Every 10 years a mountain village cradled in the German Catholic stronghold of Bavaria nails Jesus Christ to a cross and charges spectators to watch. However, add a financial crisis, a wide-ranging scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and a cloud of volcanic ash to the mix, and suddenly enthusiasm for a 376-year-old passion play can begin to ebb.
"I don't think the world has got the message yet. During the last passion play, people were suddenly knocking at my door looking for rooms and a ticket," Renate Frank, owner of Gasthof zur Rose, a popular Oberammergau guesthouse told Reuters.
Today her lodgings are only half booked for the show. By this time 10 years ago, she was fully booked.
"Now we have the economic crisis," Frank added, just days before the May 15th premiere of the 41st staging of the passion play in the Alpine village of Oberammergau.
It has staged the passion play, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus, every 10 years since 1634, after villagers vowed they would perform it every decade if they were spared from the bubonic plague sweeping the region at the time.
Since then the five-hour play, which local children spend years preparing for, has gained a large international following, especially among British and American travellers.
However, jitters over the weak economy and the euro-dollar exchange rate have dented interest from English-speaking tourists, according to tour operators and Oberammergau locals.
On top of this have come a recent surge of negative headlines for the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, which has had to cope with at least 250 cases of sexual and physical abuse from recent decades inside Church-run schools.
GOOD TIMES GONE
With its onion-domed churches at the heart of every village, crosses and statues placed along country paths and portraits of saints on the sides of houses, Bavaria is Germany's most Catholic state.
Yet one of the most widely publicised cases of abuse in Germany took place in the monastery school at Ettal, just a short drive away from Oberammergau, which lies in southern Bavaria, the home state of Pope Benedict XVI.
Similar abuse scandals have also rocked the Catholic Church in Austria, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and Christian Stueckl, the play's director, said the Church needed to change.
"It needs to get away from its dogmas and rules," he said in a weekend interview with German weekly magazine Focus.
"The Church would do well to focus on Jesus again."
Organisers insist the scandal has not hurt the spectacle in which the men of Oberammergau grow their hair and beards from the start of Lent the previous year, but sales are suffering.
Tom Garlin, president of Garlin Travel, a religious tourism travel agency in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, says he's run tours over four decades from the United States to see the play.
"The response is underwhelming," Garlin said.
He cites a number of factors including the economy and how Oberammergau "jacked up the [ticket] prices." The best seats cost 165 euros versus 150 deutschemarks (77 euros) in 2000.
Hotelier Frank works with German travel operator Dertour in London to sell package deals for the event, which Oberammergau's Mayor Arno Nunn hopes will help the village generate a profit of around 25 million euros this year.
This year, the long-term resident is facing the prospect of having to let the rooms herself without tickets because the operator could not sell all the package deals.
TELEVISION BID
For the 5,000 inhabitants of Oberammergau, a chocolate-box town nestling in Alpine pastures, the passion play is a way of life. To take part, one must either have been born in the village or have lived there at least 20 years.
Nearly half of Oberammergau's residents are involved in the show, which runs five times a week through to Oct 3.
In 1977, when he was 15 years old, Stueckl says a new director tried to make script changes, but they were rejected. It was then that Stueckl knew he wanted to direct the passion play some day, getting his wish in 1990 at the age of 28.
"For me, the staleness was what was dreadful about the passion play. Every generation must find a new way to tell the story," Stueckl said. "It's not so easy with a play that lasts over five hours. Many young people think it's an old story."
To keep the performance fresh, Stueckl redesigned the sets and costumes, added two new scenes, and decided to give more depth to characters like Judas and Pontius Pilate.
As tourism from English-speaking countries slows, Mayor Nunn hopes to attract people from the so-called BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, Stueckl and others in Oberammergau are also working harder to promote the show.
For the first time, Oberammergau let regional Bavarian television shoot a 45-minute documentary on the play. "The Oberammergau Passion" is set to air on May 13th.
Local officials were also in talks to air the passion play in its entirety on German television for the first time, but the village council later voted the motion down.
Mayor Nunn said he was "sceptical" that a camera could capture the emotion and aura of the audience, live music, actors and Oberammergau's theatre, which has around 4,700 seats.
Stueckl and 29-year-old Frederik Mayet, one of two actors playing Jesus Christ, both wanted the television broadcast.
"We have to change with the times," said Mayet.
SIC: ReutersIndia