“The White Lotus” is founded on the premise that high-end vacations, for all their perks and luxuries, can bring more misery than leisure. There is something inevitably disappointing about setting off for a week of sun-drenched relaxation, maybe with some sightseeing mixed in, only to discover that the real world isn’t so easily escaped.

Columbia University Players’ “Indecent” follows Sholem Asch (Jamie Treatman-Clark, CC ’27), a young playwright who authored the play “The God of Vengeance” in 1906, which follows a love affair between two women and features those women scandalously—some might say indecently—kissing on stage.

“A White Girl’s Understudy,” a one-act play written by Isabel Tongson, BC ’26, debuted off-off Broadway at the Chain Theatre in February. The play follows Lyn Wong, an Asian understudy to a white actor for the lead female role in a Broadway play called “Speakeasy Love.” For Tongson, who initially wrote the play in a playwriting class during her first year of college, the production at the Chain Theatre was a culmination of years of hard work.

“We Strangers” is simultaneously a socially biting comedy, an uncanny work of psychological horror, and a quiet character study. Screened March 9 at the LeFrak Theatre, the film won the 2025 Athena Film Festival Breakthrough Award.

Stories about serial killers have no shortage of gruesome murders, but how many feature a villain who makes consistently delicious use of their victims?

The Columbia Musical Theatre Society presented the second “Legally Blonde” production of the semester last weekend, following the Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s Broadway Haven Players’ performance in late October. That two theater groups presented the same musical back-to-back is a fun—if not surprising—coincidence. It’s easy to imagine the bubbly optimism and familiar college setting of “Legally Blonde” appealing to a younger audience, whose members can perhaps relate to Elle Woods’ transition from sunny California to the stuffy and serious halls of Harvard Law School.

“Yellow Face,” with performances from Sept. 13 through Nov. 24 at the Todd Haimes Theatre, is a profoundly uncomfortable exploration of racism, identity, and the double standard that blurs racial boundaries for some and militantly enforces them for others. It’s also hysterically, ruthlessly funny, the kind of humor that embraces discomfort as a language of comedy and eviscerates everything in its path.

The Broadway Haven Players, the Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s most prominent theater company, produced a “Legally Blonde” that stayed true to the pink, sparkly ethos of the original musical, yet hummed with its own unique life. With performances on Oct. 25 and 26 in Alumni Auditorium, the show followed Elle Woods, the blonde, fashion-savvy daughter of the Delta Nu sorority as she enters the hallowed halls of Harvard Law School in an attempt to win back her ex-boyfriend, Warner Huntington III.

People of all ages gathered on West 111th Street and Amsterdam Avenue on Saturday for an afternoon of Halloween festivities in an open street event jointly hosted by local organizations, including the West 111th Street Block Association, Haunted Fountain at the Cathedral, and Morningside Merchants.