Time Out Sydney Arts & Culture Awards 2024: Best Performance in a Musical Nominees

Courtney Monsma’s G(a)linda is slap-your-knees, let-out-a-squeal funny. She re-shapes the virtue-signalling mean girl role and makes Glinda that much easier to redeem with her masterful timing, quirkiness, and propensity for revealing the good witch’s vulnerable side. From soaring operatic highs from within her perfect bubble to a delightfully unexpected grunt or two, Monsma is a delight.

Sometimes, you don't need to reinvent the wheel to pull off a show that goes straight for the jugular. Case in point: this grim and gothic production of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd from Victorian Opera and New Zealand Opera, which made its long-awaited Harbour City debut at the Sydney Opera House. Opposite Ben Mingay, Antoinette Halloran's Mrs Lovett was a masterclass. Her characterisation of the ruthlessly manipulative pie maker who turns her customers into cannibals is deliciously lurid. From thinly veiled euphemisms (such as the suggestive stroke of a rolling pin) to bare-faced gropes, Halloran’s performance is peppered with bawdy, lustful winks to her myopic desires for Todd. Nimbly shifting from hilarity to horror, she can wring every last drop of dramatic colour from a role without it curdling into pantomime. 

Australia loves Tina Turner. It's indisputable fact. So when the musical inspired by the life of the "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll" announced its Australian premiere in Sydney, the pressure was on to find a performer who was up to the task. Enter Zimbabwean-Australian rising star, Ruva Ngwenya. While the show's writing has its shortcomings, it's Ngwenya's revelatory performance that kept Sydney audiences hooked 'til the end. She fully embodies the real deal’s strength, charisma, power, and talent. Sadly, the real Tina Turner passed away just a few weeks after the show opened, but not before she gave Ruva her blessing.

Seann Miley Moore stole the show by bringing an injection of queer, camp excellence to Opera Australia's revival of this complicated classic musical. Reinventing the role of the hustling brothel owner known only as The Engineer, the The Voice alum leaned into a lascivious pansexuality, pushing the character beyond a misogynistic sleaze to a flamboyant masochist who craves the extravagant materialism only white privilege can bring. This expression of queerness increased the stakes for a character that has often been dismissed as a mere caricature, a projection of colonial views of Eastern barbarism. (And it was also just really fabulous.) 

Monique Sallé is always a bright light in any show she appears in – from playing a mischevious sprite with a modern twist in The Lovers to a feisty leopard-print-loving "mumager" in The Deb – and it was no small feat to stand out amongst the charismatic esemble of The Dismissal, but you can count on Sallé. A brand-new musical inspired by one of the most notorious events in Australian political history (the Governer-General's sacking of progressive PM Gough Whitlam), the success of this show hinges on the actors giving their all as caricatures of real-life figures. Sallé's range shone in various roles, including a sniveling Billy Snedden, but it's her aloof Queen Elizabeth II that lives on in our imaginations, with Sallé taking ol' Liz (RIP) through a whole punk-style breakdown with incredible comedic timing.