The Varsity Show is one of Columbia’s oldest and most venerated traditions, described on its website as “celebrating and satirizing life at Columbia.” Historically, the task has been simple: Construct a farcical plot to mirror some ongoing campus controversy, and pack it with as many relatable jokes about dining hall food or econ bros as possible.

As the double doors of the Austin E. Quigley Black Box Theatre burst open, a flood of people from another era emerge. In costume for their upcoming performance, the actors hurry down Lerner Hall’s winding maze of stairs and form a circle on the still-wet grass. Excitement and nerves mix as they laugh and spin around in their long skirts.

As students donned raincoats and occasionally held up umbrellas, Bacchanal began with an unexpected drizzle this Saturday. Despite the rain, students stood shoulder to shoulder in the crowd, awaiting a series of performances headlined by Tinashe.

When he was a teenager, Richard Rodgers, CC 1923, went to see the Varsity Show for the first time. After the show, he met one of the actors, Oscar Hammerstein, CC 1916, Law 1917. Rodgers wrote in his autobiography “Musical Stages” about that afternoon: “I went home with one irrevocable decision, I would also go to Columbia, and I would also write the Varsity Show.”

Tony Award winner Renée Elise Goldsberry kicked off the Athena Film Festival on March 6 in the Diana Center Event Oval with a screening of her new film “Satisfied,” a documentary about her two years originating the role of Angelica Schuyler in “Hamilton.” The screening was followed by a talkback with Goldsberry and film co-director Melissa Haizlip.

As two dancers clasp hands and spin across the dance floor, their movements perfectly correlate with a black-and-white video of the same dance being performed nearly 100 years before.

While the characters in the play “Three Sisters” are constantly talking, they are simultaneously stagnant. Their hour long conversations about life, death, work, and pleasure in their timeless room meld together in a blur, until one day they wake up and wonder when life passed them by.

When a play’s leading politician begins by declaring that he is “determined to prove a villain,” it’s best to believe him. As the bodies pile up in King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe’s “Richard III,” there’s no other way to spin it: Tricky Dick Gloucester really is a crook.

A coffin remains the centerpiece of the stage for the entirety of the Columbia Musical Theatre Society’s production of “Fun Home.” It is a constant obstruction in the Bechdel home, while the house itself, obsessively curated to erase any mess or evidence of life, seems to have entombed the decaying family inside.

Dropping Shakespearean characters into a ’90s slasher film, King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe’s “Fear It” deconstructs the gender tropes that pervade the modern American canon by terrorizing the ladies who started it all.