Augsburg University Theater
Shows (17)
Beatrice and Benedick have been enemies since they first met. Their hatred for each other is borderline obsessive. It’s almost like… they can’t stop thinking of each other! Their friends decide to pull a prank and trick them into falling in love.
The internet can be a scary place — but it’s much less scary when you meet someone on it who is just like you. It’s even better when you fall in love with that person through the screen. But when they disappear for months without explanation? Torture. Can these two teenagers navigate online friendship, romance, ghosting, and more without being face to face? All it takes is a message to find out.
The Drowsy Chaperone
Apr 15 – Apr 25, 2027
In this hilarious love letter to show tunes and show people, a forgotten Jazz Age musical comes to life in the living room of a diehard theater fan. As he eagerly spins his favorite cast album, a fizzy vintage show suddenly appears, exploding with song, dance and pure entertainment. Mix in two lovers on the eve of their wedding, a bumbling best man, a desperate theater producer, a not-so-bright hostess, two gangsters posing as pastry chefs, a misguided Don Juan, and an intoxicated chaperone, and you have the ingredients for an evening of madcap delight.
This adaptation of Ibsen’s classic 1882 play, An Enemy of the People, is an original and contemporary musical that leads the audience through the story of two siblings, a doctor and a mayor of the same town, that find themselves on opposite sides of a major community crisis. An Enemy of the People examines how a community responds when the local doctor threatens to expose that the town’s water source they rely on for tourism is contaminated. It raises questions of how far a community will go to protect their town’s secret so they can keep tourism dollars coming and circumvent a path to financial ruin. Scenes and songs will happen in close proximity to the audience, compelling them tofeel as if they are part of the story. Immersed in the play’s dilemma, audiences will find themselves part of the climactic ending of the play when they actually vote to shape the ending of the story.
Who owns history? And who is allowed to tell its stories? The student-written piece Tian centers around these fundamental questions. This conflict becomes clear when the audience is led through the life of romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode by two characters with two very different claims to Karoline’s story: Bettine von Arnim, contemporary and close friend of Karoline, who wants to paint a strong, feminist picture; and the Playwright whose goal is to create an enticing, heart-wrenching play. The audience finds themselves in the in-betweens of history, whilst being part of Karoline’s personal journey filled with struggles, doubt, and dreams.
The animals at the zoo are very busy—experimenting with meditation, processing their relationships, honing their wilderness survival skills, hosting community meetings, arguing about doors. No one is talking about the cages. The cages are not important…or are they?
The cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Show, written in 1973, brings together song, camp, fluid sexuality, and blurring gender identities in a time when any sexual difference was taboo. Rooted in B movie horror and science fiction tropes, this humorous countercultural musical sees an apparently innocent heteronormative couple “transduced” into gender non-normativity, queerness, and sexual liberation while encountering quirky characters, catchy rock and roll music, an alien scientist and his Frankenstein-like creation, and audience participation! One of the first experiences many mainstream audiences would have had to experience such thinking, The Rocky Horror Show is still as relevant today, linking 21st century thinking and experiences to question, complicate, and celebrate expansive yet controversial ideas from the 1970’s. In the current moment with its political push to erase certain experiences of gender, The Rocky Horror Show allows us to celebrate differences–so let’s do the Timewarp…again!
Professor Shae Pemberton is a humble, secretive inventor who leads a quiet life focused on science. However, as her loyal assistant Matilda reminds her, fixing broken toys, clocks, and household gadgets is what she must do to pay the bills. When her friend Lawrence visits her with a business proposal from two shady fellows, buried secrets from her past resurface. As political unrest sweeps over the great city of New Providence, unexpected (and weird!) events start to unravel and threaten to destroy everything Pemberton holds dear, perhaps even the Crown itself! The Clockwork Professor is an action-packed adventure of fantastical science fiction with a steampunk twist.
The divide between Kendra and Betty mimics the very world that devours them: a vast and polarizing abyss. On a quiet summer evening, somewhere down in the Alabama Delta, Kendra and Betty troll the flats looking for red fish. After Betty begins diagnosing Kendra’s dead-end life with career picks from What Color is Your Parachute, their routine fishing excursion takes a violent turn.
Set in London during the plague of 1665 and based on true accounts of some who survived, The Living reveals what happens when a government under-reports the case numbers and fails to act in the face of a devastating epidemic. It is a heart-wrenching and sometimes funny display of human frailty and ignorance, courage and cowardice, survival and desperation, suffering and communion.
Challenging, brutal and hilarious, four women of various shapes and sizes sitting in the waiting room of a liposuction clinic explore their perceptions of body image. The women reveal their experiences dealing with their weight issues through monologues, short scenes, and even schoolyard rhymes. From painful childhood memories to frustrations with the opposite sex, these experiences both haunt and empower these women as they imagine their way to a new vision of themselves as beautiful and whole.
Shakespeare frequently reminds viewers not to misuse power–there will be consequences. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, political ambitions arise in the Scottish soldier after he receives a prophecy of power from three eerie witches–he will be a nobleman and then he will be King! Working with his wife, Macbeth kills the King and takes power–only to be caught in a web of shame and guilt that requires him to continue to murder to keep his position. Eventually both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth descent into insanity, prompting a civil war that leads to their own demise. There are consequences when one misuses power!
The woods can be dark, the woods can be scary, the woods can give you what you wish for—but no one leaves the woods unchanged. Into the Woods, the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapin, asks how we encounter the world in which we live, how we deal with the consequences of actions taken by others, and how our own actions create consequences as well. No one is alone!
When his good friend Jane becomes the head curator at the prestigious Parnell Museum, Gus is sure his break to be a renowned painter has arrived! However, things do not turn out as he hoped. Feeling excluded as a white gay man, Gus asks his boyfriend Tanner to connect him with Vanessa, an African American actress from his improv class. He is confident Vanessa can help him create a masterpiece for the museum’s “New America” exhibit that will catapult them both to fame. Will she agree? White is a bold comedy using art to address head-on current issues of race, representation, gender, and sexuality.
A modern retelling of the fall of the House of Atreus. It follows the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, siblings who are both players in the family tragedy and victims of it. The cycle of blood and vengeance seems inescapable until the final reunion of a lost sister and brother brings the bloody family saga to its mystical and unlikely end.
A plant that can make dreams come true… Or is it a mean green mother from outer space?