Musicals speak the language of the heart – we sing when words are no longer enough – so we followed ours to create this list of the greatest Australian musicals of stage and screen.
We also followed a few rules. Musicals that aren’t strictly Australian, but feature a solo Australian collaborator in a key role, don’t count for our purposes (you’ll see no Matildas, Beetlejuices, or Legs Diamonds here). With typically short seasons that often see no returns or revivals, we can’t claim to have seen every great musical. And a musical only has a chance to achieve greatness when it does what the form does best: sing out loud in front of as many audiences as it can. This isn’t always possible: there are a lot of flashes of greatness still waiting to be picked up, developed, and fanned into flame.
