Up until now i have been pretty sure that things around me are going down. I mean since i am 15 or so, thing’s around me close down: it may be no secret that i was totally in favor of my school closing down, but for the rest it is usually bad: municipal swimming pools close, train lines disappear, bank branch offices get replaced by card-eating machines and cultural institutions get forced to shut down by budget cuts (and then i am not even talking about good ole’ fordist factories here).

So when a new theater opens around the corner from your house that is actually quite an unbelievable development. But that is what just happened around the corner from our house. A group of actors, directors and other theater people have turned an unused backyard hall on pappel allee into the ballhaus ost (beware: beautiful but stupid flash site!!) .

On top of the fact that it probably takes a lot of guts to start a theater without subsidy and all the other positive signals being given by this bold act as they have been discussed in the feulleiton of almost every German newspaper in the last two weeks it is also a nice thing to suddenly have a theater around the corner: it means you can just go out of the door to see if there are tickets left for the night’s performance if you are sitting at home being bored or depressed or both. And that is exactly what i did tonight and i ended up seeing the premiere of ‘Don’t cry for me Adolf Hitler’ (by Uwe Moritz Eichler):

I would have never expected that i would actually enjoy a performance that for a good deal consist of songs performed in german but in the end i did: the piece is situated in a end of second world war german army field hospital (think mas*h) which is run by double playing nurses trying to protect their drug addict, signal relaying, love-sick patients from an imbecile army inspector and Adolf Hitler himself while musing about love and happiness. Sounds extremely cheesy but actually it is quite insightful an entertaining (big props to the sparse contributions by the trumpet player (Steffen Schult)).

If you are in Berlin and you understand German you can see further performances on 24, 25 feb and 5,8,10,17,22 and 23 march at Ballhaus Ost, Pappelallee 15.