“What do you do to get ready to go out?” an emcee asked the crowd gathered in the Lerner Black Box Theatre on Saturday night. Hip-hop dance troupe Onyx celebrated officially becoming an all-female group with their aptly named “Girl’s Night Out” Spring Showcase, which took place from April 21 - 22.

“The Varsity Show is a self-selecting group of insane motherfuckers!” exclaimed cast member India Beer, BC ’20, citing wisdom that writer Amelia Arnold, BC ’17, had passed on to her. “Which I think is pretty accurate,” Beer continued, “but they’re also some of the best people that I’ve ever met.”

“You know what would be cool? A drunk, sad Santa Claus beating up a giant bird in front of two screaming kids,” somebody at LateNite Theatre thought, apparently.

High above a formal dining room hang letters, handwritten in a scrawling font. They are replicas of real correspondence between Virginia Woolf and author Vita Sackville-West, her lover for two decades. In her original one-act play, “West,” Antonia Georgieva, CC ’18, imagines a dinner party between Woolf and Sackville-West, as well as their respective husbands, Leonard Woolf and Harold Nicolson, and their friend T.S. Eliot.

As the curtains opened on Thursday night, a spotlight panned downward to illuminate four male butts, cheerily clad in Victorian coattails and bobbing up and down in a comedic dance. The scene was set for the farcical pursuit of the villain who had slain Edwin Drood.

Two people stood apart on an empty stage. A spotlight illuminated one of them, a man in a suit. His face conveyed an apologetic sentiment he seemed to be trying much too hard to feel. “It is with great sadness that I write with difficult news,” he began.

Last week’s blizzard failed to put a damper on the seventh annual Athena Film Festival, which took place at Barnard from Thursday to Sunday evening this weekend.

Four nights before the Grammys, on Feb. 9, the Columbia University Performing Arts League put on what felt like its own red carpet event in Lerner’s Roone Arledge Auditorium.

At the start of each semester, production posters pop up in hallways. Bathrooms begin to echo with actors rehearsing their monologues. Why? Because auditions for plays and musicals begin almost as soon as students arrive back on campus.