Simon Willison's Weblog: theatre

Singing the gospel of collective efficacy

2026-01-31T01:22:15+00:00

Singing the gospel of collective efficacy

Lovely piece from Matt Webb about how you can "just do things" to help make your community better for everyone:

Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody started a group to get swift nest boxes made and installed collectively, then applied for subsidy funding, then got everyone to chip in such that people who couldn’t afford it could have their boxes paid for, and now suddenly we’re all writing to MPs and following the legislation to include swift nesting sites in new build houses. Etc.

It’s called collective efficacy, the belief that you can make a difference by acting together.

My current favorite "you can just do things" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently you can just build a successful software company for 20 years and then use the proceeds to start a theater in Baltimore (for "research") and give the space away to artists for free.

Tags: matt-webb, theatre

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

2026-01-30T03:51:53+00:00

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab, a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed to automate lighting and audio for live theater productions.

I recently started following him on TikTok where he posts about his business and theater automation in general - Chris founded the Voxel theater in Baltimore which QLab use as a combined performance venue, teaching hub and research lab (here's a profile of the theater), and the resulting videos offer a fascinating glimpse into a world I know virtually nothing about.

This latest TikTok describes his Claude Opus moment, after he used Claude Code to build a custom lighting design application for a very niche project and put together a useful application in just a few days that he would never have been able to spare the time for otherwise.

Chris works full time in the arts and comes at generative AI from a position of rational distrust. It's interesting to see him working through that tension to acknowledge that there are valuable applications here to build tools for the community he serves.

I have been at least gently skeptical about all this stuff for the last two years. Every time I checked in on it, I thought it was garbage, wasn't interested in it, wasn't useful. [...] But as a programmer, if you hear something like, this is changing programming, it's important to go check it out once in a while. So I went and checked it out a few weeks ago. And it's different. It's astonishing. [...]

One thing I learned in this exercise is that it can't make you a fundamentally better programmer than you already are. It can take a person who is a bad programmer and make them faster at making bad programs. And I think it can take a person who is a good programmer and, from what I've tested so far, make them faster at making good programs. [...] You see programmers out there saying, "I'm shipping code I haven't looked at and don't understand." I'm terrified by that. I think that's awful. But if you're capable of understanding the code that it's writing, and directing, designing, editing, deleting, being quality control on it, it's kind of astonishing. [...]

The positive thing I see here, and I think is worth coming to terms with, is this is an application that I would never have had time to write as a professional programmer. Because the audience is three people. [...] There's no way it was worth it to me to spend my energy of 20 years designing and implementing software for artists to build an app for three people that is this level of polish. And it took me a few days. [...]

I know there are a lot of people who really hate this technology, and in some ways I'm among them. But I think we've got to come to terms with this is a career-changing moment. And I really hate that I'm saying that because I didn't believe it for the last two years. [...] It's like having a room full of power tools. I wouldn't want to send an untrained person into a room full of power tools because they might chop off their fingers. But if someone who knows how to use tools has the option to have both hand tools and a power saw and a power drill and a lathe, there's a lot of work they can do with those tools at a lot faster speed.

Tags: theatre, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, tiktok, ai-ethics, coding-agents, claude-code

V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London

2025-08-27T18:51:28+00:00

We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture.

First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year.

This is a delightful new format for a museum. The building is primarily an off-site storage area for London's Victoria and Albert museum, storing 250,000 items that aren't on display in their main building.

The twist is that it's also open to the public. Entrance is free, and you can climb stairs and walk through an airlock-style corridor into the climate controlled interior, then explore three floors of walkways between industrial shelving units holding thousands of items from the collection.

There is almost no signage aside from an occasional number that can help you look up items in the online catalog.

I found the lack of signs to be unexpectedly delightful: it compels you to really pay attention to the items on display.

There's so much great stuff in here. I particularly appreciated the two storey street-facing façades of Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist London residential estate completed in 1972 and demolished in 2017 through 2025. I also really enjoyed the Kaufman Office, an office space transplanted from Pittsburgh that is "the only complete interior designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright on permanent display outside the USA."

The building is a working museum warehouse and preservation facility, and there are various points where you can look out into the rest of the space (I enjoyed spotting a cluster of grandfather clocks in the distance) or watch the curators arranging and preserving new artifacts.

I've added it to Niche Museums with whole lot more of my photos.

In the evening we headed to the Fortune Theater to see Operation Mincemeat at the recommendation of several friends. It's a fantastic musical telling the story of a real British covert operation that took place during World War II. A cast of five take on 86 roles, sometimes switching roles live on stage multiple times during a single number. It's hilarious, touching, deeply entertaining and manages to start at high energy and then continually escalate that energy as the show continues.

The original British cast (three of whom co-wrote it) have moved to New York for a broadway production that started in March. The cast we saw in London were outstanding.

It's a tiny theater - the West End's second smallest at 432 seats (the smallest is the Arts Theater at 350) which makes for an intimate performance.

I absolutely loved it and would jump at the chance to see it again.

Tags: london, museums, theatre

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

2009-12-31T09:36:37+00:00

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical

Went to see this last night with some friends—they really do improvise an entire musical (a surprisingly good one, with catchy new songs and three part harmonies) based entirely on user suggestions. They have shows coming up in Brighton and Bath, thoroughly recommended.

Tags: bath, brighton, events, musicals, recommendations, theatre