When dreams are the only escape from a nightmare.

Les Miserables. Rent. Blood Brothers. Cabaret. Musicals know how to shine a light on the dark places of life, how to find beauty in people’s hardest times.

Places don’t get darker than this. Life cannot get harder than this. But still, there is light. Still, there is beauty.

City of Dreams is based on the life of Austrian artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a leading light of the Bauhaus movement who spent her time in Terezin – the Nazis’ sham ‘model ghetto’ – secretly helping the imprisoned children through art. It tells of her love for her husband Pavel; a love so deep that when he was sent to Auschwitz, she volunteered to go too. It follows Pavel’s quest to find the truth about her death, and his desperate need to recall the song they first danced to. It reveals her legacy, represented by the thousands of drawings that survived the holocaust although the children who drew them did not.

This is a story of love and art and compassion and sacrifice. It will claim you. It will change you.

It is a story that must be told.