- December 2025
- December 2025
- December 2025
Been waitin’ all our lives for this, it’s gonna be A Night…to Remember!
Come on now! Join CU Show Choir for an unforgettable evening of music, movement and magic! From iconic club classics to show-stopping musical theatre hits and chart-topping pop anthems, this is the ultimate celebration of feel-good favourites. All that, plus a generous helping of jazz hands! Expect powerful vocals and slick choreography. CU Show Choir: A Night to Remember will have you singing and dancing in your seat!
So grab your friends, bring your family and don’t miss being a part of this show – we're all in this together!
CU Show Choir: A Night to Remember – because some nights are just too good to miss!
- November 2025
Far far away, in a small cottage named Chequers, Jack Beanstalk and his mum live a humble life where money is tight. To make ends meet, Jack sells his beloved cow Daisy in Bridgetown in exchange for five ‘magic’ beans from the renowned Evil Bean Merchant. His mother is devastated at the trade-off, but knows all about mistakes, having bean there done that. But fear not! Jack is distracted from this woe after meeting the love of his life, Jill, who will follow him to the ends of the earth…
… and indeed up a beanstalk. Join Jack and Jill as they navigate the high-altitude world of an insecure Giant, Claudia Winkleman, a golden goose and Guinness the Harp and follow them around the long winding corridors of Castle Mound. Wait why is the Evil Bean Merchant here, again?
Come and watch this year’s unmissable festive delight featuring love, adventure and... beans: the CUADC/Footlights Pantomime 2025: Jack and the Beanstalk!
- November 2025
For queen bee freshman Apple Wormwood, getting into the St. Abbing Secret Society is the ultimate ticket to campus glory. For the more cautious Liv, it looks like little more than an outdated boys’ club. But when the two join eight other hopefuls at the society’s initiation ritual, the night takes a dark and unexpected turn. What begins as harmless hazing quickly spirals into a series of blood-soaked survival challenges, where popularity points don’t mean squat and GPA won’t save your life.
RUSH! is a razor-sharp spoof of the teen slasher genre that skewers the absurdity of hazing, the toxicity of exclusivity, and the pressures of high-achieving institutions. Underneath the camp and chaos lurks a sharp jab at the high-pressure world of elite academia, where students are pushed to prove their worth – in this case, to the death.
The CUMTS Freshers Musical is the perfect way to support musical theatre newbies in Cambridge. Each year, a group of freshers get together in their first term and put on a student-written musical with the help and oversight of current CUMTS students. A show full of fresh, new talent and enthusiastic musical theatre freshers, it is not one to be missed on the CUMTS calendar. Come and show your support for the next generation!
- November 2025
"Supposing I were to come down one morning and find a dead body in the library... what should I do?"
Spider’s Web comes to life at the ADC Theatre as the Freshers’ Play for Week 6. Directed, produced, and performed entirely by first-year students, this production offers a fresh and energetic take on Agatha Christie's tangled tale of secrets, deception, and unexpected twists. Prepare for an evening of sharp wit, classic intrigue, and a dash of farcical chaos.
The play follows Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, the imaginative wife of a diplomat, who stumbles into a murder scene and decides to cover it up—only to find the situation slipping rapidly out of her control. Part mystery, part comedy, the play is a perfect showcase of Christie’s flair for suspense with a light-hearted twist.
- November 2025
“How pretty the sky is! I ought to go there on a rocket that never comes down.”
A visitor arrives at a small apartment in the French Quarter. A sister spirals. Nothing will ever be the same. On a street in New Orleans, in the sweet heat of summer, past and present collide. The fragile peace between two lives begins to unravel, and secrets push their way up to the surface. Step into the world of 'A Streetcar Named Desire', Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, and experience this timeless domestic drama where desire simmers beneath every word, dreams collapse, and reality and illusion collide.
- November 2025
This sketch show is for the ones who learnt maths in a porter-cabin, sat their mocks next to a leaking radiator, and learnt more from corridor gossip than any Sex Ed lesson.
A Comprehensive Understanding is a fast-paced, character-led comedy created by state school students. Expect surreal satire, painfully accurate assemblies, and the kind of humour forged in the chaos of the British comprehensive system.
From lying to Ofsted to the unspoken rules of the lunch queue, we’re taking the familiar and making it very, very funny - all while punching up at the institutions that got us here.
Leave your lacrosse sticks, fancy crests and Latin mottos at the door...
- November 2025
A Bright Room Called Day follows a group of artists and activists in 1930s Germany, as they grapple with the rise of fascism around them. Punctuating this narrative are "interruptions" from Zillah: an activist who has moved from the US to Berlin during the Reagan administration, and is studying the rise of the Nazis. Tony Kushner (author of Angels In America, among other plays) combines poetry, fantasy, and historical fiction, to create a piece as compelling as it is experimental.
- October–November 2025
Jumpscared by seeing your supervisor on Grindr? Being left on read on Tinder sending a shiver down your spine? Latest Queerbridge discourse making you feel dead inside? Forget your worries and fall under the spell of our drop dead gorgeous kings, queens and inbetweens as we return to the ADC for another hit Halloween show, presenting the best drag talent the city has to offer. Hold on to your seats as the ghouls and ghosts of Dragtime! take you on a thrill-inducing ride through the dark side of drag, featuring singing, lip sync, spoken word, pole dance, burlesque, live music and more!
- October–November 2025
A summoning of dead ancestors, a secret engagement and a sudden storm all converge in the life of Wednesday Addams as she pursues her love for a seemingly normal boy in the eccentric world of the morbid-loving Addams family. Matriarch Morticia attempts to impress with her apple pie, uncle Fester confesses his love for the moon and Pugsley lets loose with a truth serum to catastrophic consequences. Will the course of true love and utter darkness run smoothly? Join us in Halloween week for this uplifting, hilarious musical tale of love, family and acceptance, with a touch of the macabre!
- October 2025
The New-York Times Bestselling ‘Author’ returns with a reading of their self-help book dealing with anger management and meat. Unfortunately, this book is horrible and written terribly; most of the anecdotes are random, incongruous and barely legal. On tour, the speaker is inaudible, raucous and only on stage for half of the allotted time. It’s still worth reading and / or watching as an exercise in how to rapidly destroy your career. RRP UK £20, CAN $45, US $32. Subject to shifting exchange rates in this turbulent time.
Join Footlight Martha Alexander for their debut stand-up hour at the ADC Theatre. It will be fine.
- October 2025
1994, Grimley. Ten years after height of the Miners' Strike, talented musician Gloria returns to her hometown under orders from her higher-ups. All the while, the local brass band, struggling for funds, makes the decision to go out on a bang with one last hurrah on the competition circuit. As circumstances become increasingly bleak, and music takes an increasingly central role in the lives of the band members, will the band prevail against the odds to reach the grand final? Based on the classic 1996 film of the same name, Brassed Off, which will be performed with a live band, is a moving portrait of life during the Thatcher years and testament to the fact that music really couldn’t matter more.
- October 2025
Manhattan island. The swinging 60's. The Golden Age of Broadway.
Nina and Robert are buskers with dreams of the big stage. Singing their hearts out on the streets, they hope it's only a matter of time before a big name notices them.
On the other side of the pond, Jack and Ernie are two London lads in the marketing business. Seeing the New York boom, they take the plunge and head to the New World in search of fortune. Enticed by the city, they blow their savings on gambling booze and other unsavoury habits, leaving them bare. Penniless and somewhat talentless, they hatch a plan to con their way to the top.
The couple, entangled in this rotten scheme, are soon to find that money is the biggest speaker, and some dreams just aren’t meant to be.
Fresh off a successful Edinburgh Fringe run, 'This Side of Life' takes the ADC stage in Week 1 with toe-tapping numbers, feel-good atmosphere, and an expanded band!
"Feel-good, lively... full of 60s flair" - The Scotsman
- October 2025
- October 2025
Because in stories things usually turn out the way the author wants them to; and in real life, they don’t…always
Marrying for money often doesn’t go to plan. It certainly hasn’t for faded tennis star Tony Wendice as he believes his wife will ultimately divorce him for her on-off lover, a charming crime writer. For Tony loosing his wife would be catastrophic, not because he loves her but her fortune. He consequently orchestrates a devious plot to have her killed. On paper it’s the perfect murder.
Will the wits of a shrewd inspector and a prolific crime writer manage to unveil Tony’s malicious scheme before it’s too late?
This amateur production of “Dial ‘M’ for Murder” is presented by arrangement with Concord
Theatricals Ltd. on behalf of Samuel French Ltd. www.concordtheatricals.co.uk
- June 2025
A sketch show about falling apart.
- June 2025
We are excited to announce our touring production of Macbeth, supported by CAST and Cambridge in
America. As a company we have worked to foreground reproductive anxieties latent in the text,
contextualizing Macbeth’s ‘fruitless crown’ in the wake of a recent and painful still-birth, which in turn
sharpens Lady Macbeth’s famous reproductive language: ‘take my milk for gall’; ‘I have given suck and know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me’. The detailed medieval costume against the paired back set places primacy on the actor rather than our ever changing stages, aiding in the flexibility of our production and retaining the all important ‘emotional blocking’ at the core of our affective vision.
Macbeth is the 25th CAST production to travel America, following the success of last year’s Julius Caesar. CAST aims at spreading Shakespeare far and wide, both as an educational introduction to the infamous bard, and to stretch and stimulate new discussion among those already acquainted with his works, and Macbeth specifically.
- September 2025
- September 2025
- September 2025
- July 2025
A comic quick romp through all of Jane Austen's work. Three actors are due to perform the complete works, but when it transpires that one of the actors has defected to the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, the two remaining actresses and Austen superfans must teach an understudy who knows nothing about Austen about her work.
- July 2025
- June 2025
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
When Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy first meet, it's dislike at first sight. Born into a lesser noble family with four sisters, with nothing to recommend them but their charms, Elizabeth is beneath the wealthy Mr Darcy's notice. Elizabeth sees Mr Darcy as a man born only of unpleasant arrogance and privilege. Their pride and prejudice blinds them to each other's true feelings, but can they overcome their flaws in spite of all obstacles, and find their way to happiness together?
Experience Jane Austen's classic tale of hate to love, revitalised in this production full of laughter, colour, and life.
- June 2025
- May 2025
The situation’s dire. It’s a catastrophe, a calamity, a really, really…bad…thing. After 20 years of being Helen, Helen has decided that enough is enough. Why be yourself, when you could be literally anyone else? At long last, Helen has found a way to transform herself into various alter egos and she’s bringing you along for the ride, because, well, she’s desperate for attention. This should be obvious by now. But will she find who she's really meant to be?
A new comedy hour from Footlight Helen Brookes, it won't be one to miss!
- May 2025
Expect laughs, laughs, and more laughs...
Footlights bring you the funniest songs, sketches, monologues and stand up in an evening of non-stop, back-to-back fun-filled hilarity. The material is always original and always varied. It can be soft and silly; rude and spikey; wordy and nerdy or a little surreal - whatever the style, it's always "uproariously funny" (Varsity)
- May 2025
Ten strangers are invited to a secluded island. None are safe.
When a cryptic recording accuses each guest of a terrible crime, the tension mounts. One by one, their number begins to dwindle. Trapped with no escape, they must confront their pasts as paranoia takes hold. Who can be trusted? Who will survive? And who, or what, is behind it all?
Every shadow hides a secret; every moment tightens the grip of fear. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None will keep you guessing until the very end.
“Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?”
- May 2025
“I’m writing a musical. About two guys writing a musical. About two guys writing a musical!”
[title of show] follows Jeff and Hunter, two friends who hear about a musical theatre festival that could change their lives. The only catch? The deadline for its submission is 3 weeks away! Along with their actress friends Heidi and Susan (and their pianist Larry), they set off to write, compose and rehearse their musical in the space of 3 weeks.
Featuring toe tappers like Two Nobodies in New York and ballads such as A Way Back to Then, [title of show] is a clever, funny and relatable musical that demonstrates the joys and stresses of putting on a show, and shows us the importance of the friends we made along the way.
- May 2025
When Sophie lands a new job in parliament, it’s a chance to leave her past behind. Working as an assistant to a charismatic Labour MP, she climbs the ranks as he rockets from backbencher to leader of the opposition. But when scandal sweeps Westminster, Sophie is forced to choose between ambition and integrity. MESSIAH is a new play about power, corruption and what happens when the personal becomes political.
- May 2025
'Had I as many souls as there be stars, I’d give them all for Mephistopheles'
Doctor Faustus is the best academic of her generation, but she has grown frustrated with studying theology and arithmetic. As she stumbles deeper and deeper into black magic, she starts to form a strange bond with the demon under her control, Mephistopheles. The two wreak havoc across Europe, and yet Faustus is consistently reminded that in exchange for power over Mephistopheles, she has sold her own soul...
Come and watch this dark-academia tragedy, and be enveloped in chaos.
- April–May 2025
- April 2025
- April 2025
Emma Watson is nineteen and new in town. She's been cut off by her rich aunt and dumped back in the family home. Emma and her sisters must marry, fast.
If not, they face poverty, spinsterhood, or worse: an eternity with their boorish brother and his awful wife. So far so familiar.
But there's a problem: Jane Austen didn't finish the story. Who will write Emma's happy ending now? Based on her incomplete novel, this sparklingly witty play looks under the bonnet of Jane Austen and asks: what happens to characters abandoned by their author?
This amateur production of The Watsons is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd. On behalf of Samuel French Ltd. www.concordtheatricals.co.uk
- April 2025
Amélie is an extraordinary young woman who lives quietly in the world but loudly in her mind. She covertly improvises small but surprising acts of kindness that bring joy and mayhem. But when a chance at love comes her way, Amélie realizes that to find happiness she'll have to risk everything and say what's in her heart.
With a romantic score, colourful characters, and a world of fantastical fun, Amélie is a beautiful tale for the dreamers in everyone.
This amateur production of Amélie: The Musical is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd. www.concordtheatricals.co.uk
- March 2025
Why do fools fall in love? And why do we sing about it so much?
From heartwarming ballads to break-up bangers, Silly Love Songs is CU Show Choir’s latest tribute to love in all its forms – romantic, platonic, and everything in between. Join us in a tribute to love in all its messy, beautiful, and sometimes downright silly forms!
