Every year, history meets the stories of personalities who shaped our country at this place. And this year, on the 150th birthday of Tomáš Baťa, the story of a family whose name is carried in the subconscious of the entire nation comes.
For the first time, we are presenting a purely original musical about a family that managed to build a global empire from a small shoe shop and deeply inscribe itself in the Czech identity. The 150th anniversary of Tomáš Baťa’s birth is an opportunity to look into the roots and consequences of his legacy: What happens when tradition becomes almost a sacred law? And what if the next generation starts to break it? We observe the eternal tension between tradition and its breaking on several levels. Not only in the story, but also in the genre itself. The classic musical gradually breaks down here – rap, beatbox and modern rhythms penetrate the music, as if the present were knocking on the door of the Bata world and wanting to stir it up. Similarly, new decisions appear in the family that change the direction of the ancestral business: closing the settlements, moving production to China, questions of responsibility and the price of survival.
The Bata clan explores whether reference or the need to survive is stronger. Is it more important to stick to the values that Tomáš Baťa laid down as the foundation stone of the company – or does the family empire have to change in order to survive in the global world? And above all: is it still possible to live today as Tomáš Baťa taught? And what happens when his ideas start to collide with the reality of the 21st century? The musical Klan Baťa is not a history lesson. It is a story about a family that learns to live with the myth that it created itself. About how tradition can be a home, but also a cage. And that even the greatest empire is built on people who decide every day whether to listen to the past – or the future. And the realization that neither one without the other would be where they are now.
