Promises to God are notoriously hard to keep. The townspeople of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps have not only kept their renaissance promise, they’ve turned it into euros and cents. Flashback to 1633. Oberammergau was a stop on the market road between Augsburg and Venice. When the plague hit, the town elders swore to heaven: Protect us and we’ll do a play about Jesus’ crucifixion every ten years.

The first began in 1634. Today the village of Oberammergau lives because of theater. Half of the 5,400 residents break a leg in the Passionsspiel, performed in years ending in zero from May to October.

Long traditions can get musty; until a couple of decades ago, the Passion Play had kept its old antisemitic tone and banned married women and non-Christians from the stage. That’s changed, due mostly to Christian Stückl, the play’s chain-smoking, coffee guzzling director.

In June 2007 he pushed for the biggest change to the plays yet – moving the six-hour performance later in the day so that the last supper scene happens at twilight and the crucifixion by torchlight on Oberammergau’s partly open-air stage. The plan split the villagers, but in a referendum they voted to try out Stückl’s vision in the 2010 performances. In the last Passion Play season (2000), Oberammergau earned some 80 million euros. Not bad for a 500-year-old promise.

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