Jasmine Joyan

There's always a lot happening on Sydney's stages – but how do you even know where to start? Thankfully, our critics are out road-testing musicals, plays, operas, dance, cabaret and more all year round. Here are their recommendations. Want more culture? Check out the best art exhibitions in Sydney.

International Women's Day takes place this year on Friday, March 8, and the 2024 theme is Inspire Inclusion – it's all about celebrating women's achievements, raising awareness about discrimination, and taking action to drive gender parity, as we move towards a gender-equal world free of bias, stereotypes and discrimination.  The annual day of solidarity and activism has become a rallying point for people around the world to unite, celebrate and brainstorm solutions to the ever-mutating challenges we face. Feminism takes many forms, and each female-identifying person should feel like they can celebrate IWD in a way that truly explores their experience. To that end, we’ve selected a range of different ways to experience International Women's Day in Sydney this year. Psst... Have you heard about All About Women? It's the Sydney Opera House's annual feminist fest, with this year's line-up including a conversation with Mary Beard and a candle-making workshop with Nonna's Grocer.

What was the time of death for the American dream? In her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat, Brooklyn-born playwright Lynn Nottage offers a compelling starting point: with the heedless disregard for the plight of the working class, which flatlined with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Set in Reading, Pennsylvania, as the country’s once-strong Steel Belt turned to rust, the play is a sociological exploration of class struggle in the United States. Directed by Zindzi Okenyo (Is God Is, Orange Thrower, Choir Boy) the play’s timely Australian premiere is here to close out Sydney Theatre Company's huge 2024 season. Sweat is oft-quoted as the “play that explained Trump’s win” in the 2016 presidential elections. However, this description does not do justice to the depth of Nottage’s work and extensive research. Sweat is not merely an explanation, as that connotes a retrospective reflection – rather, when it debuted in 2014, the play served as a prescient warning that highlighted the dissatisfaction of blue-collar workers, who were once regarded as the backbone of the American economy. There is an eerie sense of déjà vu that comes with watching this play in light of the result of the United States’ recent presidential election. Sweat’s themes and concerns are just as relevant today, and have arguably become worse for both the working and middle classes. The story unfolds in a bar, the watering hole of choice for the factory workers who toil away at the local steel mill. The n

Well-behaved women seldom make history, and a well-behaved production seldom breaks new ground. A celebratory (if not a touch tokenistic) musical tribute to real women who have left their own impact on the zeitgeist, Well-Behaved Women debuted on the New York stage in early 2020. It’s a contemporary song cycle that explores the stories of sixteen her-storical figures, and this new production directed by Blazey Best (Tell Me on a Sunday) tasks just four of Sydney’s most respected performers to portray all of them.   From the compact stage of Surry Hills’ Belvoir St Theatre, the show kicks off with an impressive bang. Zahra Newman’s (star of STC’s Dracula, Belvoir’s Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill) performance as Eve (from the bible) is a sultry rendition of the original sin, leaving you as mesmerised as Eve herself was by that serpent. Newman takes up space with an assertion of authority, commanding attention with her every movement. The stage quickly fades into blackness, and for a moment, it seems we might be intruding on the fateful moment when Eve takes the apple. As quickly as Newman’s performance begins, the show suddenly cuts to another song – this one centered on Queen Boudica, warrior queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe, portrayed by Sarah Murr (& Juliet). Murr’s own gravitas continues to build on Newman’s momentum – tasked with portraying a lesser-known figure, her vocal clarity allows the audience to hear every lyric of Boudica’s story clearly. Murr’s vocal

Nine years on from its Broadway debut, audiences still can’t get enough of Hamilton. While theatre lovers anxiously await Sydney’s exclusive return season of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, we also have the chance to go back to where it all began. The hit hip-hop musical’s multi-Tony-Award-winning predecessor, In the Heights, has landed at the Sydney Opera House to heat things up this winter. First hitting the Broadway stage in 2008 (before it inspired the 2021 feature film), this rags-to-riches story returns to the Harbour City with gusto for the first time since 2019. A fiery fusion of poetry and passion, In the Heights is an idyllic love letter to the riches of community, cariños and carnaval! The story is simple enough: Usnavi (Ryan Gonzalez, they/them - Zombie! The Musical), a bodega owner living in the largely Latin-American neighbourhood of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, dreams of returning to his homeland and pines for the strong and beautiful Vanessa (Olivia Vásquez, she/her). Amongst the struggles of the day-to-day – the rising threat of gentrification, the cost of living, tighter immigration laws, and heat-induced blackouts – the news of a winning lottery ticket could change everything for the local community, catalysing dreams about what a future beyond the Heights might look like.  The only thing hotter than the Fourth of July is this show and its suave cast. Sydney’s winter chill is soon forgotten at the entrance of the Drama Theatr

We on the affirmative team contend that taking a high school debating tournament, making feminism the topic of discussion and turning it all into a play is a recipe for a fascinating night of theatre.  This will be the third year in a row that Trophy Boys is running in Melbourne, following sold-out seasons at La Mama in 2022 and fortyfivedownstairs in 2023. This time around, the dark drag extravaganza is playing at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio from July 16-21. Melbourne tickets range from $25-55 and you can get yours here. Read on for our Time Out Sydney reviewer's five-star take on the recent Sydney run of Trophy Boys. If you had asked me what I thought the next canonical Australian text would be before I watched Trophy Boys, I certainly wouldn’t have pegged a play that features a sign boldly emblazoned with the words “Feminism has failed women” set against a backdrop of portraits of “powerful women leaders”. (Jacinda Ardern, Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Youzafi and Grace Tame are accounted for, to name a few.) And yet, with this hilariously profound production, Trophy Boys proves that a provocative and unexpected approach can pay off handsomely.  We are introduced to a gang of four private school boys from the fictional Saint Imperium College as they strut into a classroom with the kind of boisterous raucousness that can only come from teenage boys. However, these aren’t your average young men – this queer black comedy features an all-women and non-bin

To revive and reimagine a classic novel is no easy feat. It takes a particular skill to balance traditional concepts in a contemporary context – and when the novel in question is as enduringly popular as Little Women, the stakes are even higher.  Broadway’s 2005 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 coming-of-age classic has arrived for a highly-anticipated season at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre Company under the eye of director and choreographer Amy Campbell (A Chorus Line, Once). Little Women has been churned through countless adaptations (most recently, Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film). The question is – is this musical (with book by Allan Knee, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein and music by Jason Howland) able to capture the charming essence of the original text? And has the local team been able to tap into that spirit of sisterhood love, while also embracing a modern perspective? In some ways, the answer is yes, but the balance is off. ...under Campbell’s direction, Little Women is a uniquely innovative musical that will surprise you until the very end Tanwee Shrestha’s set design is thoroughly minimalist, the stage is almost bare except for some strategic arrangements of stretch cords (2 kilometres in total!). While this modern design is an unconventional choice, it beautifully enables the finely crafted execution of every emotion, thought and action as the performers weave, crawl, and bounce through the cords. It’s a fantastic use of the space, inviting the audience into the March sisters

If you had asked me what I thought the next canonical Australian text would be before I watched Trophy Boys, I certainly wouldn’t have pegged a play that features a sign boldly emblazoned with the words “Feminism has failed women” set against a backdrop of portraits of “powerful women leaders”. (Jacinda Ardern, Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Youzafi and Grace Tame are accounted for, to name a few.) And yet, with this hilariously profound production, Trophy Boys proves that a provocative and unexpected approach can pay off handsomely.  We are introduced to a gang of four private school boys from the fictional Saint Imperium College as they strut into a classroom with the kind of boisterous raucousness that can only come from teenage boys. However, these aren’t your average young men – this queer black comedy features an all-women and non-binary cast serving masculine drag.  Trophy Boys is a masterful play that I hope we will continue to see not only in theatres, but in future school curricula. Trophy Boys makes its Sydney debut after receiving rave reviews in Melbourne for three years running, and it's an overdue homecoming of sorts for playwright Emmanuelle Mattana, who was inspired by spending their adolescence working their way through Sydney’s competitive debating scene (which is a very real thing, we’re told). It is a world that director Marni Mount is also intimately familiar with. Over a tight 70-minute runtime, we witness the boys prepare to go toe-to-toe with

The premiere of Jane Harrison’s Stolen marks the second production of this poignant play from Sydney Theatre Company in less than twenty years. The performance, directed by Ian Michael, stays true to Harrison’s work while evolving the play for a new generation. However this generation, albeit more cognisant of the truth of Stolen Generations, may be unaware of the extent of the hurt and trauma, which Michael effectively centres on here.  The play focuses on the lives of five Indigenous children who have been forcibly removed and sent to live in a children’s home. Each child's life diverges as teenagers and young adults, as they begin to cope with the aftermath of being removed from their families and their culture in their own way.  This production takes a powerfully eerie approach, opening with a focus on Renée Mulder's simple but effective set design, featuring an oversized filing cabinet and a single  dingy, institutional iron bed. The abnormally large size of these props creates a nightmarish spectacle. This effect is amplified when each character enters against a backdrop of silence, which is abruptly broken as they plead to the audience for any information about their parents. This gut-wrenching opening scene is an incredibly impactful choice.However, it also sets a high bar for the remainder of the play to keep pace with, and the chilling opening is also heavily relied on for expressing the extent of the horror and cruelty these children experience. This production emp

What would you do if you were struggling to afford to pay your rent, gas, and electricity bills, only to discover that you’ve been priced out of paying for basic groceries too? When the quick-witted Antonia (the prolific actor Mandy McElhinney – who, yes, is also “Rhonda” from those insurance ads) and her fellow weary housewives discover that prices at the local supermarket have doubled overnight, their shopping run erupts into a revolt. The women begin to loot – or, as Antonia would describe it, “liberate” – food off the shelves. When the excitement is over, Antonia finds herself back home with a random assortment of fruits and vegetables, dog food (she doesn’t own a dog), canary pellets (she doesn’t own a canary) and rabbit heads. She enlists the help of her neighbour Margherita (Emma Harvie) to hide the stolen goods from her moralist husband Giovanni (Glenn Hazeldine), a staunch unionist who’s a stickler for rules and due process. The supermarket riot sets a ripple effect of absurdity in motion, ranging from a briny phantom pregnancy with added  “womb olives”, to an unconscious cop with a flatulence problem – and that’s just the highlights.  ...simultaneously leaves you wheezing from laughter and slightly deaf from the roars of others No Pay? No Way! is two hours and twenty minutes of comedic gold. Marieke Hardy’s laugh-out-loud political satire initially premiered with Sydney Theatre Company in February 2020, before it was plagued by lockdowns. But with the way that the

What do the terms “Nicomachean Ethics” and “lying whore” have in common? They are both used in the same sentence in A Fool in Love, Van Badham’s (Banging Denmark) snort-out-loud new romantic comedy, which uproariously kicks off Sydney Theatre Company's 2024 season. This is not an ‘exhale air from your nose while watching a funny scene’ kind of show – be prepared to discover how you truly laugh (and wheeze, and snort) in this fantastic performance.  The play is based on Spanish playwright Lope De Vega’s 17th century farce La Dama Boba, with a script curated thoughtfully to a contemporary audience whilst preserving the core themes of golden age comedia palatina works.  Badham has created an impossibly high bar for comedy... Badham’s work is a masterclass in adaptation, one which is so meticulously tailored to Sydneysiders that it brings praise to her anthropological skills in acknowledging each of the Harbour City’s archetypes. Badham stays true to the tropes of a simple romantic comedy, however she elevates this story through parodying clichés of Sydney archetypes, which provides a level of localised humour and complexity that effortlessly expands the story.  The play is set in the fictional sun-drenched, coastal town of Illescas, a few hours away from Sydney. We open on two men seen rhythmically thrusting away in a dance – and with those pelvic thrusts, begins the story. A once-wealthy businessman, Otto Otavio (Johnny Nasser) is at the brink of financial ruin. His only hope o

In 1901, the word ‘bondmaid’ was found to be missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. A century later, this simple oversight catalysed an epiphany in the formation of the theatrical debut of The Dictionary of Lost Words. Directed by Jessica Arthur and adapted for the stage by Verity Laughton, this play based on Pip William’s bestselling novel is an astounding performance set during the seismic events of the late 19th and early 20th century, at the height of the women’s suffrage movement and the dawn of World War I.   The play begins with protagonist Esme Nicoll (played by Tilda Cobham-Hervey) observing her father, the lexicographer Harry Nicoll (Brett Archer) from beneath his desk as he is researching and curating the first Oxford English Dictionary. In what can only be described as the first vibrations of a ripple effect, a slip of paper with the word and definition of ‘bondmaid’ (a "slave girl") falls onto the floor, where a five-year-old Esme innocently watches her father and his colleagues work. This moment reverberates into Esme’s interest in the compilation of ‘lost words’ – those words discarded, forgotten and considered not worthy enough for the Oxford dictionary. (And why is it, that so many of those words that fell through the cracks have something to do with women?) Laughton’s script exceptionally translates the novel to stage…allow[ing] for greater emotional investment The Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House is transformed into the scriptorium of Oxford for

Visitors are meant to leave. Right? The premiere of Jane Harrison’s The Visitors at the Sydney Opera House marks the second rendition of the acclaimed play since its smash-hit debut at Sydney Festival in early 2020. The performance, directed by the legendary Wesley Enoch and produced by Moogahlin Performing Arts and Sydney Theatre Company, is a fantastically critical and speculative historical fiction that leaves you inspired and hopeful. Harrison’s play is set in 1788, where seven Elders from each respective nation across the region we now know as Sydney gather to discuss the looming nawees (the First Fleet) sailing towards the Eora nation (Botany Bay). The play focuses on the discussions within that meeting, and explores the varied suggestions for what to do about the strange boats heading closer towards their shore.  ...this play humanises history and recenters Indigenous presence and engagement, simultaneously in the past and for the future. The premise is simple: how do we come to an agreement about understanding the unknown? Each character represented provides dimension into what becomes a very difficult question to resolve. Both Harrison’s meticulous dialogue and the deeply considered character development of each Elder adds colour and complexity to this question. It is very easy for performances about historically marginalised and colonised groups to become patronising or dogmatic parables – this production completely evades such superficial discussions, executing a p

Beauty and the Beast the Musical revives Disney’s 1991 animation in a theatrical masterpiece that captures a tale as old as time, through the panorama of a multi-sensory spectacle in this two-and-a-half hour production. Before you see anything, it’s what you hear that captivates your attention. The orchestration by Danny Troob and sound design of John Shivers completely shifts the atmosphere in each scene, accentuating that gravitas of emotional range of the characters and their circumstances. The presence and influence of the music and orchestration is truly felt in the few moments of its absence. In an artform where too much music can easily become overkill, the sound design shifts seamlessly between diegetic and non-diegetic to support transitions between dialogue and musical scores.  Shubshri Kandiah, who plays Belle (and who also played princesses in Disney’s Aladdin, Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and Belvoir St Theatre’s Into The Woods), has become Australia’s go-to princess, and deservedly so. Kandiah’s performance carries the youthfulness and animation of a Disney cartoon while exuding the elegance of a woman born to be royalty. While Belle’s disdain for Gaston (Jackson Head) falters in the pair’s duet, ‘Me’, this oversight is beyond compensated for in her timbre and melody throughout the rest of the performance.  Head plays the repugnant role of Gaston delightfully. His performance elicits a tug-of-war of admiration for his execution but also an unease at