Staatstheater Mainz presents a diverse lineup of theatrical performances that transport audiences through a world of creativity and storytelling. From the legendary Rudi Carrell's life journey and Greek mythology's most beautiful woman to the whimsical adventures of a little witch, each show offers a unique artistic experience. As the stage brings to life tales from the past, present, and imagined futures, audiences are invited to connect with stories that resonate across cultures and time. Dive into an exploration of captivating narratives, intricate characters, and unforgettable performances.

From Stage to Myth: A Journey Through Staatstheater Mainz's Captivating Performances

The Staatstheater Mainz presents an enthralling lineup of plays and musicals, each unraveling intriguing narratives and showcasing the talents of diverse performers. From Rudi Carrell's ironic reflection on showmanship to the whimsical world of 'The Neverending Story', these performances promise rich storytelling and unforgettable experiences. Through these events, audiences are invited to explore cultural and historical themes, while enjoying the artistry of both classic and contemporary productions.

Diverse Dramas and Captivating Performances: A Journey Through German Theatre

Step into a world of artistic brilliance at the Staatstheater Mainz, where timeless tales and contemporary narratives come alive. From the enchanting operetta of 'The Beautiful Helena' to the gripping play 'The End of Eddy', each performance offers a unique exploration of human emotions and societal themes. Join us as we journey through captivating musicals, operas, plays, and ballets, showcasing the creativity and talent of remarkable performers and creators.

Staatstheater Mainz: Unveiling Timeless Tales and Modern Narratives

Staatstheater Mainz's upcoming season promises an eclectic mix of storytelling and performance art that delves into timeless myths, modern dilemmas, and riveting dramas. From the legendary tales of Greek mythology in 'The Beautiful Helena' to the poignant journey of identity in 'The End of Eddy', each event offers a unique exploration of human experience and cultural heritage. Join us as we delve deep into the narratives, performances, and themes that make this season at Staatstheater Mainz a must-see for any theater enthusiast.

Cultural Odyssey: A Dive into Staatstheater Mainz's Diverse Theatrical Line-Up

Staatstheater Mainz presents a captivating season filled with diverse theatrical experiences. From classic operettas and plays to contemporary dance performances, the lineup features works that span cultures, histories, and genres. With talented performers and innovative creative teams, audiences can expect to be both entertained and challenged by the stories unfolding on stage. Whether diving into Greek mythology, exploring the human condition, or celebrating dance, there's something for everyone at this renowned cultural venue.

Exploring Theatrical Masterpieces at Staatstheater Mainz

The work of Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz has shaped the German dance scene for over 30 years. In 1993 she founded her dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests, performed with it at the most prestigious venues both nationally and internationally, and received the Federal Cross of Merit for her work in 2011. It is high time that tanzmainz and Sasha Waltz & Guests met: In the 2024/25 season, the ensembles will work together several times. The first piece is In C - a piece that Sasha Waltz designed from the outset with the basic idea of ​​a project for open knowledge transfer. Dancers from tanzmainz and the Berlin company will present joint performances in a mixed cast at the Staatstheater Mainz and in the Radialsystem Berlin.

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In C tanzmainz meets Sasha Waltz & Guests

Staatstheater Mainz

America's most bizarre family is back with a new story: The Addams live a life in their house in Central Park that is anything but ordinary, full of darkness, pain and death. But that could soon change: Wednesday, the daughter of the family, has grown up and falls in love with a handsome, intelligent young man from a respectable family - a man her parents have never met before. As if that wasn't bad enough, Wednesday lets her father in on her secret and begs him not to tell her mother. Now Gomez Addams has to do something he has never done before - keep a secret from his beloved wife Morticia. And the next catastrophe is just around the corner: That evening the families are supposed to get to know each other and Wednesday just wants a completely normal evening without any unusual incidents, but everything turns out differently than planned...

The Addams Family

Even as a child, Eddy Bellegueule felt that he would find it difficult to live up to the expectations of those around him. His world is a small village in Picardy in northern France, and his upbringing in a working-class family is marked by poverty, violence, and social exclusion. Eddy's behavior, which is perceived as feminine, makes him an outsider long before he can discover his own homosexuality, and the constant rejection of his fellow human beings and lack of acceptance from his family weigh heavily on him. Despite the adverse circumstances, Eddy looks for ways to escape his surroundings and find his own identity. Édouard Louis' autofictional debut novel tells the story of escaping an oppressive childhood with ruthlessness and sociological precision.

The End of Eddy

Get your tickets for the Posse 2025 now! It's best to do it today, because, like every year: on Ash Wednesday, everything is over!

Come in, dear audience! This time we are going on a little journey through time with the farce. We are taking you to the carnival season of the late 1950s and looking behind the scenes of the fair that was taking place at that time. Life, love, stress at the Määnzer Mess ! As the title suggests, the worries and needs of people back then are actually the same as they are today! Was everything better in the past? Or maybe not? Does the journey through time show us that some problems could be solved very easily?

Everything revolves or: Life, love, stress at the Määnzer Mess

When Colm and his wife Bonnie return to his father's hometown, an island off West Cork, Ireland, for the first time in many years, everything seems different at first: His mother Beiv, a famous visual artist who lives a secluded life on the island, has demolished half of the house and decided to only install glass walls in order to deliberately put herself on display. People in the village are talking anyway. Since the mysterious death of her husband, who died at sea ten years ago, she has been accused of murder and is constantly under surveillance. And her son's visit holds a few surprises for Beiv too. Colm has kept his wedding to art student Bonnie a secret from her and otherwise seems to have no interest in a harmonious reunion. Old wounds are quickly reopened. The sudden appearance of his old childhood friend Donal finally causes the situation to escalate. The past draws everyone into a whirlpool of old and new injuries, accusations of guilt and unrequited love.

Beacon

On February 19, 2020, a right-wing extremist known to the police shot dead nine people with an immigration background in Hanau - one of the most brutal series of murders in recent German history, which has hardly been dealt with to date.

And now Hanau

Landgericht Mainz

"Light gives us the ability to perceive others and thus ourselves. Like in a pinhole camera, the new impressions fall on our retina and condition our actions. The information that reaches us passes unfiltered from the outside to the inside. There it changes due to our predispositions. The same events can therefore elicit very contradictory reactions in different people." (Philippe Kratz)

Camera Obscura (UA)

The emotionally torn Roderick Usher is the last branch of a degenerate noble family and is at the centre of this dark story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is initially a dialogue between Roderick Usher and the first-person narrator William, who finds his friend in a worryingly absent-minded state on his country estate. Roderick's twin sister also lives in the house. But for William, her presence is like a ghostly suspicion - especially when Roderick declares her dead. This huge, demonic house, which seems to be tearing apart in the middle, seems to have a malicious power over the souls that live in it. What family history is inscribed in the house?

The Fall of the House of Usher

Gerda and Kay are best friends. But when Kay gets a splinter in his eye, everything is suddenly different. He finds Gerda and his other friends annoying and boring and follows the enticing voice of the ice-beautiful Snow Queen. Gerda sets out to find her friend - and finds herself: In the mysterious and shrill realm of the Flower Queen, at the golden court of a lovesick prince and princess, in the dangerous and harsh world of the Robber Queen, she learns to stand up for herself and her friends. With the help of the crow and the reindeer, she ultimately finds her way and is able to free Kay from the cold hands of the Snow Queen with the true power of friendship - laughter.

The Snow Queen Musical theater

A collective energy is released, flows through the bodies, burns and creates new forces. Like masses that charge themselves and pass on impulses, connections are created that support and encourage each other. In this dance, the bodies form a living field of tension, the echo of which pulsates through the floor. 35 performers between the ages of 12 and 80 combine to form a network of tension and connection.

Echoes of Tension

Anyone who has an eagle for a father dreams of flying. The young Duke of Reichstadt, nicknamed "L'Aiglon" ("the young eagle"), is the only legitimate male descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte and wants to follow in his famous father's footsteps and make history himself. Encouraged by war veteran Flambeau, he wants to escape the golden cage in Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where Austrian Chancellor Metternich is keeping him imprisoned: Napoleon's son with Marie-Louise of Austria wants to regain control of France. But the young bird's wings break when he sets foot on a battlefield for the first time in his life and hears the ghostly voices of the fallen. He begins to understand what the reality of war really means.

L'Aiglon

Bastian Balthasar Bux is a completely normal boy, or at least that's what he always thought... until one day his whole life changed.
Teased and laughed at by his classmates, he takes refuge after school in Karl Konrad Koreander's antiquarian bookshop. There he discovers a mysterious book entitled
The Neverending Story , which immediately captivates him. As he begins to read, reality around him seems to blur and he is immersed in the
magical realm of Phantásien, which is threatened by "Nothingness". There he learns about the Childlike Empress, who is terminally ill, about the heroic Atreyu, and about Auryn, the symbol of power and wisdom. He also learns that all of Phantásien's hope rests on the shoulders of the young warrior Atreyu, who is to search for a human child. The further he reads, the more Bastian seems to become a part of the story. Is he the one Atreyu is looking for and who holds the fate of this magical world in his hands? That can't be true, he of all people is supposed to be a hero?

The Neverending Story

The cat in the hat ends up in Stackeln an der Kruke by chance. She moves into an old, empty house where the grumpy brewery director Maulwisch spent his unhappy childhood. The cat promises to make the house a happy place to live. But that is impossible on her own - so little by little she takes in a bunch of homeless people, orphans and oddballs: the pipe hen Marianne, Captain Knaak, the Zappergeck and the Puddingbrumsel, the musical pig Baby Hübner, the stumbling bird, the Erbsenstein brothers and even the decent llama who sleeps a lot. Together they turn the house upside down and open the doors to happiness. But with so many charges there is of course no money left for the rent. Brewery director Maulwisch starts to make a fuss!

Cat with Hat

Felix Krull sees the world as a stage and wants to enjoy life to the fullest. He grew up in a small town in the Rheingau. His father was an unsuccessful sparkling wine manufacturer who drove the family into ruin and then took his own life. Felix - the lucky one - sets out into the wide world to escape poverty. Through his godfather Schimmelpreester, he finds a job in a luxury hotel in Paris. There he is very good at saying what people want to hear. He is what he seems. He is authentic by deceiving and an expert at marketing himself. A projection figure for all desires.

Confessions of Felix Krull, Impostor

Greyhound Poch wins one dog race after
another until one day she simply collapses. She wakes up in the hospital surrounded by dog ​​doctors - diagnosis unknown. There is too much pressure in her head because the dog's bloated brain is floating around in the water. Hellcat Rosali, who does business transporting cadavers, proposes a mean deal: pain-relieving pills in exchange for half a life. The dog's brain hesitates at first - but ultimately doesn't know what else to do.

Sick Dogs (DE)

A young couple sets out on a journey to become average. They move from Berlin to Haßloch. Haßloch is considered the most average place in Germany and is a so-called "Magic Town". The economy takes advantage of the averageness of the residents for product testing. But who actually produces whose needs here? Which wishes are normal? And what happens when you fall in love with a product that then suddenly disappears again? The need to help shape the average and the longing for predictability and security create pressure to adapt your own wishes and dreams.

Magic Town (UA)

Three women - grandmother, daughter and granddaughter - are sitting together at dinner in a cozy apartment in a European city. They talk about their shopping, the upcoming weekend trip and the school work of the youngest, as if they had always lived here. But they only moved into this house a few months ago, where they are known as the Ukrainian "refugees". They describe themselves more as "temporarily displaced persons".
It seems almost inconceivable that the three of them stormed out of the house under a bomb alert or were stuck in a traffic jam at the gates of Europe, on their way to an uncertain future.

Non-Existent

The little witch lives with her faithful companion, the raven Abraxas, in a small house in the middle of the forest. At 127 years old, she is actually much too young to dance with the other witches on Walpurgis Night on the Blocksberg. She sneaks off to the witches' night anyway and is promptly caught. As punishment, she is given the task of becoming a "good" witch by the following year. If she passes the witch's test, she can finally take part in the big dance. Easier said than done... It doesn't really work with all the spells and complicated curses. Something is constantly happening that the little witch and Abraxas didn't expect. On top of that, the evil witch Rumpumpel tries by all means to prevent the little witch from achieving her big goal, and then the two of them have completely misunderstood what it means to be a "good" witch.

The Little Witch

Viola is separated from her brother Sebastian in a shipwreck and comes ashore in Illyria. Here she decides to go to work for Duke Orsino under the name Cesario, disguised as a page. The Duke likes the young nobleman and sends him as a messenger to Olivia, whom he adores. Viola, who has fallen in love with the Duke, suffers from these errands. To her delight, Olivia rejects Orsino's advances, as she has sworn to mourn her deceased brother for seven years - but then falls in love with the supposed youth Cesario. 

What you want

How well-versed are you in Greek mythology? Are you familiar with the characters of goddesses and gods? And who actually rode the Trojan horse?
The operetta The Beautiful Helen offers a little insight here: Helen was supposedly the most beautiful woman in the world in her time (around 1250 BC). Aphrodite, who had won the beauty contest with Athena and Hera, had promised Helen to the judge Paris as a prize. At the time of the contest, however, Helen was not free; she was married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The prize could therefore only be fulfilled by kidnapping Helen, which is ultimately seen as the trigger for the Trojan War.

The Beautiful Helena

“Showmaster is my job, a job that the devil created…” Rudi Carrell sang about himself in 1975 with an ironic undertone and later shaped German television as a showmaster until the 2000s. Carrell, a perfectionist and tireless source of ideas, was always on the lookout for new show elements to inspire his audience. But behind the charming entertainer there was also an ambivalent character.

Showmaster is my profession - Rudi Carrell (UA)

The librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal puts these words into the field marshal’s mouth. She knows that the affair with her young lover Octavian is finally over. So she proposes him to her cousin Baron Ochs as a messenger of love, a Rosenkavalier. Ochs has his eye on Sophie, the daughter of an up-and-coming middle-class family. His goal is to rejuvenate the old nobility with new money. What Ochs doesn't expect: Octavian falls in love with Sophie and thwarts his plans.
It is a lively rococo fantasy that Richard Strauss creates with Der Rosenkavalier and in the framework of which he creates a social study about old nobility, new money and class arrogance.

With the production of Strauss' Rosenkavalier, the internationally renowned director Georg Schmiedleitner is presenting himself for the first time in Mainz. Known for his gripping access to material and fine direction of characters, he penetrates the deepest depths of opera characters. In Strauss's masterpiece he will look behind the facade of lavish sounds and rococo gestures.

Der Rosenkavalier

A woman who was remarkably emancipated for her time is at the center of Kaija Saariaho's monodrama Emilie . Emilie du Châtelet was a French mathematician, physicist and philosopher during the Enlightenment.

Emilie (DE)

Can artificial intelligence develop consciousness? Where is the boundary between man and machine? Does only humans have the right to a self-determined existence? The science fiction opera humanoid tells a gripping story about the relationship between people and technology, about diving and getting lost in digital worlds.

Humanoid

“Ladies and gentlemen, some call him Lucky, some call him Zimmy, I just call him Bobby – here is Bob Dylan!” George Harrison once announced Bob Dylan.

Things Have Changed

In Radio Star , a musical panorama is unfolded that moves exploratively between catchy tunes and unknown sounds and turns the radio itself into a musical instrument, such as in Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition Pole for singers and 2 shortwave receivers. And last but not least, the question is asked: Did video kill the radio star?

Radio Star

Based on the novel of the same name by Polish author and Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, Weinberg created an opera about guilt and renewed confrontation with the past. In his opera, completed in 1968 but only staged for the first time in 2010, the Polish-Jewish composer, who lost his parents and sister in the Shoah, combines late romantic opulence with twelve-tone technique, folk songs and dance music to create a haunting memorial against obfuscation and forgetting.

Die Passagierin

Pagliacci tells the story of an acting troupe: the aging actor Canio learns that his younger wife Nedda is having an affair with another man. Nevertheless, he has to put on a good face every evening on stage as “Bajazzo”. Canio threatens to break because of it.

The ability of the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo to reconcile the playful theater-on-the-theater level, the ambiguous emotional situation and the dark mood makes this opera a thrilling crime thriller.

In Giacomo Puccini's first opera Le Villi, the composer's talent as a melodist and harmonizer - his typical "melancholic tone" - can be clearly heard. Anna and Roberto celebrate their engagement. Soon afterwards, Roberto has to travel to Mainz to collect an inheritance, where he falls for a seductive stranger. Anna feels betrayed by him and dies of grief. Her soul unites with the Willis, the souls of dead women who suffered a similar fate. Roberto finally returns full of remorse, but he is drawn into a frenzied dance by the Willis...

Le Villi / Pagliacci

Every child knows about pirates, but who actually are the Pirates of Penzance ? In Gilbert and Sullivan's classic of the English operetta repertoire, the pirate apprentice Frederic dreams of finally leading a decent life because he only ended up in a pirate apprenticeship instead of a private apprenticeship because of a hearing problem with his nanny Ruth. When Frederic meets the lovely daughters of a major general - whose comprehensive education is unfortunately sparse in the military sector - and falls in love with the loveliest of them, the humorous chaos begins: torn between his sense of duty and Due to his overwhelming aversion to being a pirate, Frederic and Ruth, the band of pirates who want to get married under their victorious pirate king on the hunt for the major general's daughters and a group of police officers unwilling to fight, slide through the events to ravishingly comic music, in which the absurd is declined until one faces it Laughing results without a fight.
An absolute must, not just for fans of British humor!

The Pirates of Penzance

Pagliacci tells the story of an acting troupe: the aging actor Canio learns that his younger wife Nedda is having an affair with another man. Nevertheless, every evening he has to put on a good face on the stage as "Bajazzo" and play the game. Canio threatens to break up.

In Giacomo Puccini's first opera Le Villi, the composer's talent as a melodist and harmonist - his typical "melancholic tone" - is clearly heard. Anna and Roberto celebrate their engagement. Soon after, Roberto has to travel to Mainz for an inheritance, where he falls for a seductive stranger. Anna feels betrayed by him and dies of grief. Her soul reunites with the Willis, the souls of dead women who have suffered a similar fate. Roberto eventually returns, full of regrets, but the Willis engage him in a frenzied dance...

Le Villi /Pagliacci

Nabucco, king of the Babylonians, raids the Hebrews and destroys their temples. His daughter Fenena defects to the enemy camp. Her love for the slave Ismaele is a thorn in the side of her half-sister Abigaille. She is not only fighting against Fenena, but against the subjugated Jewish people.

But then Abigaille finds a document that reveals that she is the daughter of a slave and will therefore never be entitled to the crown. Only an intrigue and the mental decline of her power-obsessed father Nabucco can pave her way to the king's throne...

Nabucco

Only a single hit separates Max from his happiness. If he succeeds in making a successful test shot in front of the prince, forester Kuno grants him the hand of his daughter Agathe and the forest. But the fear of failure paralyzes Max and makes him resort to forbidden means. In the dark Wolves Gorge, Kaspar seduces him into casting free bullets. Six of these magic bullets hits every imaginable target unfailingly. With the seventh bullet, however, the devil takes a human victim. The next day, when the seventh bullet is in Max's rifle during the all-important test shot, all the bleak omens seems to come true.

Der Freischütz

4:48 a.m. Every 24 hours, in this darkest hour of the night, the effects of the psychotropic drug cocktail wear off - until the next dose 72 minutes later. Every night at this time, the drug veil lifts from the tormented consciousness and they return, the intrusive dark thoughts that threaten to suppress everything else. Nightmare visions. Feelings of hopelessness and self-hatred. Fragments of memories: of conversations with an absent lover. With a therapist whose professional distance seems downright cruel.

4.48 Psychosis

Very few of us have lived in a world without nuclear weapons. I haven't. You probably haven't either. They just exist....
Sometimes the threat comes into focus. When Russia invades Ukraine. But that doesn't make the weapons any more dangerous. They are always dangerous. And one day - intentionally or accidentally - they will be reused. And then it's all over.
None of this is normal.

Talking about the Fire

40 million years in the future: A humanoid species re-enacts the legendary myth of how their ancestors, the primitive species Homo sapiens, disappeared from Earth and ended up on Planet B:
Their story begins on Earth in the 21st century, where the climate catastrophe is raging unchecked and many species have already become extinct. Then aliens suddenly appear and tell humanity that "Project Earth" unfortunately cannot be extended. Humans have dominated and exploited the Earth for too long.

Planet B

Princess Turandot never wants to belong to a man. To deter her suitors, she has passed a cruel law: anyone who wants to marry her must first solve three riddles.
If he fails, he is executed. Countless men have already died this way. Prince Calaf also feels attracted to Turandot. Ignoring the urgent warnings of his father and Liù, who loves him selflessly, he faces the riddles - and is able to solve them. But instead of taking Turandot as his wife against her will, he now gives her a riddle of his own...

Turandot

The action of the play takes place on board a Danish packet boat that trades on the nearby coasts. Shortly before departure, a man jumps into the harbor to escape from his pursuers. Carl, the captain's son, gives the stranger protection by hiding him in the hold. But the presence of the fugitive, who, as it soon turns out, is a Jewish doctor, cannot be kept secret on the small boat for long...

The Stowaway

"One job doesn't get you very far these days. You need two for a life. That's the so-called flexibility that everyone is talking about these days. They do it so that at the end of the day we don't know where we are at. But two paychecks mean two meals, that's all I can think of right now."
Beatrice wants to collect her recently deceased brother's money from his debtors, but nobody takes her seriously as a woman. So she disguises herself as her dead brother in order to get the money she is entitled to. To gain credibility and support, she also hires the servant Truffaldino. However, he has also taken a job with Florindo because he cannot otherwise make ends meet on his salary. What he doesn't know is that Florindo is Beatrice's lover and is on the run because he is said to have killed Beatrice's brother because Beatrice's brother wanted to prevent his relationship with his sister. Chaos and comedy of errors are inevitable...

The Servant of Two Masters

" Underdog invites the audience to a dialogue about dominance and submission and explores the depths of our collective psyche through the themes of hunting, desire and power. It confronts us with the paradoxes of strength and vulnerability and reminds us that in the cycle of life we ​​are all hunters and hunted, caught in the delicate balance of nature." (Alan Lucien Øyen)

Underdog (UA)

A moment of carelessness leads to a young fox being captured. She grows up on a forester's farm, surrounded by forester's children who tease her, a dachshund who feels misunderstood, and a flock of chickens whose eagerness to serve only encourages the fox to give in to her hunting instinct. After escaping to freedom, she meets a fox with whom she starts a family - not without some forest dwellers commenting indignantly on the young couple's courtship. But in the forest, it's not just foxes and badgers who say "good night" to each other, but sometimes foresters and schoolmasters too, when they meet on the way back from the pub. And when the paths of humans and animals cross, the animals often come off worse...

Staatstheater Mainz

Mar 21 - Jul 2, 2025

The End of Eddy

Apr 26 - Jul 4, 2025

4.48 Psychosis

29 - 30 Apr, 2025

Talking about the Fire

Mar 22 - Jul 1, 2025

The Addams Family

Dec 31, 2024 - May 4, 2025

What you want

Mar 26 - Apr 16, 2025

In C tanzmainz meets Sasha Waltz & Guests

Mar 22 - Jul 1, 2025

The Addams Family

Articles & News

Staatstheater Mainz