Portrait: Sara Kroos

By Contributing Writer on Thursday, May 7, 2009 - 15:47

A couple of years ago I went to see a cabaret show in a tiny theater hall in the city I lived in with my parents. It was a new trial show by Sara Kroos called ‘Zoetgevooisd’. Thirty people crammed into the hall with bated breath.

Sara Kroos is someone you either love or hate. She lives, works and creates in extremes. There is no grey to her. Nothing is sugarcoated. Literally the title of her show means ‘sweet of voice’. And those of us in the theater were waiting for it.

I had never been to a trial show. I had no idea what to expect. If it were anyone else I’d gone to see, I’d heard so many stories after all, I’d think the comedian would enter the stage, explain that much was still in the works and any errors were regretted but beyond their control.

Sara Kroos is not that woman. She came on like a whirlwind, beautiful and haunted, smiling as soon as the lights hit her. Everyone in the room was instantly captivated by her presence. She was in jeans and her curly brown hair hung unruly around her round face. Her eyes were aflame and if anyone had ever belonged on that stage, it was her.

Image by: Willem de Roon

The show was messy, all over the place and I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. She would do the two songs she’d written with the band, a pianist (Martijn Breedbaart) and a guitarist (Bas Mulder), turn to us and wait expectantly for the reaction. She would crack a joke and measure our response. Every now and then she produced a collection of papers to either jot something down or read back to see what she was supposed to say now. Half way through she abandoned the entire written piece of paper and just was. It was incredible to witness the woman full force.

As she stood there I couldn’t help but marvel at the fact she was only four years older than me. She was born in 1981 in the tiny town of Wijngaarden in Holland. She moved from there with her parents when she was five and back to the province when she was a teen. The tiny town of ‘Groot Ammers’ proved too little and too Christian for the bisexual and extroverted comedian–to-be. Excommunicated and depressed, Sara was desperate for a way out.

It came. Taking the bus every weekend to Amsterdam to see the theater shows, Sara found that which she wanted to do the rest of her life. She entered theater academy in Utrecht and left it three months later. She was just as relieved to leave as her teachers were to see her go. Too chaotic. Too unique.