Playbill

What a night! Thank you to everyone who came out to open Playbill’s 2026 program and helped create such a warm, attentive space for the songs of Baby Dee to land.

Tomorrow night we open our 2026 season with ACT XVI and we’re thrilled to welcome Baby Dee to Torpedo Theater for a rare live performance. The concert is now sold out, and we’re grateful for the incredible response. Since retiring from regular touring in 2019, Dee has appeared on stage only occasionally — including a concert last year at ICA London. Her return to Amsterdam marks a rare moment: her last performances in the Netherlands were at Le Guess Who in 2014 and at Vleeshal in 2018. We’re excited for this unique performance and look forward to welcoming everyone tomorrow at Torpedo Theater. Doors: 20:00 Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam SOLD OUT — DM for waitlist Video: Baby Dee performs "Safe Inside the Day" live in session for The Line of Best Fit, 2011.

NOW ON SALE: ACT XVI: Baby Dee Featuring a collection of ‘unsomethings’ for piano by Baby Dee March 28, 2026—Doors at 8pm Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam SOLD OUT/DM for waitlist Playbill opens its 2026 season on March 28 with a concert by Baby Dee, who will perform songs from across her body of work, including several dirges and recent compositions titled ‘Bucket of Eyeballs’. Dee has long resisted the discipline of the setlist, allowing her performances to unfold in real time and, in this spirit, the evening promises no fixed script. Songs will drift from mournful ballad to mischievous confession, from cathedral hush to carnival lament. Carried by voice and piano, she moves effortlessly between tenderness and theatricality, the sacred and the absurd. In the 1990s, Dee summarised herself in a brief biography: ‘Baby Dee is a child of light, a circus freak and a happy whore.’ Yet a more extended biography would state that Dee was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1953, with her life following an uncommon path traversing music, faith, street theatre and performance art. A transgender woman and classically trained harpist and pianist, she spent a decade as music director and organist at a Catholic church in the Bronx before the unpredictable pull of circus and sideshow life took hold. Her years as a travelling performer carried her across cities and continents. For a time she could be found busking on the streets of Amsterdam, balancing on a unicycle with a concert harp attached. Later, encouraged by collaborators such as Marc Almond, Dee began recording at the turn of the millennium, releasing her debut album ‘Little Window’ in 2000, after which a string of studio albums followed. ACT XVI offers a rare encounter with Dee, now living in Zeeland, who has largely stepped away from the stage in recent years. Join us to celebrate her return to the spotlight, with a special evening of songs shaped by decades of wandering, where echoes of old dear friends, circus adventures and street life meet again, guided by the sounds of robins in the distance. Image: Portrait of Baby Dee on her unicycle with harp in New York City, 1996. Photo by Paul Coughlin.

Setting II: Sue Tompkins is a wrap! Many thanks to everyone who joined us last Saturday for the festive finissage of Setting II at our space on Sint Jansstraat 35. It was a pleasure celebrating the closing of Sue Tompkins’ exhibition together. Stay tuned as we’ll soon announce the first act of 2026 as Playbill’s live programme continues at Torpedo Theater.

Join us this Saturday for the finissage of Setting II: Sue Tompkins. Drop by between 3-5pm to celebrate the closing of the exhibition with us. We’d love to see you there for one last look of Tompkins' painting 'Scene' and performance documentation of 'Letherin Through the Grill'! Should you not be able to join for the finissage the final days for visiting the show are this Friday and Saturday 1-5pm.

Last two weekends alert: Setting II: Sue Tompkins is coming to an end! If you haven't seen the show yet, feel welcome to drop by on Friday and Saturday between 1-5pm. Join us on Saturday, March 7 to say goodbye with a festive finissage from 3-5pm.

Playbill is closed today because we are down with flu. Next week Friday and Saturday we are open as usual: 1-5pm.

Should you be out today for holiday shopping you're welcome to pop in to visit SETTING II: Sue Tompkins. After today Playbill will be closed for our winter break until Friday, January 23, 2026. SETTING II: Sue Tompkins will be on view until March 7, so there will be plenty of time to visit in the new year. We wish you all a gentle change of the year and look forward to welcoming you again in 2026!

If you haven't visited SETTING II: Sue Tompkins yet, you can do so today and tomorrow during 1–5pm before we close for the winter break until Friday, 23 January. 🎥: Sue Tompkins, Letherin Through the Grille (excerpt), 2013, performed at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Tony Webster Ltd., Glasgow.

SETTING II: SUE TOMPKINS December 13, 2025 – March 7, 2026 p l a y b i l l is very excited to welcome you to SETTING II: Sue Tompkins, the second presentation of our inaugural program celebrating the opening of our new office and archive, that will be, on two occasions throughout the year, a presentation space as well. Opening quietly today and running for three months, this presentation will ease us into the new year and culminate in a finissage on the final day in March—when we can toast Sue’s work together. Following each other in quick succession, SETTING I and II are attempts to settle into our new space on Sint Jansstraat, in turn painting a picture of what is to come. While Moniek Toebosch welcomed everyone to the space with her film Welkom, gaat u zitten [Welcome, take a seat] (2000), Sue Tompkins’ presentation traverses multiple forms of documentation to present the space as a site of translation—a translation of what is happening in the theatre, of a live context to an archival one and of language from speech to script. The presentation begins from a small painting made by Tompkins last year, in which the word ‘SCENE’ is inscribed across its surface. Creating a bridge between the vernacular of the theatre—in which play after play is staged through a series of scenes—and the naming of our presentation series as ‘Settings’, the painting draws a frame of intention: at only 20 × 25.9 cm, it is ‘setting the scene’ of the program itself. You can visit Setting II today and next week during our usual visiting hours of Friday and Saturday, 1–5pm, before we break for the holidays.

Final weekend of SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch If you haven't been able to swing by Playbill yet to visit SETTING I then you are very welcome this weekend! Saturday: 3–6pm Sunday: 1–5pm After the weekend we'll be closed while we install for SETTING II.

NOW ON SALE: ACT XV: Open Stage Featuring Lorenzo Garcia-Andrade Llamas, gervaise alexis savvias and luz December 7, 2025—Doors at 8pm Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam ACT XV marks our third open call as a platform and the second night of Playbill’s first double bill weekend. Now a staple of our program, the annual Open Stage act started in 2023 as a way to share the theatre with a group of young practitioners equally committed to exploring language and text through artistic works. In this spirit and with much excitement, we again hand the platform over to artists, musicians and writers working with similar concerns, aware that taking the stage often requires resources not always available. In a further gesture of opening up, we also work with an external selector each year, to make sure we try and get outside our own curatorial biases and habits, and to introduce the work of the applicants to a leading practitioner in the field. This year, we worked with poet, photographer and ACT XIV artist S*an D. Henry-Smith to select three applicants through an open call, for which artists were invited to propose a work that they felt would be at home on the stage at Torpedo Theater and which engaged with our year-long focus of ‘song’ in whatever varying and experimental ways they deemed fit. With this in mind, the three selected artists and collectives—Lorenzo Garcia-Andrade Llamas, gervaise alexis savvias and luz—present an array of approaches to voicing and song. Throughout the evening, a chance encounter with a grandmother’s manuscripts will see ghostly echoes and spirits conjured in search of meaning, an experimental opera based on a classic of queer literature will put musicality and text at the forefront, and narratives and imaginaries surrounding the triumph of the Cuban Revolution will be brought to life through sampling, distortion and layered voices. While a diverse cast of figures, periods and approaches will make up the evening, what the works have in common is a relationship to doing history otherwise—to doing it in and out of time, between tongues and with fragmentation in mind. Join us and this choir of characters to celebrate the final act of 2025.