Theater Dortmund is set to captivate audiences with its rich and diverse 2025 lineup, encompassing iconic plays, operas, and family-friendly performances. From the dark tale of 'Sweeney Todd' to the whimsical journey in 'Giant Sprinkles', and a fresh take on Marie-Antoinette's tale, this season has something for everyone. With outstanding performers and innovative directors, these events promise to challenge, entertain, and inspire theatergoers with both their dramatic narratives and musical excellence.

Theater Dortmund's Spectacular 2025 Lineup: A Fusion of Classic Stories and Modern Interpretations

Theater Dortmund is set to dazzle audiences with a diverse lineup of performances, ranging from the chilling tale of Sweeney Todd to the whimsical adventures in The NEINhorn. These events showcase a variety of genres, including opera, ballet, and engaging children's theater. With performances by talented artists and captivating narratives, the theater promises an unforgettable experience for attendees. Whether you're drawn by the allure of Stephen Sondheim's dark masterpiece or the playful antics of Nils Karlsson Thumbelina, Theater Dortmund offers something for everyone.

A Diverse Theatrical Journey at Theater Dortmund: From Sweeney Todd to The NEINhorn

Theater Dortmund is set to captivate audiences with a diverse array of performances, ranging from the darkly thrilling tale of Sweeney Todd, to the opulent ballet of La Bayadère, and the epic narratives of Wagner’s operas. With performances from well-acclaimed artists and directors, these events promise to deliver a rich tapestry of storytelling, music, and dance. Each production, unique in its theme and execution, invites audiences to immerse themselves in narratives that are as timeless as they are compelling.

Exploring the Enchantment: A Theatrical Journey at Theater Dortmund

2025 promises to be a remarkable year for Theater Dortmund as it unveils a series of captivating performances. From the opulent Ballet & Dance production of 'La Bayadère' to the introspective opera 'Die Walküre', the lineup showcases a diverse array of artistic expressions. With 'Das Rheingold', 'Siegfried', and the enchanting 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', audiences are in for a cultural feast. The theater also introduces 'Kirsa's Music' and 'Carrie – The Musical', each bringing unique narratives to life. Join us as we delve into the details of these extraordinary events.

Dortmund's Theatrical Extravaganza: A Year of Captivating Performances

Mara and Tara have just become friends when someone new appears: Kirsa. But the boy behaves differently than all the other children the two girls know. Because Mara and Tara don't like his behavior, they don't want to have anything to do with Kirsa. When Kirsa notices this, he withdraws into himself. But Mara can't stop thinking about the encounter with him. She has become curious and wants to find out more about this new and yet so interesting boy.

Kirsa's music

Opernhaus Dortmund

The curtain rises and – wheat is harvested on the open stage! Star choreographer Alexander Ekman was inspired by the customs of his Nordic homeland to create a world-famous dance work of art.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The naive Siegfried grows up as an orphan with the loveless and greedy blacksmith Mime, with only the remains of a sword left by his unknown father. At some point, his curiosity about his own origins and identity becomes too great, and after fearlessly and naively reforging his father's wonderfully strong sword, he sets off. Mime had convinced him that he must learn to fear in order to survive in the world - preferably from the dragon worm Fafner, who lives in a forest cave on a valuable treasure, including the powerful, eponymous ring. But with his carefree nature, Siegfried masters the episode effortlessly and wins the treasure. What's more: after he accidentally comes across the dragon's blood, he can suddenly understand the language of animals! This is how he comes to a rock surrounded by fire, where he finds a sleeping woman, Brünnhilde, who can only be awakened by the most fearless and free hero. For the first time, Siegfried feels fear – but it quickly turns into love!

Siegfried

Experience members of the Dortmund Opera ensemble up close in a personally designed song recital.

Recitals

It is about a pair of siblings who have lost each other and then find each other again. It is about incestuous love, adultery and affairs. It is about power and intrigue. But it is also about love, trust and the search for happiness. And it is about a ring that represents the future of the world. Richard Wagner's Die Walküre begins as a simple love triangle in which two people fall in love and a third suffers. But as the opera progresses, the deeper dimension of this entanglement becomes apparent and the perspective broadens beyond the purely human. It is nothing less than a part of the global epic The Ring of the Nibelung , which Richard Wagner created with Die Walküre .

Die Walküre

Accompanied by a slowly swelling E-flat major chord, in the prelude to Das Rheingold a mythical cosmos rises from the depths of the Rhine, from whose waves a world populated by gods, giants and dwarves arises: Cursing love, the Nibelung Alberich procures the legendary gold of the Rhine maidens in order to forge a ring from it that gives its owner limitless power. When Wotan and Loge cunningly steal the valuable piece from him, Alberich places a curse on the ring, the fateful consequences of which ignite the further events of Der Ring des Nibelungen ...

Das Rheingold

Advantage Package: The Ring of the Nibelung

As the last premiere in his role as artistic director of the Dortmund Ballet, Xin Peng Wang presents the three-part ballet evening Dips . In addition to the world premiere of Drama Class by the young, internationally sought-after Israeli choreographer Nadav Zelner, the award-winning work Blushing by Marco Goecke will be shown.

Dips

In an intimate chamber music atmosphere, opera director Heribert Germeshausen will lead the program as moderator and provide you with exciting background information on both the artists' careers and the musical program.

Singer portrait

The unicorn family in the Heart Forest is having offspring! And they are just as cute and sweet as the Heart Forest itself: clouds made of candy floss, flowers as big as trees, stones made of plush, and the sun shines every day. A little too sweet for the little unicorn, because it says no to everything. No to swimming in the bubble lake. No to rainbow slides. No to sugared lucky clover. Its family doesn't know what to do anymore and calls it NEINhorn from now on. One sunny day, the NEINhorn decides that it has had enough of all the exhausting NEINhorn-ness and sets off for Nowhere. On the way, it meets the WASbear, who doesn't really listen, the NAHUND, who nothing can upset, and a King's DAUGHTER, who constantly talks back. Not even the NEINhorn says no to these new friendships, because it can be stubborn with them - and that's much more fun than alone!

The NEINhorn

How are ballet creations created, who is involved, what are the rehearsals like? If you want to experience the atmosphere in the last few days before a premiere and gain insight into the interaction of creative forces in the theater, public stage rehearsals give you the opportunity to do so. An introduction to the evening and moderation during the rehearsals deepen the understanding of the production process.

Public Sample: Dips

In the run-up to the premiere, choreographer Nadav Zelner and his team will present the creation Dips on Sunday morning in the ballet center and provide information about the creation and background of the productions. Members of the ballet company will provide the first live insights into the choreography.

Matinee: Dips

Ballettzentrum Westfalen

Hollywood in the 1920s. A new, exotic and opulent film is being produced in the dream factory. The subject: La Bayadère - the story of the beautiful temple dancer, which was celebrated at its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1877, is to find its way onto the cinema screens of the world. Everyone is working with great enthusiasm to ensure the success of the project, which is believed to be certain. The aim is to help the tragically beautiful story, set in ancient India, achieve international brilliance in the cinemas of the 1920s.

La Bayadère

With a total running time of around 16 hours, Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung is one of the most monumental epics that the opera stage has ever seen. Is it therefore even possible to tell this gigantic stage festival in a single evening? Absolutely! The German humorist Loriot made it possible and masterfully captured the essence of the drama in just a few words: "The perpetrators in the most powerful drama in music history are actually very nice people. Only one shared passion is their undoing: they want to own more than they can afford, more power than they are entitled to. In a blind, loveless pursuit of profit, they destroy themselves and their world. ... Fortunately, such things only happen on the opera stage."

The Ring in One Evening

The twins Fadeya and Taseh decide to find their father, who has been missing for many years. He is not just anyone, but the ruler of Sultania, a faraway country in the desert. The path to his palace turns out to be dangerous: the children encounter a hungry giant snake, are almost washed away by a raging river and have to overcome an almost insurmountable wall. Magical figures and all-knowing objects help the resourceful twins on their journey. Their most important companion: a talking camel!

The Sultan's Children

With the revue Youngsters Unplugged, the participatory Dortmund opera clubs established a new format in the past 2023/24 season under the direction of director Alexander Becker, in which the audience could experience the exciting diversity of film music up close. At the Dortmund Opera, this is now becoming a tradition! For the first time, the focus is on the youngest: Embark on a musical journey through several decades of film history with the Opera Kids - the spectrum ranges from well-known songs from Disney classics such as The Lion King to the magical sounds from Harry Potter . Our young up-and-coming talents receive active support from participants of the Opera Youngsters and the newly founded YoungSymphonics. And this time, too, the performance will be rounded off by humorous interludes - including the obligatory film quote quiz.

Kids Unplugged

Gabriel Eisenstein is sent to prison for insulting an official. His friend Dr. Falke advises him to have some fun first, namely at Prince Orlofsky's ball. Rosalinde, Eisenstein's wife, who actually wanted to have fun with her lover Alfred during her husband's absence, also goes to the ball - but incognito as a masked Hungarian countess. And the chambermaid Adele also obtains a free evening for herself under the pretext of wanting to look after her sick aunt - but only to go to the ball as well. There, all the people finally meet under false identities and the erotic game of confusion takes its course...

The bat

Princess Rosalia is in a bad mood. Her tutor Marquis Stuck keeps telling her how she should be a "real" princess: how she should talk, sit, dress and behave. But she has no desire to do this and would much rather do everything completely differently. Her persistent resistance makes her tutor wonder: is there really only one way something can be "right"? In Being a princess? No, thank you! In the end, very little is as it seemed at the beginning. A story about self-determination, finding one's identity and questioning imposed role models - told with well-known melodies from operas by WA Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi and others.

Be a princess? No thanks!

The feared seducer Don Giovanni chases from one love affair to the next. While his unfortunate servant Leporello suffers the consequences, the womanizer himself does not shy away from even the most gruesome crimes: for example, he kills the father of his latest conquest, Donna Anna, who tried to overpower the scoundrel. While Donna Anna, her fiancé Don Ottavio and Don Giovanni's ex-lover Donna Elvira, seek revenge, the latter is already causing trouble at a wedding, where he is trying to win over the bride Zerlina - much to the displeasure of the groom Masetto. But the voice of the ghost of Donna Anna's murdered father announces that Don Giovanni's misdeeds will soon end...

Don Giovanni

Bertil is home alone again because both his parents had to go to work. Suddenly the boy hears small, tripping steps. It is Nils Karlsson, the little Tom Thumb, who actually wants to be called Nisse. He has just moved into a mouse hole in the wall of Bertil's room. Nisse tells Bertil a trick that allows him to become as small as he is. After the size difference has been overcome and Bertil has shrunk to the size of a thumb, they spend the whole day together.

Nils Karlsson Thumbelina

Together with three singers, the young audience embarks on a musical journey of discovery into the forest of giants. They are not expecting a classic story, but rather a magical world that is told primarily through exciting sounds and singing: How do mushrooms giggle? How loudly does a mosquito buzz? What does a soap bubble sound like before it bursts? And: What do giants actually do all day long in the enchanted forest?

Giant Sprinkles

Life is hard for Marie-Antoinette and her husband King Louis XVI. For almost 20 years they have been locked up in the magnificent Palace of Versailles waiting for their beheading. Outside their window, the people constantly harass them with loud revolutionary slogans, their servants have shrunk to just one person, and they haven't even had a decent piece of cake for a long time. And although prominent figures from the French Revolution keep coming to visit unannounced, the executions simply don't progress. So Louis XVI has courageously worked on his own guillotine in secret. And what can we say - it works. After all, the royals have to kill time somehow in this entrenched situation; but also escape the thought that they will no longer find a place in this new world that is loudly forming outside the window.

Marie-Antoinette or cake for everyone!

The story of Odette, who is transformed into a swan and who must be rescued by Prince Siegfried from the clutches of the magician Redbeard, has everything it needs to be a hit: a magical setting, a love story that overcomes all boundaries, deception and betrayal, and a dramatic or - depending on your taste - open ending. Based on the emotionally expressive and haunting music of Peter Tchaikovsky, the choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (1895) has become the epitome of classical ballet.

Swan Lake

After 15 years, the barber Benjamin Barker returns to his old home in London. He believes his wife to be dead, and his daughter is now in the care of his arch-enemy Judge Turpin, who was responsible for Barker's decades-long banishment. Under the name Sweeney Todd, the barber embarks on a brutal campaign of revenge by slitting the throats of all his customers with a razor blade. He is assisted by the baker Mrs. Lovett, who processes the human remains into a new meat pie ingredient, which soon helps her business to boom. But the bloodlust that Todd becomes more and more addicted to has fatal consequences...

Sweeney Todd

What is special about the upcoming opera premiere? How does the team approach the piece? What topics are being covered? And what is it all about? In the run-up to the premiere, the public rehearsal for Don Giovanni offers you a deeper insight into the work and production, but also into the diverse work processes of an opera house. In the public rehearsal, you can experience first-hand how the major opera project is coordinated, rehearsed and developed.

Public Rehearsal: Don Giovanni

Carrie White is a complete outsider: her religiously fanatical mother raises her in a strict and naive way, and her classmates make the 16-year-old's life hell. Only her sports teacher, Miss Gardner, stands by her and tries to stop the bullying by excluding the perpetrators from the prom. Sue Snell then regrets her behavior and persuades her boyfriend Tommy Ross to go to the prom with Carrie. Overwhelmed by this unexpected happiness, Carrie has no idea that Chris Hargensen is planning a cruel prank. After the attack on Carrie succeeds, however, her reaction is far more horrific than expected. Because she has long since discovered that she has hidden telekinetic abilities...

Experience Opera: Carrie – The Musical

You no longer want to sing the songs from our current productions alone in the shower? Then come along with your children and relatives to our family singing! The ensemble of the Junge Oper Dortmund will accompany you safely through all musical highs and lows. Reading music or any other previous knowledge is not necessary, the joy of singing is all that counts!

Family singing

After Siegfried and Brünnhilde have happily found each other, the hero sets out on "new deeds". Brünnhilde, who remains behind, receives the Ring of the Nibelung as a token of love from her lover. But Hagen, a descendant of the Gibichung family, also wants to get his hands on the cursed ring that his father Alberich once forged. Siegfried's naivety plays into his hands: he cunningly gives Siegfried a potion that makes him forget everything, causing him to lose all his memories of Brünnhilde. In this state, he cruelly abuses his former wife, who then seeks revenge. Hagen is prepared to murder Siegfried in order to finally get his hands on the ring...

Götterdämmerung

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of something seeming as if it had just happened and at the same time happened half an eternity ago. We have only just experienced it and a decade - or more - has already passed between us and our fond memories. The moments that define our personality and have made us the people we are today often remain particularly vivid in our mind's eye.

“... yesterday I was still young!”

Schauspielhaus

Advantage package: Wagner-Kosmos VI (Cycle 2)

Presenter and show star Götz Alsmann invites the Dortmund audience to a festive opera and operetta gala that focuses entirely on composers named Strauss: And there are, as we know, many of them in music history! The Strauss family, including father Johann (1804 - 1849) and his sons Johann (1825 - 1899), Josef (1827 - 1870) and Eduard (1835 - 1916), formed a veritable dynasty of composers. The best known of this group - famous as the "Waltz King" Johann Strauss (son) - will celebrate three anniversaries in the calendar years 2024 and 2025: the 125th anniversary of his death (June 3, 2024), his 200th birthday (October 25, 2025) and the 150th anniversary of the premiere of his probably most famous stage work Die Fledermaus  (April 3, 2024), the "Queen of Operettas".

Six bouquets

Germany is a welfare state whose citizens form a community of solidarity that looks after one another and takes responsibility. But what is care and welfare actually worth to us? - "Emergency" is the word of the hour that best describes the precarious situation in most care professions today. Too few staff in care facilities, hospitals and daycare centers, too high workloads and poor working conditions for people who care for others. And even those who privately care for the sick, the elderly or children quickly feel abandoned by society. Because high physical, emotional and financial burdens expose those affected to the immediate effects of this described "emergency" - often women, many of them with only a low income or a migrant background. This situation ultimately raises the question for everyone involved in our community of solidarity: "Who Cares?"

Who Cares?

Summertime is musical time. Before the Dortmund Opera goes into its annual summer break and the musical season begins again on the country's major open-air stages, we invite our audience to a festive musical gala in the opera house.

A Musical Summer

Ballet Dortmund ON TOUR: Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville

Maestranza Theatre

This season, the JugendTanzTheaterBallettDortmund is dealing with the connecting elements of different faiths. Using the universal language of dance, choreographer Justo Moret creates images that are associated with the discussion of the concept of faith:

Youth Dance Theater Ballet Dortmund

At the beginning of his 21st and final season with the Dortmund Ballet, ballet director Xin Peng Wang is once again inviting you to an overwhelming celebration of the art of dance. For this occasion, the Dortmund Ballet and the NRW Junior Ballet will once again share the stage in the opera house with international greats of the ballet world. Star guests from all over the world will once again be guests in the Ruhr metropolis.

Theater Dortmund

Apr 19 - May 11, 2025

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Feb 22 - May 16, 2025

Dips

Apr 29 - Jun 13, 2025

Kirsa's music

May 17, 2025

Experience Opera: Carrie – The Musical

May 18, 2025

Family singing

Apr 29 - Jun 13, 2025

Kirsa's music

Apr 19 - May 11, 2025

A Midsummer Night's Dream

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