Guardian Australia’s staff and reviewers spent many hours in the dark this year and have re-emerged with a recap of the best theatre, musicals, dance and comedy of 2025. From Eddie Perfect’s blockbuster Beetlejuice and a talent-stacked new take on Jesus Christ Superstar, to adaptations of modern literary classics Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Talented Mr Ripley, and comedian Garry Starr’s nude show about books – these are the gems that brightened Australian stages this year.
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
Sydney Theatre Company
Sydney
Joan Lindsay’s iconic mystery novel might now be best remembered for the 1975 Peter Weir film but this year director Ian Michael gave it new, brilliant and terrifying life onstage for Sydney Theatre Company. Tom Wright’s lyrical script – paired with Elizabeth Gadsby’s stage design, James Peter Brown’s score and sound, and Trent Suidgeest’s lights – became, in Michael’s hands, not a ghost story but a haunting. The girls’ dreamy trespass on stolen land comes at a great cost and, the deeper we were pulled into the story, the more the scenes pulsed and flickered and became a thrumming, striking horror before our eyes. – Cassie Tongue
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Beetlejuice
Michael Cassel
Melbourne; touring to Brisbane in 2026
Australian Eddie Perfect was simply perfect to take on the adaptation of Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice into a blockbuster Broadway musical. He is composer and lyricist as well as its star: during the Melbourne run, Perfect played Betelgeuse, a demonic “bio-exorcist” who is enlisted by a freshly dead couple to scare off the Deetzes, the (alive) family who has moved into their old home. Betelgeuse begins scheming to make someone say his name three times so he can finally return to the land of the living – but only the death-obsessed teenager daughter Lydia Deetz (an excellent Karis Oka) can see him. The costumes and set are particularly fantastic and there’s plenty of hilarious wordplay to boot. Garish, cartoonish and ghoulish fun. - Sian Cain
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Innocence
Adelaide festival
Opera that speaks directly to contemporary experience, with characters that have real depth and psychological acuity, are rare. There is usually never enough time, given how long it takes to sing a line of dialogue rather than speak it. Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s spooky and highly charged work about a mass school shooting and its muddy aftermath, Innocence skirts this problem with a polyphonic, multilingual libretto and music of otherworldly wonder, in a production of breathtaking ingenuity and precision. A jaw-dropping theatrical masterpiece; this was opera as cauterising hellscape and painful retribution. – Tim Byrne
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Garry Starr: Classic Penguins
Melbourne international comedy festival
Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Regional NSW, returning to MICF 26 March – 19 April 2026
Garry Starr, the alter-ego of Australian comedian Damien Warren-Smith, has revitalised the literary canon with nudity. Taking out the Melbourne comedy festival’s top award, Classic Penguins sees Warren-Smith recreating as many Penguin Classics as he can in a 60-minute one-man show wearing only flippers, top hat and a tailcoat (in homage to the sea creatures who authored these books). Using his training under French clown Gaulier to create wordless vignettes with plenty of audience interaction, each ridiculous bit is so silly-smart that you momentarily forget all about his other bits on display – until he attempts a cartwheel or crowd surf. Literature is saved. – Jared Richards
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Jesus Christ Superstar
Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth
Michael Paynter was a revelation as Jesus in the latest tour of the much-loved rock-opera, delivering a blistering Gethsemane that justified the ticket price alone. Javon King had an undeniable presence as Judas and Reuben Kaye was at his camp cabaret best when he strutted in as King Herod, dripping in gold. The stripped-back, almost Brutalist staging gave this familiar story a novel, gritty edge and the powerhouse live band pushed it closer to a concert than a musical. The choreography may have felt thin – but it hardly matters beside the cast’s vocal brilliance. – Monique Ross
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The Talented Mr Ripley
Sydney Theatre Company
Sydney, Melbourne
This nimble adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley never gave you a moment to breathe. The story moved along at a relentless pace in a brisk two-hour run time, with Joanna Murrary-Smith’s script and Sarah Goodes’ direction. The queerness was dialed up, the sets were indulgent and romantic, the music punchy and contemporary. But the night belonged to Will McDonald’s Ripley, wrapping us around his little figure – menacing and debauched, yes, but ultimately utterly charismatic. Staged as a memory play, we are fully under the machinations of Ripley’s charm, and the romantic way he viewed his life – and his murders. – Jane Howard
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Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Belvoir Street Theatre and Andrew Henry Presents
Sydney
Reading Max Porter’s poetic novella, with its ambiguous mix of naturalism, magical realism and interior monologues from the perspective of a father facing a life without the mother of his two sons, I pondered how director Simon Phillips, lighting designer Nick Schlieper and actor Tony Schmitz would make it work on stage. But the play arrived fully formed, finely crafted and deeply literate, closely hewing to the original text. Schmitz transformed himself, portraying both the devastated father and the macabre but comforting grief figure of crow, through deft physical and vocal embodiment. Phillips and Schlieper’s set ultimately popped with animation by video designer Craig Wilkinson and illustrator Jon Weber, while Freya Schack-Arnott’s live cello score enriched the emotional wreckage. A national tour would be in order. – Steve Dow
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Antigone in the Amazon
Sydney festival
This extraordinary show pulled off my favourite theatrical hat-trick: tackling urgent issues, imagining better worlds and grappling with what theatre can be and do. A team of European theatre-makers led by Swiss director Milo Rau worked with (and crucially, by invitation of) Indigenous communities and activists to create a contemporary staging of ancient Greek political tragedy Antigone as an allegory for Brazil’s land rights movement. The premise was neat but the result was messier and far more interesting: a theatrical documentary that reflected on the most urgent issues of our time – the abuse of the Amazon, the dispossession of First Peoples and the rise of fascist far-right governments – while also interrogating western theatre and the first-world gaze. – Dee Jefferson
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Candide
Opera Australia
Sydney
Voltaire’s satirical novel shouldn’t really work on stage. The operetta has been through multiple book adaptations over the course of decades, all trying to match the glorious Leonard Bernstein score, which is a dazzling pastiche of European musical styles with a dash of Broadway. In Dean Bryant’s production for Victorian Opera, presented in Sydney by Opera Australia, the doom-struck novel transformed into a queer confection – and with Eddie Perfect as our narrator, companion and guide, and Lyndon Watts as Candide, even the convoluted plot went down a treat. Bryant is one of the country’s best directors, and to watch him direct a musical comedy is to watch someone make magic. – CT
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Illume
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Sydney, Perth, Albany, Canberra, Brisbane, Darwin and Melbourne
Bangarra artistic director Frances Rings’ collaboration with the Goolarrgon Bard pearl carver Darrell Sibosado yielded achingly profound shapes and meditations on kinetic light as a symbol of life. The dancers became part of Sibosado’s pattern, between tubular poles of neon and beneath a large mother of pearl shell descending from the ceiling. Commentary could also be found between the beauty of the show’s 11 segments, on colonialist conformity diminishing Indigenous cultural systems, and on the pollution of light from an industrialised world. – SD
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Lou Wall: Breaking the Fifth Wall
Melbourne international comedy festival
Touring in 2026 to Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne again
I’ve never hit Google faster after a show than I did after this one. Directed by Zoë Coombs-Marr, Breaking the Fifth Wall opens with a story Wall tells through song, about listing a bed on Facebook Marketplace – and becoming embroiled in an increasingly unhinged chat with an increasingly unhinged customer. To have a story so insanely funny fall into the hands of such a talented comedian is a true gift. Or is it just that a talented comedian can turn anything into an insanely funny story? I can’t say more without spoiling what became a mind-bendingly meta hour of high-concept comedy: as our reviewer said at the time, “Like a good magic trick, you want to see it again just to try and work out how it was done.” – Steph Harmon
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William Yang: Milestone
Sydney festival
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide
How lucky we are to have William Yang. The photographer and performer offers an intimate insight into otherwise overlooked worlds, from Sydney’s gay and artistic underground in the 1970s and 80s to his Chinese Australian community. Created to mark his 80th birthday, Milestone was Yang’s most monumental live performance to date: a slideshow delivered alongside anecdotes spanning his eight decades, with understated accompaniment from Elena Kats-Chernin. It was an incredibly moving, affirming ode to the chosen and biological family that shaped Yang, and a celebration of joys among hardship, in which his experiences of homophobia, racism and the HIV/Aids epidemic were intertwined with Yang’s fondest moments. – JR
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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Adelaide festival
Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne
After the last attempt to bring Hedwig to Australian stages became embroiled in a storm about representation, this Adelaide festival revival of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s hit musical arrived in a moment of reactionary backlash for queer and trans progress around the western world. Seann Miley Moore understood the assignment in a lead performance that blurred gender and genre – all smeared mascara, ripped denim, flipped wigs and heartbreak. An early quip about JK Rowling – lest any festivalgoers mistake this for a play about the boy wizard’s pet owl – left any subtext at the door, but Hedwig’s confused search for love and identity still packs power and heart. – Walter Marsh
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Sistren
Old Fitz Theatre
Sydney and returning to Sydney in 2026
Griffin Theatre Co’s Griffin Lookout series supports next-generation theatremakers and this year’s production – Sistren, a story of two best friends on the cusp of a high school suspension – was such a hit that it is coming back in the company’s 2026 season. Written by Iolanthe, who also starred alongside Janet Anderson, Sistren was a messy and full-throated ode to the agonies and ecstasies of sisterhood. The pair had a crackling chemistry that lit up Iolanthe’s breakneck-paced script, which used audience asides, queer memes and a slow and satisfying build of intimacies and conflicts to weave a love letter to solidarity. – CT
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One Man Musical
Melbourne international comedy festival
Starting life at the Edinburgh fringe, it didn’t take long for this hysterically funny (if borderline defamatory) autobiographical satire about Andrew Lloyd Webber to be declared the UK’s best stage comedy of 2024. This year, it made its Australian premiere – and I laughed so much I struggled breathing at one point. Sisters Rosie and Nicola Dempsey – AKA Flo & Joan, on stage on keys and drums – cast the incredible George Fouracres as the “king of the musicools” himself: a bloviating buffoon plotting his unlikely comeback in the age of Lin-Manuel. Endless fun is poked at the creator of Cats and Starlight Express, as it absolutely should be – but there’s a lot of love in here too; the Dempsey sisters grew up with ALW’s music and, in their pitch-perfect and whip-smart score, it shows. – Steph Harmon
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Jacky
Belvoir Street Theatre
Sydney
I haven’t heard a louder collective gasp from an audience all year. Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick’s serrated-edge comedy had its audience in uproar. What began as an Odd Couple-ish story of a sex worker Jacky (Guy Simon, magnificent) and his chaotic brother (a magnetic Danny Howard) detonated into a fizzing satirical takedown of racism and colonial rot. Mandy McElhinney was wince-worthy perfection as the boss of a white-run social enterprise desperate for an Indigenous face, while Greg Stone was fearless as Glenn, a regular client of Jacky’s whose cooler-than-thou admiration for Black culture curdled into utterly toxic kink. – Jason Blake
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12 Last Songs
Perth festival
This wonderful 12-hour show has been performed eight times so far, in eight cities around the world: Leeds being the first in 2021 and Perth being the latest in January. Thirty-two ordinary people from each city are chosen to perform a “shift” on stage, while answering questions put to them by interviewers. There are 600 questions, all carefully designed to reveal something about them – and humanity more broadly. Do you have a good memory? Did you share your bed with anyone last night? Are you comfortable talking about money? What’s the best age to be? I found it both novel and moving, and stayed until the end at midnight. The creators say 12 Last Songs will only be performed 12 times; keep an eye out if it comes back to Australia again. - Sian Cain
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The Edit
Belvoir Street Theatre
Sydney
Actors become playwrights with some frequency – but few do so as conclusively as Gabrielle Scawthorn, whose debut, The Edit, dragged an open-mouthed audience to the bottom of the morass of reality TV celebrity. Nia, a young and determined influencer played by a scorching Iolanthe, is desperate to be part of a live-in dating show, Match or Snatch. A friendly-seeming junior producer, Jess (Matilda Ridgway), has been assigned to scope her out – and, in a series of scandalising reveals, we learn that there are no depths to which each will not sink. Scawthorn (also directing) had her audience hard on the hook for the entire show, expertly gaming our own expectations and prejudices. The Edit needs a mainstage revival – now. – Jason Blake
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POV
Rising festival, Melbourne; touring to Adelaide festival and Perth festival in 2026
This economical, funny and clever show follows a 14-year-old named Bub, who is making a documentary about life at home with her parents, who are reluctant to participate. But there is a twist: the two adult actors who play Bub’s parents each night have not rehearsed or seen the script before stepping on stage, where they are guided live by the young actor playing Bub (Edith Whitehead and Mabelle Rose alternate). It makes for a very personal and dynamic experience; on the night I went, Geraldine Hakewill and Bert La Bonte performed the role of Bub’s parents beautifully, and even they were moved to tears. – SC
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Rusalka
Opera Australia and West Australian Opera
Sydney
Director Sarah Giles is a refreshing voice in Australian opera, having started out making some fabulously weird and darkly funny theatre. She brought these sensibilities to Dvořák’s Slavic take on The Little Mermaid, about a water nymph who makes a brutal bargain with a witch: to gain a human body but lose her voice. Every element of this production thrilled. The performances were impeccable and frequently fun, Charles Davis’s set design was bewitchingly beautiful, and Renée Mulder’s costumes were gorgeous and gloriously strange. Among the directorial choices that rendered Rusalka more heroic than hapless was a final gesture that turned what could have been yet another tale of wicked and woeful women into a promise of female solidarity and queer community. Fist-pumplingly good. – DJ
