The Stage Show

The acclaimed Irish actor Andrew Scott tackles his most challenging stage role yet in a one-man retelling of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. The production, Vanya, was commissioned and directed by Sam Yates, a young British director who was mentored by the likes of Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Phyllida Lloyd. 

Also, opening nights can be stressful under any circumstances, but what do you do when a zombie apocalypse threatens curtain time? We're joined by the team behind Zombie! The Musical. And an updated version of Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gaslight is now touring Australia. We meet the director and writers.

At the 2024 Adelaide Festival, we visit theatre foyers, dressing rooms and the city's famous gardens to meet the artists bringing theatregoers to the edge of their seats.

We speak with artistic director Ruth McKenzie, who is delivering her first full program this year, we meet acclaimed choreographer Elizabeth Streb, whose 'Action Hero' performers in Streb Extreme Action will push their bodies to the limit in Time Machine, we visit the Narungga artists and cultural custodians sharing the creation stories of their country on the Yorke Peninsula in Guuranda, and we learn how acts of creative thievery can become a joyful paean to the performing arts in Grand Theft Theatre.

One of the headline events at this year's Adelaide Festival is an enchanting production of Stravinsky's opera The Nightingale. It comes from the playful imagination of Robert Lepage. Lepage is an acclaimed French-Canadian writer, director and performer who, during his decades-long career, has reshaped our ideas of what theatre can be.

Also, we hear a scene from Monument by Emily Sheehan, a new Australian play at Red Stitch about a tense encounter between a woman prime minister and her makeup artist, and we learn about the family history that has inspired former ABC journalist Jane Hutcheon to tell her own story on stage in the show Lost in Shanghai.

British visual artist Es Devlin has designed spectacular sets for some of the largest stages on earth. As well as designing for the theatre, Es has created unique performance spaces for the likes of Beyoncé and U2. Now, her award-winning stage design for The Lehman Trilogy, about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, can be seen on stage in Sydney.

Also, Pip Williams' bestselling novel The Dictionary of Lost Words has been adapted for the stage, and 400 years after its publication, John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi is back. So, what is this violent and bloody play's appeal in 2024?

Live on stage at the 2024 Perth Festival, we encounter an opera, a play and a dance work that each explores how the places where we live shape who we are.

We're joined on stage by Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse, composers of the new Noongar-language opera Wundig wer Wilara, Dalisa Pigram, Soultari Amin Farid and Zee Zunnur, co-creators of Mutiara, a dance work that investigates the complex history of Broome's pearling industry, and playwright Steve Rodgers and director Kate Champion whose new play The Pool is performed in and around a suburban aquatic centre.

The last production to grace the stage of Griffin's historic SBW Stables Theatre before a major redevelopment will be The Lewis Trilogy from Australian playwright Louis Nowra. The three highly acclaimed plays — Summer of the Aliens, Così and This Much Is True — are all drawn from Nowra's own very eventful life.

Also, Jonathan Larson's hit musical RENT is back on stage in Australia, and ahead of two new productions of Candide in Melbourne and Adelaide, we take a closer look at Leonard Bernstein's comic operetta based on the Enlightenment-era novella by Voltaire.

In Jungle Book Reimagined, the celebrated choreographer Akram Khan brings Rudyard Kipling's classic and contested Jungle Book stories into a near-future world torn apart by the impacts of climate change. But with the original stories rooted in colonial perspectives, why revisit them a century later to tell a story of displacement amid environmental collapse?

Also, the role of Brünnhilde in Wagner's Ring Cycle is one of opera's most demanding. It requires a dramatic soprano voice with extraordinary power and maturity and is rarely tackled until a singer is well into their career. To learn more, we're joined by our ABC Top 5 resident, mezzo soprano Katrina Waters, who is investigating the mid-career transitions of female dramatic voices.

Tim Minchin has written the music and lyrics for Groundhog Day the Musical, which is coming to Australia following runs on Broadway and the West End. 

In the 1993 film, Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman, Phil Connors, who finds himself living the same day over and over. But with each repeated day, Phil learns a little more about himself and the people around him. Who better to wrestle with these existential themes in musical form than the always philosophical Tim Minchin?

What happens when we see real events and meet well-known people on stage? How can the theatre shape our sense of our own history? Those questions are raised by a new Australian play called Sunday. It features a knockout performance from Nikki Shiels as the famous Australian arts patron Sunday Reed.

Also, Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage is renowned for her incisive, moving and witty plays about the intersections of race and class in America. The playwright joins us to reflect on her storied career and how her work taps into larger political conversations. This year, the Sydney Theatre Company will stage her play Sweat.

Joanna Murray-Smith is an acclaimed Australian playwright and one of the few to have enjoyed success on Broadway and the West End. She joins us to reflect on her storied career and recent work.

Also, Stephen Schwartz thought that he had left Broadway behind when he had a chance encounter with a novel called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Wicked became his most successful show and it is now back on stage in Australia.

Tina Turner's phenomenal success in the 1960s and 70s masked the destructive tempest of her personal life. Now, her powerful story is laid open in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. It features Tina's hits with a book written by the Pulitzer and Olivier Award-winner Katori Hall — a renowned chronicler of the black experience in the American South.

Also, what happens when opera and circus meet? In 2019, Opera Queensland and Circa, teamed up to reinterpret Gluck's 18th century opera Orpheus & Eurydice. The project was led by Patrick Nolan, the artistic director of Opera Queensland and Yaron Lifshitz, the artistic director of Circa. Now that production is coming to Opera Australia.

Heather Mitchell's mainstage debut was more than 40 years ago and she continues to delight audiences, last year performing to full houses at the Sydney Theatre Company in the one-woman show RBG: Of Many, One. This year, Heather published a memoir called Everything and Nothing.

Also, imagine a world with no Macbeth, no Tempest and no Twelfth Night. Without the First Folio, published 400 years ago this year, those plays may have been lost to history. To celebrate the anniversary, Bell Shakespeare presented three plays from the First Folio in their 2023 season.

Have you ever wondered how a musical is written? At this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the Tony-nominated composer and lyricist Eddie Perfect hosted an event that brought us into that process. Eddie and another musical theatre composer, Gillian Cosgriff, share their insights and debut brand new songs in our music studio.

Also, Richard Mills' forthcoming opera Galileo explores the life of the pioneering Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Performed by Victorian Opera, Galileo will have its world premiere at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne. Richard joins us at the piano to share stories from his own life as a composer.

Nellie Small was a mainstay of the Tivoli circuit in Australia from the 1920s until her final performance in 1964. There was a catchcry on the variety circuit: if your show was falling flat, send for Nellie. Largely absent from our performing arts history books, Send for Nellie at the Sydney Festival thrusts Nellie Small back into the spotlight.

Also, a new Australian production of Death of a Salesman has enticed Anthony LaPaglia back to the stage for the first time in over a decade, and we learn how, after being a flop in its native Russia, Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker became a permanent fixture of the Christmas season at ballet companies everywhere.

In the desert town of Papunya in 1981, four blackfellas and a whitefella bonded over rock 'n' roll and became the history-making Warumpi Band. The Warumpis were the first rock band to sing in Aboriginal languages. Now, Big Name, No Blankets from Ilbijerri Theatre Company will tell their story on stage at the Sydney Festival.

Also, the American dramatic soprano Lise Lindstrom shares the works that have most inspired her journey as an artist on Top Shelf and we mark 100 years of radio in Australia and reflect on RN's role in creating great radio drama and developing some of Australia's best-known theatrical talent.

Richard Wagner's massive Ring Cycle consists of four heroic operas that tell stories from ancient Nordic sagas. But what would happen if you shifted the tale to an imaginary cosmos closer to our own? That is the question raised by an epic new production from Opera Australia which draws on imagery from Asia and the Pacific.

Also, Moulin Rouge! The Musical is theatre at its most spectacular and dynamic — so, how do they do it? We go backstage with their technical director, Richard Martin. And we meet some dedicated volunteers from The Rondo Theatre, home of the Cairns Little Theatre, which turned 70 this year.

A Tony-award winning production of A Christmas Carol has returned to Australia, this time with the Welsh actor Owen Teale as Scrooge. A Tony winner himself, best known for playing Alliser Thorne in Game of Thrones, we learn about Owen's very unconventional path to becoming an actor. 

Also, the American playwright and drag icon Charles Busch has inspired a generation of artists with his outrageous writing and iconic performances. The first production from the Australian company Little Ones Theatre was Psycho Beach Party and their last will be Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. We're joined by Charles Busch and Little Ones co-founder Stephen Nicolazzo.

Sisters Hayley and Mandy McElhinney are two of Australia's finest stage and screen performers. Having built their careers as individuals, they now join forces for their playwriting debut. The pair have written and will star in Dirty Birds at the Black Swan State Theatre Company — a strange, funny and moving portrait of two women trying to find their place in the world.

Also, the plight of asylum seekers involved in a 2010 maritime disaster that left 50 people dead has inspired This Rough Magic — a new, dreamlike play that weaves their story into Shakespeare's The Tempest. And we take a walking tour of London's famous theatre district, the West End, with theatre producer and columnist for The Stage, Richard Jordan.

We continue our journey into the life and work of Stephen Sondheim, the composer and lyricist of some of the most well-regarded musical theatre ever made.

We are joined by performer Philip Quast, authors Joanne Gordon and Robert L McLaughlin, directors of several Sondheim productions Dean Bryant and Sonya Suares, and we speak with the New York Times' chief theatre critic Jesse Green about Here We Are, Sondheim's posthumous final musical.

Stephen Sondheim is the composer and lyricist of some of the most well-regarded musical theatre ever made. We delve into his life, work and impact on the form.

We hear archival interviews with Sondheim himself and are joined by performer Philip Quast, author Joanne Gordon (Art Isn't Easy: The Theatre of Stephen Sondheim), director of several Sondheim productions, Dean Bryant, and Sonya Suares, founding artistic director of the Sondheim repertory company Watch This.