Swan Lake
Australian Ballet; Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney
The Australian Ballet’s artistic director David Hallberg has set down a signature production that will undoubtedly outlive his tenure, with this sumptuous, deliberately traditional Swan Lake, a triumph of artistry and imagination. Following the example set by Anne Woolliams, Hallberg emphasised psychology over synchronicity and self-expression over robotic precision. Benedicte Bemet’s Odette was a swooning tragic heroine, tremulous and vulnerable; Joseph Caley a deeply melancholic prince. Together, they made for one of the company’s most notable pairings. Thrumming with symbolism and high romantic ardour, Hallberg’s production didn’t break the mould but made the case for its enduring appeal. – Tim Byrne
Read more: The Australian Ballet: Swan Lake review – a beguiling triumph
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill
Adelaide Festival Centre; Sydney’s Belvoir Street theatre; Arts Centre Melbourne
Zahra Newman’s tone and phrasing was pitch perfect, making you believe you were witnessing jazz singer Billie Holiday on stage in the final months of her life in 1959. She evoked what people remember about the great Lady Day while locating her own rhythm in Lanie Robertson’s play, dramatising an extraordinary life lived in defiance of Jim Crow America. Directed by Mitchell Butel, Newman did not portray Holiday as a victim – even when she needed to fix herself a “little moonlight” (heroin) – in a performance on par with Broadway star Audra McDonald’s Tony award-winning effort. – Steve Dow
Read more: Zahra Newman on becoming Billie Holiday: ‘I want people to feel how they do when they listen to her’
Bark of Millions
Sydney Opera House, Sydney
US drag fabulist Taylor Mac (pronouns judy/judy’s) reignited a passion for Australia by blessing the Sydney Opera House with the full-length premiere concert Bark of Millions. With co-writer and co-performer Matt Ray, they frolicked among an exuberant international cohort of singers and musicians non-stop for four hours (a cinch compared to playing 24 hours over four nights in Melbourne, as they did in 2017). The ensemble, decked in costume designer Machine Dazzle’s ecstatically camp aesthetic, performed 54 all-original songs, each honouring a queer icon from Claude Cahun to Oscar Wilde. The warmth of community on stage wrapped the audience in a blanket of belonging. More please, judy: maybe a concert film or audio soundtrack? – Steve Dow
Read more: Taylor Mac: Bark of Millions review – a bombastic queer history, told over 55 songs
Sunday
Melbourne Theatre Company, The Sumner
Playwright Anthony Weigh tackled the well-trodden subject of John and Sunday Reed’s tempestuous relationship with artist Sidney Nolan with wit, insight and heaps of emotional intelligence, in this three-hander of great skill and subtlety. Featuring very fine performances from Matt Day and Josh McConville, it was nevertheless dominated by a star-making turn from the magnificent Nikki Shiels. Her Sunday was mercurial, problematically patrician but also deeply sensual, in a play that understands the nuance and ambivalences of patronage. Few Australian plays are this savvy and thoughtful about art and provenance, muses and money. An instant classic. – Tim Byrne
Read more: Sunday review – a masterful and moving portrait of a woman who railed against conformity
Mary Poppins
Crown theatre, Perth; Her Majesty’s theatre, Melbourne
The enigmatic Mary and her endless bag of tricks soared to new heights in this dazzling production. Packed with epic musical numbers, mind-bending choreography and astonishing sleights of hand – from Mary rocketing into the audience and Bert tap-dancing upside down on the proscenium – this sublimely casted remount was an absolute joy to watch. It’s hard to pick a standout among its endless showstoppers, but Bert (Jack Chambers) and his chimney sweepers brought the house down with Step in Time, a feast of thunderous tap-dancing and gravity-defying leaps that had the audience in complete rapture. – Rosamund Brennan
Read more: Mary Poppins the Musical review – practically perfect and packed with delights
Death of a Salesman
Her Majesty’s theatre, Melbourne; heading to Theatre Royal, Sydney in 2024
Arthur Miller’s perennially relevant play got a star turn this year with Neil Armfield’s big-budget production, starring Anthony LaPaglia as the delusional, insecure Willy Loman. Against a static backdrop of sporting bleachers, the tragic tale of the lie of the American dream and its intergenerational impacts on one family played out as forcefully as ever. It was a thrill to see LaPaglia in his Australian theatre debut, but the real powerhouse was Alison Whyte as Linda Loman, all pathos and rage. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Read more: Death of a Salesman review – Anthony LaPaglia leads an electric, devastating tragedy
Messa da Requiem
Adelaide festival, Adelaide Festival Centre
Giuseppe Verdi’s oratorio Messa da Requiem is famed for having one of the most overwhelming auditory climaxes in opera (even if you haven’t seen it, you’ll know Dies Irae), But seeing it performed by 200 Ballett Zürich dancers, choristers and soloists from the Adelaide Festival Chorus made for one of the most overwhelming visual displays I have ever seen. Dressed all in black, the choir gathered around the dancers as walls and waves, running and undulating as one great, heaving mass of humanity to give Verdi’s vision of death a remarkable physical heft. I don’t normally love opera, but I will never forget this. – Sian Cain
Up Close: Somos
Sydney Dance Company, Neilson theatre, Sydney
How close is close enough? There were times during Rafael Bonachela’s short but enthralling work that felt like a prelude to a high-art lap dance. Set to a tasting plate of torchy Spanish songs, Somos (“We are”) uncoiled in a series of solos, duets and ensemble pieces with the audience arranged on all sides. You were never more than a couple of metres away from a performer, and sometimes just a few centimetres. What you heard and felt (dancers’ breath; feet hitting the deck; swooshes of air moved by sweeping limbs) created a sense of thrilling, almost threatening intimacy. Ravishing. – Elissa Blake
Is God Is
Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney and Melbourne Theatre Company, Melbourne
Directed by Zindzi Okenyo and Shari Sebbens – the same duo behind the Australian production of Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner – Is God Is landed with a bang at the MTC before travelling to Sydney. Following two Black twin sisters avenging their mother and themselves by trying to find and kill their violent father, Aleshea Harris’s breathless and unique play combined revenge fantasy with Greek tragedy and spaghetti western. Electrifying, thrilling and fearless theatre with knotty moral questions to sit with and ponder, driven by a stellar, all-Black cast. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Read more: Is God Is: the explosive play shaking up theatre
& Juliet
Princess theatre, Melbourne; Crown theatre, Perth; Sydney Lyric theatre from February 2024
Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin has written some of the biggest hits in the world – from Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys to Bon Jovi – and they’re packed tight into this queer, meta and extremely fun retelling of Romeo & Juliet that asks: what if, after Romeo died, Juliet just got on with it? Written by Schitt’s Creek’s David West Read, who conceived it while concussed (makes sense), the show has won lovers and haters at the Guardian since 2019. Lean into it though and you’ll be rewarded with singalong cheese with a big heart, clever in-jokes, boy band choreo and an exceptional local cast (Rob Mills, Casey Donovan, Lorinda May Merrypor). You can’t not enjoy it. – Steph Harmon
Read more: & Juliet review – queer joy and pop delirium as Shakespeare gets a Max Martin makeover
Do Not Go Gentle
Sydney Theatre Company, Roslyn Packer theatre, Sydney
Finally, playwright Patricia Cornelius is getting the mainstage recognition she deserves. Do Not Go Gentle, directed by Paige Rattray, placed a group of nursing home residents in a dreamscape that recast ageing and dementia as an adventurous epic. Riffing on Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the south pole of 1910-1912, actors Philip Quast, Vanessa Downing, John Gaden, Peter Caroll, Josh McConville and Brigid Zengeni embroidered their snowbound performances with humour and poignancy – and surely provided succour for those who recently lost a parent, including this reviewer. And 87-year-old operatic soprano Marilyn Richardson added to the profundity with short, delicate bursts of arias. – Steve Dow
Read more: Do Not Go Gentle review – a profound exploration of ageing and dementia
Hubris and Humiliation
STC, Wharf 1 theatre, Sydney
Jane Austen meets camp in this fizzy, laugh-a-minute comedy by Lewis Treston that transplanted Regency romance to contemporary Australia. To save his family, Elliott is sent from Brisbane to Sydney to find a rich husband; his sister soon follows. Add an estranged uncle and an aloof love interest, and we’re off to the races.
Dean Bryant directed this clever dance of love, money, class and family through fancy parties, bogan weddings and sparring, sparks-flying repartee, ending up with a celebration of queer joy. – Cassie Tongue
Read more: Hubris & Humiliation review – this queer take on Jane Austen is startlingly good
The Visitors
Sydney Opera House; Riverside theatres, Parramatta; Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong; Canberra Theatre Centre
Directed by Wesley Enoch, Jane Harrison’s play – about an Elders’ meeting on a hot summer day in 1788 – gets inside your gut and stays there. This onstage debate about whether to welcome or fight off these ominous boats appearing in the harbour is a story of culture, lore, generosity and devastating change; it’s no surprise the play has had further life as an opera and a novel: it’s a live current connecting the past to our unhealed present. – Cassie Tongue
Read more: The Visitors review – Wesley Enoch at his best in play that thrums with fresh potency
The Director
Mona Foma, Launceston
This bold little show has been performed around Australia and the world for years, but it was a standout for me at this year’s Mona Foma. Scott Turnbull, a real ex-funeral director of 21 years, and Lara Thoms, co-artistic director of the Aphids theatre group, talked us through the practicalities of the death industry – including the eye-watering cost of coffins and just what crematoriums smell like. They demonstrate certain funeral rituals on each other and open up the floor to questions; I was so stunned by the blurring of reality and theatre that I couldn’t come up with anything, which I regret. I didn’t know what to expect going in – but when I came out, I felt I didn’t know what I had just seen. – Sian Cain
Salamander
Northshore, Brisbane festival
The centrepiece of this year’s Brisbane festival, Salamander was a bold, risky and expensive investment, relying on the abilities of installation artist Es Devlin and choreographer Maxine Doyle to transport audiences to an alternate reality inside a Northshore warehouse – and it succeeded. This was a world-class immersive spectacle about our future in an uninhabitable climate, and what we hold close when time is running out.
Devlin’s contrasting installations – a giant Perspex maze surrounded by water and a revolving 12-foot dinner table – were monuments to beauty, illusion and metaphor, while Doyle’s choreography with the Australasian Dance Collective ensemble satisfied on aesthetic, athletic and emotional levels. Many left declaring they wanted to see it again. That’s rare affirmation. – Olivia Stewart
Read more: Salamander review – Brisbane festival opens with a world-class dance epic
The Chairs
Red Line Productions, Old Fitzroy theatre, Sydney
Director Gale Edwards brought together actors Paul Capsis and iOTA for the first time since she directed them in the Rocky Horror Show in 2008. Both were captivating in this claustrophobic story of an elderly couple preparing for the arrival of a great many important guests, who, when they show up … don’t.
Garishly made-up, Capsis and iOTA were funny, certainly (iOTA’s wry timing is superb). But underneath the vaudevillian exteriors, both tapped into all manner of anguish and fear – personal and global. For me, this was the first time I’ve seen The Chairs not just “done”, but made to speak. – Jason Blake
Happy Days
Melbourne Theatre Company, The Sumner
Judith Lucy could have probably got away with being half as good as she was in this production of Samuel Beckett’s classic. But her turn as eternally optimistic Winnie, buried up to her neck in a desert with no salvation in sight, was beautifully judged. Of course Lucy could handle the moments of humour – but it was how she handled Winnie’s descent into utter despair that I will remember. In the final seconds there was a blink-and-you-miss it glimpse of complete horror on her face, just before the theatre went dark, that made me genuinely gasp. – Sian Cain
Read more: ‘I just don’t want to crack jokes’: Judith Lucy on stopping standup – and starting Samuel Beckett
The Dan Daw Show
Seymour Centre, Sydney; Arts House, Rising festival, Melbourne
Smart, sexy, surprising, tender, funny, paradigm-busting – if only more shows were this good on this many levels. UK-based Australian expat Daw, a queer, disabled dancer-choreographer, smashed together a kink session and the “one-man show” format (comedic, confessional, fourth-wall-busting) – albeit with friend and non-disabled performer Christopher Owen as his sidekick and dom. Together they delivered a masterclass in care and consent for the theatre and the bedroom; the audience and the performer. This is the kind of show that changes the way you think about theatre and, dare I say it, the way we live. – Dee Jefferson
Read more: ‘I don’t care, I know I look good’: Dan Daw on kink, disability and ‘powerful crip joy’
A Little Night Music
Hayes Theatre Co, Sydney
Part of the joy of seeing a big show at Sydney’s little Hayes theatre is in how they navigate the teensy-tiny stage. In Dean Bryant’s production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music – about a messy, tangled web of affairs between incompatible couples that culminates at A Weekend in the Country, which is now stuck in your head – the claustrophobia becomes a set piece. Bryant’s wonderful production revels in all the best bits of Sondheim – wit, wordiness, satire, humanity, largely unsingable tunes – with an added weapon in Nancye Hayes: the theatre’s namesake gets the role she was made for in Madame Armfeldt, and sings a heartbreaking Send in the Clowns. – Steph Harmon
The Ring Cycle
Opera Australia; QPAC, Brisbane
When you’ve swum with river maidens, descended beneath the earth, traversed icy wastelands, scaled a fire-encircled tor and ascended to the celestial, 15 hours isn’t actually that long. That is the genius of Chen Shi-Zheng’s direction and production design of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen – the Ring Cycle – for Opera Australia, which propelled viewers over its epic, four-part journey. Aerial movement added another evocative dimension to the visual impact of the spectacular sets, but it was the strength of the story’s emotional underpinnings that made it visceral and drove the power of the music and singing. The fulfilment of opera’s potential as the complete art; a profound experience. – Olivia Stewart
Bikutsi 3000
Studio Underground, Perth festival
Set to a soundtrack of throbbing house and hip-hop beats, seeing Bikutsi 3000 was like having front-row seats to a high-octane dance party. This inventive Afrofuturistic performance by Cameroonian artist Blick Bassy blended dance, music and video to imagine a future where women emancipate Africa from its imperialist history. In a heart-pounding frenzy of movement, the all-female cast wage a war through Massack, the art of dance, incited by fictional matriarchs projected on screen. Particularly special was the inclusion of two young First Nations dancers who trained and performed with the African European cast. – Rosamund Brennan
Manifesto
Stephanie Lake Company, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne
Mix nine dancers and nine drummers with a dash of Busby Berkeley, shake it up in some (heavy) metal, garnish with a sprig of drum corps-style, and serve on a velvet-curtained stage. This cocktail was so delicious I went back for seconds, seeing it at both Sydney and Perth festivals. Melbourne choreographer Stephanie Lake has a talent for choreography of scale; for balancing sequences of jaw-dropping precision with flights of primal, sweaty, foot-stopping energy; for straddling the unsettling and the playful. She also knows how to get the best from her dancers; there were no weak links on stage. Credit to her husband and longtime collaborator Robin Fox for the killer soundtrack – and to the drummers for giving the dancers a run for their money in style and technique. – Dee Jefferson
