Ticket holders for the UK stage production Game of Thrones: The Mad King are furious over the last-minute cancellation of a week’s worth of preview performances at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“Having booked hotels and paid for travel this is absolutely unacceptable,” writes a Reddit user on the subreddit “Absolutely Fuming at the RSC” devoted to the latest development. “They are now offering us the chance to rebook, with 0 availability for the remaining run. What a fucking joke.”

The new play, officially titled George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King, was to have begun preview performances July 20, with an opening date of August 8 and a closing on September 5. Stratford-upon-Avon is a two-hour drive from London.

But after the Royal Shakespeare Company canceled the first week of previews with no specific explanation given as to the cause, RSC sources told Variety Friday that the performance for tonight, July 25, remained on track.

But that was yesterday.

This morning, the RSC posted an Instagram announcement stating that tonight’s performance has been canceled as well.

The announcement reads:

“We have made the difficult decision to cancel the preview performance of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King this evening (Saturday 25 July at 7:15 pm).

“The decision to cancel performances is always challenging and is only taken after careful consideration of all the options available. We recognise how disappointing this will be for audiences and we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.

“All audience members affected will be provided with a full and automatic refund including any fees paid.”

Ticket buyers holding tickets for the canceled performances and hoping to re-book are apparently out of luck: The show’s ticket page indicates that all performances through the September 5 closing date are sold out.

On the subreddit, commenters saying they have preview tickets were furious. “When we booked the tickets originally, they did not say Preview Performances!,” writes Reddit user MikeyButch17 today. “That’s the most egregious thing. Also, they allowed us to rebook for tonight, after the person on the phone promised us the performance would go ahead regardless. What a joke!”

“In exactly the same position!,” responded el_palmo42. “Just checked into our hotel in Stratford and then received the email.”

No official word yet on whether other performances will be canceled.

The Mad King is a stage prequel that, according to its official synopsis, is set in Harrenhal as a long winter begins to thaw. “At a lavish banquet on the eve of a jousting tournament,” the synopsis reads, “lovers meet and revelers speculate about who will contend. But in the shadows, amid growing unease at the bloodthirsty actions of the realm’s merciless Mad King, dissenters from his inner circle anxiously advance a treasonous plot. Far away, the drums of battle sound. Family bonds, ancient prophecies, and the sacred line of succession will be tested in a dangerous campaign for power. Who will survive? Who will rise?”

The play is inspired by the “Robert’s Rebellion” lore of Martin’s sprawling book series, in which the married Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, son of the Mad King Aerys, falls in love with, and runs off with, Lyanna Stark. This leads to a rebellion led by Robert Baratheon, who is engaged to Lyanna. Successfully deposing the Mad King, The Rebellion leads to the downfall of House Targaryen.

When the production was announced, RSC Co-Artistic Directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey described the staging as “a theatrical spectacle” that is “an ambitious and exhilarating collaboration.” The creative team members are puppetry and movement designers Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell (of Lume), set designer Chloe Lamford, costume designer Georgia McGuinness, lighting designer Jon Clark, composer Will Stuart and sound designer Tom Gibbons. Duncan Macmillan (Every Brilliant Thing) is the writer, and Dominic Cooke is directing.

Inside the Waldorf Astoria on Friday evening, President Donald Trump took to the stage at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and tried out some Don Rickles-like schtick, interspersed it with some of his greatest rally hits and fixated on some of his obsessions, including his plans for a White House ballroom.

What stood out during his one-hour-and-two minute marks, though, was the silence in the crowd: many jokes didn’t land, he meandered into asides and veered into insider-ish attacks that likely went well over the heads of the TV audience. Much of what he said wasn’t humor, in contrast to the tightly scripted routines of his predecessors, but akin to a fever dream from someone who has spent a bit too much time watching right-wing TV.

At about 45 minutes in, guests were looking at their phones and fidgeting in their seats. I looked around and locked eyes with a man who gave a brief yawn. It was Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.

The length of Trump’s remarks were a reminder of one of Johnny Carson’s quips from the Oscars decades ago: “Welcome to two hours of sparkling entertainment spread over a four-hour show.” It should be noted that Trump’s weaving from topic to topic included a riff on the Academy Awards and how they have gotten too anti-Trump, but even that didn’t get much of a response.

The president did deliver some funny lines, including quips about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire, very delicious beef tenderloin, very special beef. And I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy, who’s right here, personally ran over the cow in his car.”

Trump also revealed that he still counts how many front-page stories he gets in The New York Times, and gave some practical guidance for reporters who have his phone number and want to call him directly, and why he answers some of them. “I always find that when you don’t speak to the press, you always get a bad story. When you do speak to the press, you have a shot at a good story.”

Yet in a room full of journalists, Trump’s attacks, like on figures like Kaitlan Collins, were met with stone-faces for those who were well aware their reactions may be caught on C-SPAN cameras. His personal insults, ranging from Adam Schiff having a pencil neck to Chris Christie’s weight to Bruce Springsteen’s aged face, also were repeats of various Truth Social posts.

The event, in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom, was in a much smaller venue than the Washington Hilton, making it more intimate and putting many attendees face-to-face with Trump’s top advisers and members of his cabinet, also including Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. With a much smaller crowd, and no pre-event receptions, the enhanced security generally moved briskly.

There were standout moments during other parts of the evening. This was the rescheduled dinner after April’s event was stopped by an apparent assassination attempt on the president, as a gunman breached security and the sounds of gunfire sent the thousands of attendees at the Washington Hilton to the floor. The WHCA paid tribute to the Secret Service officer, Victor Gonzales, who helped stop the gunman, as well as the Washington Hilton staff.

WHCA President Weijia Jiang, White House correspondent for CBS News, gave a very personal and heartfelt speech about her journey, having been born in China, raised in Appalachian coal country and, inspired by Connie Chung, landing in the “Oval Office to ask questions of the president of the United States.”

There was pressure on the WHCA to directly confront Trump for his attacks on the press. Jiang talked about the purpose of the First Amendment and the intent of the founders, while commenting more generally on the state of the situation. She said, “Criticism of the media can be unfair. It can also be legitimate. We get a lot right, but sometimes we get things wrong. We mistake proximity to power for understanding it, and at times we get trapped in our own bubbles. There is a difference, though, an existential difference, between criticizing the press and trying to undermine it.”

When it came to the defense of the press at a difficult moment, the approach of the WHCA appeared to be that of what is taught in J-school: Show, don’t tell. A video segment featured an AI-generated James Madison explaining the importance of the First Amendment, with clips of Trump’s predecessors, including Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, acknowledging the essential role of the press corps. Comments from Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson reinforced how the adversarial nature of the relationship is nothing new.

The most direct face-to-face with Trump’s press attacks came when Wolf Blitzer presented an award to The Wall Street Journal for its reporting on an alleged bawdy letter that Trump wrote to Jeffrey Epstein. As Blitzer noted that Trump sued the Journal for $20 billion, the president gave a smirk, to some laughter, then he shook hands with the reporters to received the prize. After it was over, he threw his hands up in the air, as if to say, whatever.

Toward the end of his winding remarks, Trump did say that he respected those in the room, but also that he planned to be back at the event next year.

What seemed to really wow the room came at the end, when mentalist Oz Pearlman performed a series of feats, made all the more notable when they involved UN Ambassador Mike Waltz and Blanche. The latter figure, awaiting Senate confirmation to take the DOJ post permanently, gamely played along as Pearlman asked him to lie about how much money he had in his wallet. Blanche said $130; Pearlman wrote down the correct figure, $85.

Later, Pearlman had Blanche sign one of his $20 bills.

“Hold it up and let everyone see the federal offense you have just committed,” Pearlman quipped. “He just clearly lost the Senate confirmation hearings on camera.” The interplay made sense a little while later when Pearlman performed another feat, writing a figure on a whiteboard that matched the serial number to Blanche’s bill.

The moment was a bit incongruous to what is going on in D.C. and with Blanche himself, what with the DOJ recently issuing subpoenas to reporters from The New York Times, and then withdrawing them in the face of a judge’s criticisms. But for the WHCA dinner, a tradition that has traditionally mixed the serious with showbiz, Pearlman’s routine at least proved to be a bit of sparkling entertainment.

Last night, both Rosie O’Donnell, performing her new Off Broadway solo show Common Knowledge, and Donald Trump, making his first appearance as president at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, took to their respective stages to share their thoughts on, among many other things, one another.

Cutting to the chase: O’Donnell was better. Much, much better.

Just several hours before Trump delivered his widely panned, mean-spirited, deceitful and painfully unfunny mental ramble in Washington D.C., O’Donnell made full and creative use of what the president would no doubt call her “Trump Derangement Syndrome” with a candid and, not surprisingly, humorous account of her recent, Trump-inspired move to Ireland and the various personal upheavals that preceded it.

To be sure, Trump is just a small, if intriguing, part of Common Knowledge. Most of the autobiographical performance – O’Donnell tells us, right at the start, that it is all true – concerns her family, more specifically the mother she lost in childhood and her youngest adopted daughter who, the former cohost of The View shares, is both autistic and nonbinary, two descriptors that have delivered both challenges and joys to the comedian’s life.

Among the challenges and decided non-joys in O’Donnell’s life is, of course, Donald Trump. In the career-spanning photo and video montage that precedes the arrival onstage of the Common Knowledge star – more about the title in a bit – is a clip from the 2006 episode of The View when O’Donnell pushed her hair to the side of her face and delivered a stinging imitation of Trump then in the news for giving advice to a Miss USA beauty pageant contestant. “He’s the moral authority?,” O’Donnell asked then, before going on to mention Trump’s failed marriages and businesses’ bankruptcies.

The View bit launched the 20-year feud that would have a profound impact on O’Donnell’s life and find a lasting place in Trump’s brain. After O’Donnell moved to Ireland in January 2025 – a relocation she says in Common Knowledge was prompted in no small part by the Trump’s second election to the presidency – Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her.”

That Truth Social message was posted a year ago, but as Trump proved at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, O’Donnell remains at the forefront of the many grievances he harbors, right up there with late-night talk show hosts, political rivals and CNN journalists. Last night, he sarcastically said O’Donnell “really wanted to be here in order to honor me. She loves me very much. She was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respect to Donald J. Trump, but that didn’t work out unfortunately because nobody wanted her to come back. But she’s one of the greatest sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome. She’s a sick young woman. A sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.”

The alleged joke bombed, greeted by the dinner attendees with silence. Not so O’Donnell’s performance delivered just hours before on her Off Broadway stage. Calling Trump “Mango Mussolini,” O’Donnell described her reaction to Trump’s citizenship threat.

“I thought it was a joke,” she said when she learned of the Truth Social post. Realizing that it was, indeed, a real post, O’Donnell simply told the press that the president could not legally revoke her citizenship.

“I was praised for being calm,” O’Donnell, looking fit and glamorous in a bedazzled tux-style suit, says during Common Knowledge. “but I wanted to go [she grabs her crotch and yells) ‘Eat me, you orange fuck.’”

The retort was, at the reviewed performance, greeted with wild applause, a cathartic moment during a show that provides a fairly detailed account of Trump’s impact on O’Donnell’s life and mental health. Deeply depressed during and after the Covid pandemic isolation, worried about her young daughter’s autism, taking too much pot and going through an extended career break, O’Donnell, with the only one of her five children still at home, moved from her beloved New York City to Los Angeles, where she once again took up arts and crafts as a hobby and coping mechanism.

What the arts and crafts were not was a break from her Trump preoccupation. She began posting on social media her hand-drawn and thoroughly unflattering portrait paintings of Trump, even to the point that her concerned publicist phoned to check in. How many of these paintings had she done, her friend wanted to know. “211,” is the response.

As O’Donnell recounts the incident during Common Knowledge, many of her Trump paintings are projected onto a large screen behind her, as is her official social media response to the president’s threat, written in O’Donnell’s trademark poem style and accompanied by a photo of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein:

hey Donald – you’re rattled again?
20 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours

you call me a threat to humanity – but I’m everything you fear:
a loud woman
a queer woman
a mother sho tells the truth

you are everything that is wrong with
america – and I’m everything you hate
about what’s still right with it
you want to revoked my citizenship?

go ahead and try
king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan

i’m not yours to silence
I never was

While it seems clear that O’Donnell and Trump remain mentally and emotionally entangled in the feud that began decades ago, the comedian doesn’t spend overmuch time on the subject in her new solo show, and, aside from that opening montage, she devotes almost no stage time to her movies or TV credits. Looking for an insider’s take on ABC’s The View? You won’t find it here.

(Side note: O’Donnell does address her upcoming August stint as guest host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, saying she hopes to perform a song – as she previews in Common Knowledge – in which she’s written new Trump-inspired words to the Wizard of Oz‘s “If I Only Had a Brain.” Sample lyric: “All he does is cause us drama/’cos he wants to be Obama/’cos he doesn’t have a brain.” O’Donnell says she’s been told by Kimmel producers that song parodies are hard to get cleared for airing. But the show, she teases, is live, “so what the fuck.”)

What Common Knowledge focuses on are the turbulent and emotional moments of O’Donnell’s family life, both her family of origin and the one she’s created (though even there, she’s selective: No mention is made of daughter Chelsea’s drug-related legal battles). By far the most effective and moving parts of Common Knowledge are the performer’s account of the day in 1973 when, at 10 years old, she was summoned home from a neighbor’s house and told by her father that her ailing mother had died. At the time, she didn’t quite grasp the full impact of the moment, but recalls that her five-year-old brother most certainly did. Hugging her leg, the little boy tells his sister that she’ll have to be the mommy from now on.

Like The Wizard of Oz in reverse, as she describes it, the color was instantly drained from her childhood. Her grieving father temporarily relocates the family to Donegal, Ireland, which in 1973, as O’Donnell reminds us, was reeling from its very own Troubles.

The show’s Ireland interlude is intriguing, but nothing in the performance quite prepares us for O’Donnell’s loving but candid depiction of her youngest adopted child, a girl she names Dakota upon her birth in 2013. At 10 months, little Dakota is able to speak in complete sentences, as we are shown in video evidence. She’s soon quoting complete sections of the film Frozen, and at two years old Dakota is diagnosed with autism, hyperlexia (vocabulary well above typical levels) and echolalia (the uncanny ability to repeat words and lengthy phrases verbatim, often with the accents of other people).

O’Donnell recounts her own initial reactions to her daughter’s diagnoses: Concern, of course, but also a certain appreciation of the girl’s wit, astounding knack for new knowledge (she answers Jeopardy questions about the Mariana Trench with unsettling quickness) and truth-telling, even if the latter takes more than a little getting used to. When a classmate disliked by the daughter – who has announced to O’Donnell that she wants to be called Clay because she considers herself an artist – is mistakenly invited to her birthday party, the boy is bluntly informed by the birthday girl that he is not welcome and should go home.

We can’t know, of course, just how accurate O’Donnell’s onstage depiction of the real-life Clay is, but as a character the daughter steals the show. O’Donnell recounts a pivotal moment in the family’s history when young Clay says of her plush animals, “All my stuffies are nonbinary, and so am I.”

Perhaps no element of Common Knowledge is more telling about the passage of time and social mores as this moment. O’Donnell, a self-described “OG lesbian bitch,” is a bit flummoxed by the whole nonbinary thing – she happily concedes to use Clay’s preferred they/them pronouns, but more than occasionally slips with a “she” (as she does several times through the show). When Clay asks her when she knew she was a lesbian, and O’Donnell says age 10, they follow up by asking how her grade school classmates reacted to the news. O’Donnell’s dumbfounded silence at the impossible-to-grasp question speaks volumes.

If the 75-minute solo show – the title comes from Clay’s insistence that her mental collection of facts and information is merely common knowledge, or should be – can feel a bit underdeveloped (it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year), O’Donnell efficiently and effectively ties up the family tales of her life by ultimately circling back to her own mother. The comedian sees her mother’s face everywhere in the women of Ireland, and draws a crucial lesson from them all: Life, when all is said and done, is about perseverance.

Or as O’Donnell says at the end of her charming show, after all the tribulations of life and Trump , “I’m still here.”

Title: Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge
Venue: Off Broadway’s Daryl Roth Theatre
Written & Performed By: Rosie O’Donnell
Directed By: Gabriel Barre
Running Time: 1 hr 15 min (no intermission)