Three actors portraying Hermione, Harry and Ron on stage for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Photograph: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
Photograph: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

Wondering which Melbourne shows to see? Check out the latest theatre, musical, opera and dance reviews from our critics

Adena Maier
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There's a lot happening across Melbourne's stages, so how do you know where to start? Thankfully our critics are always on hand to help with a recommendation. Be sure to also keep an eye on our round-up of the best of Melbourne theatre and musicals each month, and if funds are a bit tight lately, check out our explainer on how to nab cheap theatre tickets in Melbourne

Looking for something less dramatic? Check out the best art exhibitions in Melbourne this month.

5 stars: top notch, unmissable

  • Musicals
  • Melbourne
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That’s Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006. You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York’s punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called “the music of gay bashers”, and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell’s life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask’s work with the SqueezeBox band. It’s the closest I’ve come to calling a musical ‘punk’ without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago.  This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place. We’re somewhere in the Midwest waiting for Hedwig to start a 90-minute cabaret performance accompanied by her band, the Inch. The set (by Jeremy Allen) evokes an industrial warehouse and a dive-bar in one: think a simple circular rise centre stage with a staircase at the back furnished with cooly metallic...
  • Southbank
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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 fourth year in a row that Trophy Boys has played to local audiences, following sold-out seasons at La Mama in 2022, fortyfivedownstairs in 2023 and Arts Centre Melbourne in 2024. This time around, the dark drag extravaganza is playing once again at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio from August 12-24. Tickets range from $30-60 and you can get yours here. Read on for Time Out Sydney's five-star take on the 2024 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...

4 stars: excellent and recommended

  • Musicals
  • Melbourne
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Snakes have curled their way around mythology for millennia. Present in countless creation stories from Egyptian, Greek and Indian to Norse and First Nations cultures (including the Rainbow Serpent), the loaded symbolism of this coiled creature clasping its tail between its fangs – the ouroboros – evokes eternity.  Sometimes the serpent holds the world together. Other times, it’s a constricting chaos agent. Either way, the fireside nature of myths, oft-shared in storytelling sessions spun under the stars, is inherently unending, melding anew with each retelling. Tackled by everyone from Roman poets Virgil and Ovid to Canadian indie rockers Arcade Fire and Katee Robert’s queered novel, Midnight Ruin, the myth of Eurydice and her Orpheus finds new life in the hands of folk singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Her eight Tony Award-winning smash-hit musical Hadestown began life as a sung-through community project before she turned it into a concept album, and then a Broadway smash with help from director Rachel Chavkin. In most Greek tales, Eurydice and her Orpheus are happily married, torn apart by a cruel twist of fate: a viper’s bite (sometimes while pursued by toxic dudebro Aristaeus), not even a malicious god in disguise. As she fades into the Underworld, ruled over by Hades and his niece/abducted wife Persephone (!!!), a desolate Orpheus, son of a musical muse, plays his lyre like her life depends on it. Descending into the abyss and crossing the River Styx, he makes a...
  • Musicals
  • Melbourne
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Way back when Tim Burton was a much weirder filmmaker, my wee brother and I were unreasonably thrilled by the chaos engine of awfully bad behaviour that was Michael Keaton’s unhinged and unwashed demon, Betelgeuse.  The grotty stripe-suited monster ate up the 1988 film of not quite the same name – the studio figured folks would stay away unless the title was simplified to Beetlejuice. Named after the red supergiant star blazing ferociously in the constellation of Orion, some 600 light years from our solar system, Betelgeuse is an outcast from the hilariously bureaucratic afterlife, aka the Netherworld. Which leaves him preying on the naïve recently deceased, like sweet young couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), in an attempt to crowbar open the sort of ridiculous loophole the Greek gods are fond of. Say his – apparently too complex – name three times and he’ll be unleashed on the mortal coil once more.  But Betelgeuse’s sleazy attentions are soon distracted by Winona Ryder’s goth child Lydia, when she reluctantly moves into Adam and Barbara’s now-empty house with her dad, Charles (disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones), and his new squeeze, OTT sculptor Delia (fabulously demented goddess Catherine O’Hara). A smash hit, Beetlejuice is a wild and unruly thing writhing with unhinged ideas, from its stop-animated black and white sand worms to characters shrunk into a model of sleepy town Winter River, and on to the hilariously-depicted dead of the surreal...
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  • Drama
  • St Kilda
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
The modern myth of the superhero is a kind of wish fulfilment, though the concept of the “superman” or ubermensch comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1883 work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. His idea was that humans would continually improve; a more ideal form is waiting for people in the future. Comic books find ways to speed along this evolution. So, we watch stories of heroes who fly, cannot be hurt, cannot be touched or, in some cases, are billionaires using their wealth for good. A real fantasy. Emilie Collyer’s new play, Super, which is currently running at Red Stitch Actor’s Theatre, is interested in more intimate powers that might help you day-to-day. Phoenix (Lucy Ansell) has the ability to dissipate someone’s anger; calm them down without a fight. Rae (Caroline Lee) brings people into her emotional vulnerability; if she cries, everyone else cries. And Nel (Laila Thacker) is so efficient, she can do the most basic tasks in the blink of an eye – and she can whip up a spreadsheet that will blow your mind. The origin story of Collyer’s latest dramatic work begins with a year of treatment for breast cancer. Her experience is deeply embedded in the play; these characters have been misdiagnosed or otherwise mistreated by the medical establishment. Their powers are pathologized or dismissed and they have to form their own support group to work their way through these radical changes. Phoenix is desperate to use her new ability ethically and with empathy. Nel has helped local...

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