Attracting theater, Pfaffen admits, is often a challenge. “Sometimes there are big waves,” he says. “She moves so slowly, I feel like Huckleberry Fin (in his raft).”

After Rapperswil sits in a summer anchor and Pfaffen goes to his summer anchor, a lake house in Sweden, to recover.

His is a punitive schedule, waiting seven nights a week for five months, working 12 to 14 hours days, trying to return a profit from a theater of just 40 seats. “She needs all my energy. I feel like I have all 92 tons on my shoulders.”

In previous years, he would sleep on board to prevent theft while leaving the door unlocked. “The robbers here have a sense of honor. If the door is unlocked, they won’t come in.”

Now that he is 76, he is thinking of handing over to the heart attack to someone else. But that does not mean a pension. He is currently building the skeleton of a ship inside a deconstruction church of Zurich that will become a new performance space. Maybe unusual, but much less heavy to run than a swim theater.

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