Maarten Heijmans & Xander Vrienten

What would Maarten van Roozendaal have sounded like if he had been born in New Orleans? Or Baudouin the Great in Nashville? Heijmans and Vrienten meet at the musical Hadestown. There they discover a shared love for roots music: folk, blues, country and everything in between. And for the stories told in that music — about love and loss, desire and coming home, ordinary people and their fate.

They soon discover how close that American tradition actually is to Dutch cabaret. On both sides of the ocean, life is sung with catchy sentences, black humour and a healthy dose of self-mockery.

Together with two top musicians, Heijmans and Vrienten take you on a musical trip between the Jordaan and the Mississippi. With new songs, well-known songs and music by, among others, Townes Van Zandt and Randy Newman. Sometimes small and fragile, sometimes groovy and four-part. A theatre concert with the atmosphere of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which four men ultimately do what they like to do best: play and sing together.

An evening to disappear into the music and come out lighter. 
Because what are you doing in the waiting room of death?

You're alive.

About Maarten & Xander 
Maarten Heijmans is an actor and singer and has grown in recent years into a special interpreter of the cabaret song. He was a long-time member of the ITA actors' ensemble and impressed with his role as Ramses Shaffy on TV. With his musicality and sense of text and theatre, he gives new life to the repertoire of our greatest songwriters.

Xander Vrienten developed as a bassist, songwriter and producer, who feels just as at home in the Rock 'n' Roll like the pop music. As long as there is a little soul in it.

During their collaboration in the hit musical Hadestown, Heijmans and Vrienten discovered a shared love for the music of the American South. There, where blues, folk and jazz come together, they unexpectedly found a lot of kinship with the Dutch cabaret song. This discovery gave rise to the idea for this program.