Kate Prendergast

There is a lot happening on Sydney's stages each and every month. 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.

Every January, Sydney Festival arrives to kick off the city's arts and culture calendar with a massive helping of shows, gigs and immersive experiences. In 2025, we have an eclectic grab bag of more than 130 things to choose from, including critically-acclaimed productions from overseas (such as a subversive spaghetti western performed in “white face”) and wild new work from local artists (including the premiere of an unauthorised opera about Siegfried and Roy) in addition to some phenomenal live music in beautiful spaces. So, what are the performances that you absolutely cannot miss? And which ones will we still be ranting about for years to come? Time Out Sydney's squadron of independent critics are on the case, and they’re out there seeing as many shows as they possibly can this January. You can see our 13 top picks for the best shows to see during Syd Fest '25 over here, and check out our rolling list of festival reviews below. (Note: These “mini reviews” are shorter than the critical commentary that we typically publish, but they still offer honest, rigorous observations and critiques from reliable theatre enthusiasts and live music veterans.)

To the common eye, the scene laid out in the Old Fitz Theatre (designed by Soham Apte) may appear lavish: a long oak table prepared for a feast; walls of wooden panelling and patterned green wallpaper; gilded portraits of dead aristocrats; an icy chandelier glittering above it all. But to the Oxford boys of the Riot Club, this private dining room of a regional gastro pub is a humiliating exile. Not only that – staffed by a father and daughter who aren’t educated in the natural, money-greased rules of subordination to their ‘betters’ – it’s an existential threat. The ten members of this exclusive club were banished here, on the outskirts of London, to host their next dinner (a quarterly custom) after one of them breached the strict pact of absolute secrecy. Once open and proud, their bizarre rituals of excess must now keep to the shadows. Gone are the days of legendary mayhem and glorious carnage without consequence; when their promised inheritance of seats of national power was iron-clad. (Or are they?)  As entertaining as it is savage... A dark comedy turned social horror over two acts penned by UK playwright Laura Wade in 2014, Posh is a study into how the “good old boys” have survived society’s staggered lunges towards equality over the last century. Inspired by real-life events, we see two generations conspiring to uphold the obscene traditions of class entitlement, patriarchal privilege, and their cashed-up “right” to do whatever they want. Director Margaret Thanos (Fur

In these doomy, divisive, very silent Munch scream times, there seems to be two reigning preoccupations, especially among progressives. The first: what kind of future awaits mankind and all the Earth, given our rapacious, post-industrial, apocalypse-inciting tendencies? The second: when our culture wars have such seemingly unbreachable battle lines, what collateral is there at the level of interpersonal relationships – and in particular, matters of the heart? Similar to Flat Earthers (a new musical from a trio of young writers  that debuted at the Hayes last year) Alana Valentine’s new play Nucleus asks whether love can survive fundamental differences between two people, or is it somehow separate? Yet, where Flat Earthers was incredibly gay (in both senses), riotously bonkers, and had its young lesbian lovers disagree on a very literal reality (“is the world round or flat?”) – Nucleus is prickly, sombre, and has its central duo of boomer one-night-standers at odds on the trickier level of personal values.  We meet Gabriel (prolific actor of the Aussie stage and screen, Peter Kowitz) first. Standing beneath a large glowing helix sculpture and on a luminous circular stage at the Seymour Centre, he monologues a blustering, gruff, self-aggrandising account of his long career as a nuclear engineer. Were it not for PM McMahon, he boasts, his site analysis would’ve seen Jervis Bay become a territory for a nuclear power station in the ’60s. Nucleus places us in the collision path of

One of Europe’s most boldly imaginative, avant-garde political theatre-makers Milo Rau makes his thunderous, earth-shaking debut at Sydney Festival with Antigone in the Amazon. An NTGent collaboration with the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the play reincarnates the timeless figure of Antigone – Sophocles’ archetypal 5th-century BC activist – as the sister of Oziel, a real-life Indigenous man who was one of 21 people massacred by state police during a 1996 peaceful protest on the Amazonian highway of ‘blood and resistance’.  Rehearsed on occupied land in Pará, this radically told, profoundly moving and visually arresting production features four brilliant actors on stage – Frederico Araujo (Polynices), Sara De Bosschere (Creon), Arne De Tremerie (Haemon), and Pablo Casella, the ‘Greek chorus’ and talented multi-instrumentalist. Behind them on a three-panel screen appear dozens more, many of whom are non-professionals cast from the local community, and live in the waking shadow of violence and dispossession. Action on stage and on screen overlap, interact, and ripple; as do profound ideas of truth and myth, representation and reality, activism and guilt, past and present. Notably, the actor who plays Antigone herself, Kay Sara, appears only on video. She is done uprooting herself for western audiences to try and convince them her story is equal to the Greek cannon, and chooses now to only perform for her community. Her stage lines are spoken by Araujo. We learn of Sara’s

Yes, it is long – and yes, it is worth it.  A two-part, six-hour, multi-award-winning work by American playwright Matthew López, written and set after Trump’s first election to presidency, The Inheritance is a sweeping, turbulent, and eloquently searching epic that builds a panoramic portrait of New York’s modern gay community. Having its acclaimed Sydney premiere at the Seymour Centre (Nov 7–Dec 8) with a stellar cast of thirteen, set in the shadow of AIDs and following centuries of repression, it asks how these men are learning to love and live in a world which has only very recently begun to accept that they have the right to exist without shame – or the right to exist at all. López loosely adapted the story from Howards End, the 1910 classic novel about social conventions and relationships by E.M. Forster (a gay man who came out of the closet only once he had been shut inside his coffin in 1970). The ghost of Forster himself appears as a lead in Part One, portrayed by local legend Simon Burke as an avuncular mythic elder to help this new generation of openly gay men begin to tell their stories – until, wisdom imparted, it is clear they must become their own authors. The world they live in is very different, after all.  Under Shane Anthony’s virtuosic direction (Anatomy of a Suicide, Ulster American) the story expands in a world of fragile but unmistakable social privilege amongst an urbane group of male friends and lovers. It begins in an Upper West Side apartment, with E

In the words of Michael Scott “why are you the way that you are?” Is it in our genes? Our circumstances? Are there other selves inside of us that, under the right conditions, could emerge?  A Little Trojan production presented in association with Bakehouse Theatre Co in the intimacy of KXT on Broadway, Joanna Erskine’s People Will Think You Don’t Love Me is a creative and haunting provocation of this philosophical question. Uplifted by a strong cast and mature direction from Jules Billington (The Swell) this story expands within an uneasy, irresolvable space between a supernatural possession story (via organ donation) and a kind of Wildean psychological thriller; or an inverted body horror, where empowered flesh-and-blood unleashes a monster within. Our protagonist, Michael (Tom Matthews), had never been physically powerful. He had a heart murmur as a boy – he couldn’t play sports, he couldn’t catch his breath. In his early adulthood, he is given a death sentence by a doctor. Then, a miracle happens: another man dies. A stranger’s vital organ is now knocking on Michael’s chest from the inside giving him a new lease on life – and with every beat, his strength returns, and then grows.  His wife Liz (a well-intentioned, over-excitable busy-body) is so bursting with gratitude, she can’t help but solve the mystery of the unknown donor, and discovers that this ‘Rick’ had a widow, Tommy. She drags her convalescing husband to her home in a very awkward (and funny) encounter amidst a

In Matthew Whittet’s Seventeen, five teens spend the night in a park after their last day of high school, celebrating the end of adolescence. Among the wooden playground equipment (monuments to that unreclaimable era) they drink from a communal bench, keep an eye out for the ranger, and flicker in that twilight limbo between what they’ve lived, and what’s to come – who they were, and who they hope to be. Perhaps for the last time together, they stand on the sheer cliff of a vast unknown. Their whole lives are ahead of them – only their secrets hold them back. The 17-year-olds (and one kid sister) are played by Di Smith, Katrina Foster, Di Adams, Noel Hodda, Peter Kowitz and Colin Moody. These veterans of the stage are definitely not 17 though, not even close. Assuming AI doesn’t crack the mortality problem any time soon, most of their lives are behind them. Faces seamed and voices hoary, they perform the gaucheness of youth. First staged almost ten years ago by Belvoir St Theatre before it went on to garner critical acclaim in the UK, this is Seventeen’s first major Sydney revival. Who were you when you were seventeen? Do you recognise that person? Would they recognise you?  I confess that, before even seeing this play, I had felt a great, anticipatory, existential sob bubbling up in me. I break down at the chorus of London Grammar’s ‘Wasting My Young Years’. Every morning, I smear a home-made mask of flaxseed, honey and turmeric on my face because a TikTok charlatan told me

When you walk into a show with as many content warnings as this one, you’re bracingyourself for something harrowing. Penned by playwright Shayne (just Shayne) andpremiering at KXT on Broadway, dog was developed with the aim of bringing visibility toaddiction and mental illness – psychological prisons which the playwright knows well. Thewriting clearly comes from a welter of lived experience, and the scenes that play out areraw. Sensitive viewers be warned: while a mental health coordinator was involved inbringing this story to the stage, there is a lot to be triggered by. There’s also a lot to leaveone troubled. Our two struggling characters are ‘Brother’ (he/him) played by Jack Patten, and ‘Sister’(they/them) played by Laneikka Denne. The siblings have exiled themselves to some remote outback shack, the sound of crickets transmitting slow, rolling waves through the hot air. Brother, an emotionally lost spare part in the wake of a break-up, scoops bottle after bottle from an esky as he works on a beaten-up motorbike. He holds the liquor well, until he doesn’t. Meanwhile, Sister’s Contamination Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is in a very bad way. In extended and repeated sequences, we see Denne peel off all their clothes (emphasis on all) and spray their naked body with Dettol. Under a dimmed stage light, we see them quivering with the insuperable necessity and overwhelming shame of the ritual. As both characters played out their unhealthy coping mechanisms, this critic w

A comedy line-up with no white men? Can it be true?! Free from the swinging of colonial dicks, Brown Women Comedy is a space where bad-ass brown women tell the kind of jokes that Australians rarely get to hear – and they totally kill it.     In fact, during their first visit to Sydney, Brown Women Comedy was obliged to add an extra matinee to their five-day run, with every other show sold out. On opening night, producer Daizy Maan, who is also our effortlessly hilarious host, quipped that ‘racial profiling’ (read: handing out flyers to people who looked like her) had proven a very effective marketing strategy. Still, while the show deliberately and joyfully serves a South Asian audience, these women are also simply just funny, no matter what kind of lunch your mum packed you for school – making for a fun, status-quo-kicking night out for anyone.   Along with Maan, the Sydney line-up featured Kripa Krithivasan (podcast host of Uncultured), Guneet Kaur (a RAW Comedy National Finalist), Chanika Desilva, Kru Harale, and Monica Kumar. Each brings their own unique brand of comedy – for instance, Kaur is dry and self-effacing, with lines like the one about how she’s only interested in a threesome as “a means of getting a second opinion”; and Krithivasan is wickedly funny, accusing white culture of “colonising therapy”. There’s a lot of great material about topics like growing up with South Asian parents, interracial relationships, and how ‘CALD’ is a term used only by “Susans from H

Do you enjoy being talked at for 90 minutes? Because that’s what Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World does. Part experimental performance, part anti-murder mystery, part hyperspeed TED Talk on the nature of truth and knowledge in our globalised post-colonial times, Things Hidden boasts many hallmarks of contemporary theatre. For instance: big projections on multiple screens (which ‘authenticate’ and enhance what’s told, while also showing the devious nature of the image) and the energetic dismantling of storytelling’s normative conventions.  A brain-crushing hydra, it’s a little hard to summarise, but I’ll try.  Fereydoun Farrokhzad was an Iranian entertainer and political activist, famous in the ‘70s. Imagine an Iranian Tom Jones. In the ‘90s, as a political refugee in Germany, he was murdered, and the case remains unsolved. Many suspect the Islamic Republic had a hand in it.   Farrokhzad isn’t a fictional character – look him up. Indeed, Javaad Alipoor, the creator, director and main spieler in Things Hidden, asks us to get out our phones and go to Wikipedia. He also invites us to Google ‘subalternity’. Are we really confident we can solve this mystery, like the annoying podcast host character (Asha Reid)? How meaningful are the connections and comparisons we’re making? How reliable are our tools? And what do our western-centric processes reveal about ourselves? Farrokhzad, Alipoor pedagogically corrects us, is not like Tom Jones. He is also not like Raam Emami,

Ode to Joy (How Gordon Got to Go to the Nasty Pig Party) is as ecstatically debauched as it sounds. A bass-hole throbbing master stroke of R-rated comedy, a penis de resistance paying tribute to Berlin’s revolutionary hearth of techno – a refuge for the global kink and queer communities – it is laugh-out-loud hilarious for all its frenetically paced sixty minutes. It just might be the fluid-splattered climax of this year’s entire Sydney Festival. Written and directed by James Ley (already confirmed as one of Scotland’s most thrillingly wit-laced commentators), this filthy fairy tale centres gay Scottish public servant Gordon (Lawrence Boothman). Sexually frustrated and spiritually unfulfilled, unwilling to be spooned anymore by ‘Prince Charmings’ in pubs, Gordon’s homonormative life changes forever when he encounters Manpussy (a magnificent kilt-wearing Marc Mackinnon, doubling as our diva narrator) and his partner Cumpig (a jacked Lithium bunny-man in shorts, Sean Connor).  With DJ Simonotron pumping beats from stage left throughout, our fabulous fellowship travels all the way to Berghain’s gay open sex club, SNAX (tagline: ‘Man Meat in Action’) – a vortex to excess, danger, drugs, freedom, and self-discovery. Manpussy will turn into a glorious en-goggled mermaid queen, Cumpig will turn into a pumpkin, and Gordon will turn into the new European Union.  Ley’s writing and all three actors’ performances produce the most wonderful sustained high. Creativity – in costumes, narrat

To paraphrase a line in Oil: “as soon as mankind had the audacity to dream it could keep itself warm when the sun went down, we were at war”. The Earth became an extractive commodity to be fought over; abstract lines sprung up into nation-states; division, jealousy and greed became society’s ever-burning fuel. Colonialism, empire, capitalism, modernity: the same basic impulse to escape cold and darkness rules them all.  In pioneering British playwright Ella Hickson’s ambitious modern play, it also rules a wilful (and often problematic) mother’s love. A time-bending, continent-hopping, multi-layered sci-fi epic and mother-daughter drama, Oil transports (by magical stretch of the imagination) her two main characters from the Industrial Age in Europe when crude oil was discovered, to the oil-rich Middle East at the turn of the century, to nondescript suburbia, and into the future. In each time period, the scene is some manner of dining room, which rests upon a vast mound of blackened soot (Emma White does a brilliant set). Paul Jackson’s lighting is crucial to our perception of what’s going on, and it is fantastic – moving us through greasy pools of waxy candlelight, to thrusting candelabras of boastful brightness, to rainbow fanfares, and to bleached and glaring whites.  ...the grim yet always entertaining adage of Oil has left me in a dark pool of reflection. STC has achieved a commendable feat. Directed with maturity and panache by Paige Rattray (The Lifespan of a Fact, Blith

When the Allies dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima at the end of WWII, the heat of the explosion was so great, it was two times the temperature of the sun’s surface. That potent image – of two suns floating just above the doomed city and its oblivious people – is one of many invoked by Hisashi Inoue’s magical, intensely moving and timeless 1994 play, which is beautifully translated by Roger Pulvers, a friend of the late Inoue. At last premiering in Australia with Omusubi Productions and Red Line Productions, The Face of Jizo is about a father and daughter – one living with survivor’s guilt, the other who didn’t survive – three years after the explosion, in the occupied and devastated city.  The Face of Jizo will always have a modern relevance, though, for as long as humans lose their humanity to war... This is a ghost story, but, in a marked contrast to the haunting of  profound trauma that casts a long shadow over this story, Takezo’s haunting (Shingo Usami) of his 23-year-old daughter Mitsue (Mayu Iwasaki) comes from love.  In fact, like one of the old folk tales that Mitsue tells the children at the library where she works, her father’s spirit begins showing up in her home just when her heart begins to beat again. Despite herself, she is falling for the scholar Kinoshita, a collector of objects touched by the bomb – things like warped bottles, glass shards, and spiked roof tiles.  “When he started to approach the checkout desk, a soft little sigh slipped from your lips,