There are cities that become characters. London has its fog and its class; Paris its rooftops and its yearning. But Berlin — Berlin has always been something wilder, something rawer, a place where history doesn’t so much accumulate as explode. And no decade captured that combustion more vividly than the early 1990s, when a wall came down and an entire civilisation had to work out, overnight, what it wanted to be.
Of course – I am biased a bit because I grew up in (West) Berlin and was there when the wall came down. And my history as ball room dancer exposed me to queerness early in life, making it a normal part of life.
It is into that cauldron of euphoria, grief, freedom and fear that Wir sind am Leben – Das Berlin Musical throws us — and it does so with the authority of two men who were actually there, like me. Peter Plate and Ulf Leo Sommer, the duo behind the beloved German pop-rock band Rosenstolz, moved to Berlin in 1990. They watched the city remake itself. They watched friends fall ill and die as the AIDS crisis tore through the queer community with barely a whisper of public acknowledgement. They fell in love with a chosen family in a crumbling East Berlin squat. And for the better part of three decades, they have been trying to put it all on a stage.
The result, which world-premiered on 21 March 2026 at the Stage Theater des Westens — one of Berlin’s most storied musical houses, home to the German-language premieres of My Fair Lady and La Cage aux Folles — is their most personal, most courageous, and most complicated work. It is imperfect, operatically loud, and occasionally clunky in its dramaturgy. It is also, at its best, genuinely moving. When the final anthem swells and a full house rises to its feet, you understand precisely why this musical had to exist: because the people it memorialises deserve to be remembered.
Love, Loss, and Change
The musical’s title, translating loosely to “We are Alive,” is borrowed from Plate and Sommer’s 2011 Rosenstolz album — itself an early sketch of the same world — and the show’s DNA seems autofictional, reflecting the deeper connotation of the title that comes to mind when it’s said in German. It goes well beyond showing a heart beat. Its feeling reminds a bit of One Republic’s “I lived.” Set in 1990, the story centres on a squatted East Berlin tenement in Friedrichshain nicknamed “Konsum Hoffnung” (Hope Cooperative), its upper floor once a GDR – Easter Germany’s” telephone-counselling office, its ground floor a derelict grocery. The residents have kept the helpline running.
Into this found family arrive two siblings from a small town to the west: Nina Fröhlich, a would-be pop star chasing the neon dream of reunified Berlin, and her younger brother Mario, quieter and less certain of himself, who drifts toward the city’s gay scene. Their overbearing mother Rosi — a hairdresser who bills herself the “Udo Walz of the East” and claims to have once done Katarina Witt’s hair — eventually materialises uninvited, displaced and desperate to reclaim her children.
The beating heart of the squat, however, is Bruno, a drag performer who appears nightly as Marlene Dietrich. Bruno receives an HIV diagnosis early in the first act, and the show never flinches from where that leads. His partner Nando, a Cuban-born former GDR ballet dancer, anchors the piece’s most tender scenes. Elsewhere, a lesbian couple navigate an unplanned pregnancy, and the collective’s warm but eccentric matriarch Doris falls unexpectedly in love.
Book and direction by Franziska Kuropka and Lukas Nimscheck navigate this ensemble with variable success: some storylines are dropped rather than resolved, and the episodic structure can feel thin. But the emotional arc — from the giddy communal euphoria of Act One to the elegy of Act Two — lands with genuine force. The second-act scene in which Bruno, bathed in cold light, “speaks” by telephone with Marlene Dietrich before his death is the production’s most quietly devastating moment. The story, as Plate has said in interview, is a moral debt: “Wir sind es den Menschen, die damals gestorben sind, schuldig, dass wir ihre Geschichten erzählen.”
“We owe it the friends that passed to tell their stories”
Rosenstolz at Their Best
This is not a jukebox musical. Let that be said clearly. Of the 23 songs in the score, only two are existing Rosenstolz recordings: the rousing title song and the 1997 track “Die Schlampen sind müde.” Everything else is newly composed by Plate, Sommer and collaborator Joshua Lange, and performed live each night by the five-piece on-stage “Konsum Hoffnung Band” under musical director Shay Cohen.
The style is what you’d expect from Rosenstolz and rather more: big pop-rock anthems, propulsive electronic beats, occasional echoes of techno and Eurodisco. The first act fizzes with energy. “Supernovadiscoslut” — Bruno’s signature number, an ecstatic, glitter-bomb drag spectacular — stops the show cold and earns the audience’s immediate, total devotion. “Ich werd’ nicht weinen” gives Jörn-Felix Alt his first genuinely shattering moment, Bruno’s defiant refusal to be destroyed by his diagnosis. In the second act, “Kupferrot” announces Nina’s arrival as a rising star with real theatrical grandeur, and the interpolated “Die Schlampen sind müde” — Nina alone before a black curtain — is both a showstopper and an unmistakable tribute to the late Rosenstolz singer AnNa R., who died in March 2025.
Where the score struggles is in differentiation. Critics including Musicalzentrale’s Kai Wulfes and tip Berlin have noted that the compositions blur into one another over three hours — “Tanzen 2000,” “Freiheit ist die schönste Stadt der Welt” and several others occupy a similar register and similar tempo. The live band adds warmth, but the sound design has been widely criticised for an over-amplified, frequently shrill mix that fatigues even sympathetic ears by the interval. These are real weaknesses. The score, at its peaks, soars; but those peaks are surrounded by a good deal of undifferentiated pop plateau.
In our quick review right after the show, my brother and I had to agree: challenging each other whether we could hum any of the songs. Besides “Supernovasiscoslut” and the closing hymn with the show’a title, we couldn’t. But we also quickly dismissed the thought as we loved the show overall!
A Clever Stage!
Whatever reservations one holds about the score or the book, the staging of “Wir sind am Leben” is a considerable achievement. Set designer Adam Nee has constructed three layered, graffiti-streaked East Berlin house façades that can be pushed, pivoted and reconfigured around a central rotating multi-level tenement — a kinetic, ceaselessly inventive use of the Theater des Westens’s large stage. The last time I was that impressed was for Grand Hotel, coincidentally in 1991, evoking fun memories as my ballroom dance coach performed in it at the time.
The covered orchestra pit doubles as a forestage playing area; long red telephone cables snake across the floor in the show’s most recurring and beautiful visual motif. The Berlin skyline, a U-Bahn station, a lamppost-lit park: everything is evoked with economy and wit.
Tim Deiling’s lighting design is for me one of the highlights of the production. From the ice-blue cone isolating Bruno in his death scene to the strobing fever of the club numbers, Deiling gives the show its full emotional range without a single wasted cue. The costumes by Ferran Casanova (with wigs and additional design by Anke Ludwig) are authentically, deliciously wrong: early-1990s Berlin underground in all its leopard-print, mismatched-denim, over-gelled glory.
Jonathan Huor’s choreography drives the ensemble with fierce precision. Some reviewers have found the movement vocabulary repetitive but the sheer physical commitment of the 20-strong company makes even the most familiar combination feel earned. And some of the movements evoke the Ballroom themes that I so enjoyed in last week’s Cats: Jellicle Ball in New York. Fun!
The on-stage band integrated into the set design is a masterstroke: it roots the sound in the world of the story, and when the musicians lean into the disco breaks, the theater becomes, briefly and gloriously, exactly the squat party the show describes.
Critical Reception
The critical conversation around “Wir sind am Leben” has been lively, which is itself a form of success. The Berliner Zeitung greeted the premiere with barely restrained enthusiasm, describing the audience leaping to their feet to dance and sing along. The Berliner Abendblatt reported rapturous applause and “einige Tränen” among the house. Kulturfeder called it an “eindrucksvolles Zeugnis der Erinnerung” and praised its courage in centring queer lives and the AIDS crisis where mainstream Wende-nostalgia musicals typically look away.
The dissenting voices are worth hearing. RONDO’s Manuel Brug found the book dramaturgically slack, the characters too broadly drawn, while tip Berlin felt the show’s potentially radical material was undermined by an over-produced, “schrill” sound. Musicalzentrale gave a thorough mixed verdict: “Kein wirklicher Geniestreich … zu dünn und vorhersehbar ist das Buch” — but called the cast “grandios.” The Schabel Kultur-Blog arrived at a thoughtful 3 out of 5.
In aggregate: the press is divided on craft and unanimous on feeling. The cast — above all Celina dos Santos, Steffi Irmen, and an incandescent Jörn-Felix Alt — has attracted something close to unqualified praise across the critical spectrum. And the audiences, night after night, are not divided at all.
My Bottom Line
“Wir sind am Leben – Das Berlin Musical” is a show built from grief and gratitude in almost equal measure. It is the first wholly original work from Plate and Sommer — not an adaptation, not a catalogue revue, but a labour of love three decades in the making, staged in the very city whose history it carries. It is inconsistent, over-amplified and, at times, dramatically thin. It is also tender, funny, politically awake, and performed by a cast that gives it everything it has.
This is a production with a purpose beyond entertainment: to ensure that the queer community of early-1990s Berlin — its courage, its chosen families, its catastrophic losses to AIDS — is not forgotten in the flood of triumphalist reunification mythology. On that measure, and despite its imperfections, it succeeds.
Go and let yourself be taken back to the 90s. For me, it was a blast and memorable!