Imagination on Stage: "¡Shhh…!" Asia Tour Stops in Beijing

This Saturday (Sep 20), acclaimed stage play ¡Shhh…!  will be hitting the capital. Taking place from 11.30am at Celestial, the play is brought to you by Costa Rican theater group Teatro Palíndromos as part of their 2025 Asia Tour. 

First released in 2013, ¡Shhh…!  has wowed audiences around the world with its unique twist: four short stories told entirely without dialogue, props or scenery. Instead, the performers rely on pure physical storytelling, inviting the audience to imagine the world along with them. 

The four stories are:

• The Cake: A birthday celebration that goes wrong
• Mission Impossible: Two clumsy thieves are trying to steal something out of a maximum security facility
• The Soundbomb: A curious janitor has to clean a secret lab without knowing what's inside
• The Funeral: A guy finds himself at the funeral of a mafia leader without realizing where he is 

Ahead of the Beijing stop, we spoke with group director Diego Salgado to learn more about the play, the cast, and what audiences can expect from the performance. 

Firstly, can you tell us a bit about Teatro Palíndromos?
Palíndromos celebrated its 20th anniversary in July. We have always focused on creating theater with a social and reflective approach. Furthermore, one of our main goals is to promote cultural outreach by bringing theater to as many places as possible, allowing audiences who don't normally have access to it to watch theater. Furthermore, Palindromos has an educational focus, visiting schools with educational plays and curriculum content for students.

Why did you choose ¡Shhh…!  as the performance to take on your Asia Tour?
We chose to travel with ¡Shhh…! because we knew that traveling with another show to a non-Spanish or English-speaking country would be very complicated and would limit the number of spaces we could perform in. Therefore, the goal was always to travel with a show that could be seen by any audience, without any language issues.

Can you tell us a little about the history of the play and how it's been received around the world?
We premiered the play in 2013, and the idea from the beginning was to have a production that we could take to countries that didn't speak our language. We've always loved diversifying our stage offerings, and at that moment, the mission was clear: We wanted to create a play that didn't require spoken language to be understood. Thus, ¡Shhh...! was born. It was an arduous process of collective creation that lasted six months, while we refined the stories that would ultimately make it to the final cut. Since its premiere, ¡Shhh...! has always been well received, especially by children, because they are more in touch with their imagination than adults.

We began presenting it in Costa Rica, and that same year, we toured Germany, Italy and France in various spaces. The following year, we presented it in Chile and Argentina. In 2015, we took it to Russia, and in 2016, to Panama. In 2018, we were in the United States, and in 2022, we presented the work in Finland and Switzerland. We were in Brazil in August 2023, and last year we took it to Canada and Colombia. As it has toured countries, certain details have changed while others have matured, but the play has always maintained its original essence.

Could you introduce us to the cast and creative team behind this production?
For this tour, the crew consists of only two actors: myself (Diego Salgado) and my partner, María Laura Alvarado. However, the original cast consisted of four actors, and I wasn't one of them. In 2013, I only directed it, but as the international tours began, I ended up taking on one of the roles.

The play is made up of four different stories. Do you have a personal favorite story from the four, and why?
All the stories in ¡Shhh...! have very different themes, and the characters seem to be out of a cartoon. But we both agree that our favorite is The Cake because we consider it the funniest. It has a lot of physical comedy, and the birthday celebration theme is so universal that, from the start, everyone gets it, making it much easier for the audience to get into the story's plot. Since it's the most common story, we believe it's the one people can relate to the most.

What do you hope Beijing audiences will take away from ¡Shhh…!?
We hope that the play's use of imagination and body language (as a universal language) will allow Beijing audiences to enjoy the play and the cartoonish situations of the characters in ¡Shhh…! with us.

What's next for you and the team after this Beijing performance?
On this Asian tour, we'll also be visiting a high school in Tokyo and are currently arranging a performance in Seoul with this same play. We'll then return to our country [Costa Rica] to continue our performances in educational institutions and the comedies we work on during weekends in various theaters.

¡Shhh…! will be taking place at Celestial on Sat, Sep 20, from 11.30am. Tickets are RMB 168 and can be purchased by scanning the QR code in the poster above.

Celestial 空想酒吧 
2/F, 27 Dongsi Beidajie, Dongcheng District 
东城区东四北大街27号2层 

READ: Meet the Artists of Songzhuang: A Day in Beijing's Bohemian Village

Images: courtesy of Teatro Palíndromos