Bucket List

“In the very near future, memory will be a choice”. This is the promise made the start-up company “Zeitgeist”. Its specialty is to alter or delete traumatic memories. A man whose world view has collapsed overnight agrees to undergo this treatment – and ends up being plagued by strange phantom memories.
Songwriter Shlomi Shaban, director Yael Ronen, their cast and their band use the form of the musical to address loss, dissolution and pain in haunting music and tranquil, focused images. An intense, highly emotional show about an overwhelming present.

Statement of the Jury

Sometimes the theatre manages to be contemporary in a way that is the opposite of “up-to-date”. In these instances, something seems to lie behind what we see on stage, like a second skin. “Bucket List” is such a show. Because it is precisely not what many had expected – a concrete analysis of the horrors of 7 October 2023. Instead: There is trust in what is your own, in art, music and the original story. But how can this story be told without dealing with the Here and Now? A man wants his memories to be deleted because he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But some shreds remain, some eerie scraps of yesterday’s memories, like those white pieces of clothing that keep falling from the theatre’s rafters. Among the disconsolate yearning of these images, Yael Ronen, Shlomi Shaban and their cast have created grand musical theatre, effortlessly changing between Broadwayesque glamour and mellifluous singer-songwriter sounds. As masterfully as ever – and yet nothing seems like it was before.

Tojuror Janis El-Bira’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (PDF, 0.6 MB)