Staging and Screening Anna Karenina
First published in 1887, the story of Anna Karenina still feels modern. Even 125 years later, Leo Tolstoy’s novel of stifled love in the perfumed salons of 19th century aristocratic Russia remain gripping. This social tapestry of culture and character woven together, meticulously unveiling all characters through a shifting of voice and perspective, has retained [...]
An American Night: New Plays from the U.S.A.
On 18 January, the stage of the Schauspielhaus Wien is in American hands: In cooperation with Washington D.C.-based director Gillian Drake, the theatre presents four plays by contemporary, young American authors. In addition to Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, Annie Baker’s The Aliens and Jordan Harrison’s Maple and Vine, read in excerpts, Amy Herzog’s new play 4000 [...]
Wiedner Hauptstraße Becomes Penny Lane
This weekend, the Freie Bühne Wieden belongs to The Beatles. On 12 and 13 January vocalist Reinwald Kranner and pianist Béla Fischer (with his two sons as a piano-trio) takes audiences from “Strawberry Fields” to “An Octopus’ Garden”. The guests are invited to take a trip down memory lane to a time when “Yellow Submarine” or “Lucy in [...]
West End Winters in the Innere Stadt
Beginning Thursday, 10 January and for three nights only, the Theater Drachengasse debuts the new musical cabaret West End Winters. The cast includes well-known names like Kieran Brown, who played Dr. Dillamond in the play Wicked at the Apollo Theatre, Caroline Frank, recently in the Raimund Theater’s Ich War Noch Niemals in New York, as [...]
A Wintry Wizard With Four Seasons of Magic
Viennese magician Lucca takes a break from his German-language repertoire for a debut performance in English on 29 December. His Four Seasons of Magic show incorporates a variety of performance and magic styles into four 30-minute “seasons”: “Hands”, “Tales and Myths”, “Mind”, and “Phenomena”. A display of slight of hand using cards and coins opens the [...]
A Star is Born… (Sort of)
In a world where bad news permeates the airwaves, Ken Ludwig’s award-winning play Lend Me a Tenor, playing at Vienna’s English Theatre through 21 December, is a welcome jolt of pure fun. The non-stop action takes place in a hotel suite in Cleveland in 1934, on the occasion of the Cleveland Grand Opera hosting the [...]
A Christmas Carol: The Making of a Legend
The whitewashed walls are peeling in places. A table laden with half-full mugs and empty pots of coffee stands opposite the door. Windows, through which the sky was already darkening, stretch all the way to the far wall. Against this wall stands a clothes rail so laden with skirts, shirts and jackets that it’s sagging [...]
Anna Karenina Premieres at the Volkstheater
Three couples, three stories, one stage. On Friday, 23 November, Armin Petras’ stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina makes its Austrian premiere on the Volkstheater stage. The novel, published between 1873 and 1877 and deemed a “flawless work of art” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is a dense portrait of Russian society, told through intertwined tales of adultery, [...]
Film on Skis: the Freeride Festival
Careening down the mountains without rules, goals or even a set course: Extreme snowboarding, also known as freeriding, isn’t for the faint-hearted. The Freeride Film Festival, from 14-15 November, enables those with a passion for snow to indulge it in the safety of WUK, far away from plunging mountain ravines. The festival is on tour [...]
