Things to do in Melbourne today

You may remember this outdoor pop-up from way back in winter 2019 – those sweet old days before a certain you-know-what had Melburnians sheltering in their homes for a dark winter. Thankfully, this winter is looking up with the Winter Village's (faux) snow-covered activation landing back in town from May 13 to August 29.  The Skyline Terrace at Federation Square will once again be transforming into a free, family friendly winter wonderland complete with ice skating, food trucks and pop-up bars, as well as a magical igloo village.  There will be winter-themed treats perfect for keeping warm, or you can book a private igloo and get a food and beverage package that starts at $49 per person. There's a whole host of fun events and activities expected to happen throughout the season including cheap skating days, brunch and skate packages and family fun days so you'll no doubt return more than once. The Winter Village is open seven days a week and is free to enter. Ice skating starts at $10 for toddlers, $18 for children and $26 for adults. More info here. 

Victorians and New South Welshmen don’t have too much in common (we wear a lot of black, they for some reason insist on calling parmas "a parmi") but there is some common ground – namely the beautiful Murray River which separates our two states. This year, the Murray border community of Echuca Moama is throwing a brand new festival around this legendary river.  Moama Lights is a sound and light event that runs from May 8 to 22. It will take place at the Horseshoe Lagoon, a 600-metre-long lit-up trail that visitors can traverse and explore three different chapters of Echuca Moama’s story – its Indigenous heritage, subsequent European colonisation and finally, modern-day Echuca Moama. A light show will be projected across the lagoon and you’ll be able to see a field of illuminated flowers and colours shining across the Murray River.  The event is free to attend but you will need to register for a timed ticket via the website.

There’s been a lot of hype about Because the Night, Malthouse Theatre’s new production where the audience can freely explore an immersive set while the cast perform around them. “Immersive” really is the word here, and for once the oft overused term doesn’t feel like a gimmick – nor does the intensely detailed open set undermine the integrity of the production. Because the Night is undeniably a work of theatre, but one that approaches the art with a bolt of inspiration that will attract new audiences to the discipline.  It’s apparent from the get go that Because the Night is unlike any production Australian audiences have seen before. The audience are split into three groups, each entering the performance from a different location. Ushers provide each person with a dark robe and Donnie Darko-style black rabbit mask to cover their face – apart from serving to differentiate audience from cast, the costume immediately puts visitors in the right headspace; goodbye Melbourne, hello Elsinore.  If you’ve seen Melbourne’s 2019 season of A Midnight Visit or even been lucky enough to attend Punch Drunk’s Sleep No More in New York, you’ll get the drill. The cast of six – which when we attended was Keegan Joyce (Hamlet), Nicole Nabout (Claudia), Syd Brisbane (Polonius), Ras-Samuel Welda’abzgi (Laertes), Jen Vuletic (Gertrude) and Artemis Ioannides (Ophelia) – are oblivious to the audience as they perform the loosely Hamlet-based story across the winding, labyrinthine set of Elsinore, a 1

Over the last 20 years, Rone has cemented himself as one of Australia’s most successful street artists. He has carved himself a niche in the world of urban art by routinely taking over abandoned places and distressed spaces and filling them with large, despondent portraits of women.  What you might not know is that Rone – real name Tyrone Wright – is from Geelong and he’s returning home for his first survey exhibition. Rone in Geelong presents a comprehensive collection of work spanning his career, from early stencils to photographs that show how he goes about transforming deserted buildings (you can also see one of these spaces recreated in 3D).  Geelong Gallery has also commissioned Rone to transform one of its most significant spaces – the Douglass Room – to reflect the gallery’s architecture, history and collection. Rone will work with interior stylist Carly Spooner to revamp the room, drawing additional inspiration from Venetian palazzos and trompe l’œil paintings (a painting technique that creates the illusion of three dimensions). True to form, the room will also feature an aloof-looking mural of a woman plus a haunting soundtrack by Nick Batterham.  Rone in Geelong was originally planned for winter 2020, but will now run from February 27 to May 16 2021.

The 1998 Drew Barrymore-Adam Sandler film The Wedding Singer is a mulleted, leather-gloved, parachute-panted nostalgia trip to 1985. The stage musical, now much further from 1998 than the film was from 1985, has an extra layer of nostalgia, recalling both the fashions and gender politics of the 1980s and the uncomplicated innocence of a late-’90s romcom.  Far from being weighed down by these expectations, however, the show fizzes and pops like Mentos dropped into New Coke. It's as high energy as a Jane Fonda exercise video, sweet as a Ring Pop and pulls you in like a dancefloor filler at a wedding.  The gist, in case you haven’t seen the film, is this: wedding singer Robbie Hart (Christian Charisiou) and waitress Julia Sullivan (Teagan Wouters) meet-cute the night before Robbie is left at the altar by his fiancée. Julia soon gets engaged to her Wall Street boyfriend Glen (Stephen Mahy), who cheats on her, worships money and fulfils his obligations as a panto villain. No points for guessing whether there’s a wedding at the end.  As the two leads, Charisiou and Wouters have far more chemistry than Sandler and Barrymore ever did - and here both parties are charming and adorable. They are both vocal powerhouses, with Broadway voices made for this kind of music. Charisiou is particularly outstanding, with an expressive face that telegraphs his emotions all the way to the last row of the dress circle. A lesser actor would be upstaged by that tightly permed mullet, but self-assured

Yirramboi means 'tomorrow' in the language of the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung peoples (the traditional custodians of the land on which Melbourne is built). It's a fitting name for a festival that shares the history, but also celebrates the future, of the world's longest living cultures.  Yirramboi First Nations arts and culture festival is back for 2021, with over 150 events to explore this May 6 to 16. The biennial festival first ran in 2017 when a city-wide "blak out" transformed Melbourne with First Nations-led dance, music, visual art, theatre and film events. The 2021 festival is set to be the biggest yet and one of the first opportunities for many performers to get back in front of a live audience after 2020. "When you immerse yourself in the many free and paid events you will be a part of the first live audience that many of our creatives have had in more than 12 months," says Yirramboi creative director and Boonwurrung and Wemba Wemba woman, Caroline Martin. "We can’t wait to celebrate with you.” Highlights of the 2021 Yirramboi program include: A Fight for Survival The Northlands Collective Mob have created a political cabaret about the true story to save Northlands Secondary College from closure during the early 1990s. Ziggy Ramo Hear the rapper perform his debut album Black Thoughts live at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Arterial This acrobatic show from Na Djinang Circus explores the deep connections shared between First Nations people, country and culture as well

The District Docklands gets a glow-up with Imaginaria – a magical "future play experience". In layman's terms, Melbourne, it's a giant, glowing, otherworldy all-ages playground to explore. Imaginaria allows Melburnians to explore fantastic custom-built, interactive structures like a giant inflatable bubble, glowing light maze, and a "cosmic abyss". The whole installation features bespoke sound, light and even scents that are activated as guests explore the dreamscape. In April, the team installed two new installations. One is a talking projection that uses artificial intelligence (kind of like Siri or Alexa) to answer questions and chat to you. The other is a series of interactive sound cylinders that allow you to hear sound in a relatively new way. The experience comes from the imagination of Australian creative Nick Ennis, who has brought it to life thanks to a team of architects, musicians, fashion designers, light projectionists, audio-visual artists, sculptors, stuntmen and circus performers. Ennis says: "We wanted to create a play experience that elevated you out of the digital fog and snapped you into the now." Imaginaria has been extended right through to May 23 at the District Docklands (find it beneath the Melbourne Star). Tickets start at $24. 

The weather has long been the go-to topic, especially in Melbourne (talk about four seasons in one day, am I right?). The weather is more than just small talk, however – it is intrinsically linked to the climate and the environment.  Big Weather explores Australia's weather – and specifically the knowledge, stories and perspectives on the weather as told by First Nations artists. The exhibition showcases works from Indigenous artists that are related to the weather, including representations of ancestral rain, hail and storm spirits; works exploring climate change-induced extreme weather events; and the place of animals and how they're affected by the environment and weather. The exhibition is laid out by theme, with one room representing fire, one representing water and flooding, one representing air and wind, and so on. Curator Hannah Presley created the exhibition during last summer's devastating bushfires (remember those?), and it was originally slated to open in March 2020 as a direct response to the fires. But Presley says the themes of the show are just as relevant now.  "This conversation is actually timeless," she says. "We've all had this quiet time, and we're thinking about things a little differently. We want to feel grounded and safe, and that is part of how Indigenous people feel connected to country." Presley wants visitors to the exhibition to think differently about the weather and about climate change, learning from the Traditional Owners of the land and the

Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith has, probably unfairly, become synonymous with a certain type of middle-class, middle-brow theatrical affair, the kind of play full of casually wealthy characters talking incessantly about real estate. She has always been good with a zinger, but sometimes it feels like she is indulging or flattering her typically well-heeled audience instead of provoking and challenging them. Still, it is worth remembering that she made her name with Honour (1995), a fierce chamber piece with ideas that complicated rather than flattened the characters. In Berlin, a crackling two-hander that superficially recalls her stunning 2014 play Switzerland, Murray-Smith starts small – a young Australian man, Tom (Michael Wahr), shacks up for the night with Berliner Charlotte (Grace Cummings) in her loft apartment – with the play’s central tension coiling so slowly it feels like it won’t ever coalesce. The two characters circle each other in a coy dance of seduction we feel is already foregone, the neat image of a hat deliberately evoking Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being. Iain Sinclair directs these early moments with a deceptive breeziness, a sense that nothing much may be at stake after all. Charlotte opens up about the death of her infant brother, and Tom shares a story about a fateful car crash. They bond over a survivor guilt abstracted by time, and the Ramones. Small details pop up, probably insignificant. And then the conversation turns to the war. And

The first rule of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is that you don’t talk about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Safeguarding spoilers is an expected responsibility for anyone who attends the Potter-verse’s first on-stage outing. There’s even a hashtag: #KeepTheSecrets. But in truth (as far as theatre critique is concerned, at least), JK Rowling needn’t have worried. This marathon, five-hour spectacle has a plot so dense and sprawling, so wonderfully, unashamedly elaborate, it would take many thousands of words more than any theatre review to even scratch the surface. While we may have been sworn to secrecy about Cursed Child’s plot, we can reveal that the hype – and rarely has a piece of theatre ever generated such fever-pitched buzz – is entirely deserved. And not just because of the quality of the production. The masterminds behind the show – led by Rowling, playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany – have not merely set out to put on a play, but rather craft a rich and detailed immersive experience. To this end, Melbourne’s Princess Theatre has undergone a top to bottom $6.5 million makeover, transforming its interiors to match a Hogwartsian, Potterfied aesthetic. If this sounds like an unnecessary extravagance, it’s probably an indication this play isn’t for you. The success of Cursed Child, which has smashed box office records on Broadway and the West End, is powered by its unapologetic exclusivity. Those without any prior knowledge of Harry and co will be baf