sad boy

The summer of 2025 we finally premiered sad boy at the Copenhagen Opera Festival — a piece that has been growing quietly in the background of my life for several years.

Sanna and sadgirls came to me with the idea a long time ago. Making a modern take on Voix humane and since then we’ve explored it in multiple versions, shapes, and formats. It’s one of those projects that keeps revealing new layers the more you work on it.

Premiered at basement bar in Copenhagen, brought everything together — the performers, the space, the set and costume design, the physicality, the light and the darkness felt like the most natural and inevitable form the piece could take. And then we played it at Parkteatern which felt just as fitting.

sad boy navigates the fragile seam between our digital personas and our physical selves, where heartbreak, infatuation, and obsession blur into something raw and immediate. Richard baritone meets a heavily electronic score which aims to create a kind of emotional feedback loop between voice and digital life. The flute and cello breathes life into the digital world.

I’m grateful to everyone involved, and I hope this piece finds more spaces to inhabit in the future.

Team

sad boy – Richard Hamrin (baritone) Cello – Béla Beer Flute – Rebecka Kaufmann Composer – Joel Janson Johansen Director & Libretto – Sanna Strandberg Colling Set & Costume Design – Toni Tora Botwid Light Design – Maja Lindström Choreography – Mari Carrasco Voice Actor – Otto Hargne Production – SAD GIRLS

Reviews

”The electronic score vibrates alongside the emotional baritone of Richard Hamrin in the opera ’sad boy’, which explores our self-staging on social media as heartbreak and infatuation turn into obsession and powerlessness. A phone vibrates in the dark, and a heart breaks. The new opera performance ’sad boy’ explores the boundary between our digital persona and physical self, between fiction and reality.