Things to do in Sydney today

Read about The Book of Mormon's $40 ticket lottery. In 2011, when The Book of Mormon first opened in New York City, it was a risky bet. It’s notoriously difficult for original shows to survive on Broadway – roughly four out of five shows fail to turn a profit – and a parody of religious fervour, packed with anarchic, puerile humour, written by ‘the South Park guys’, Trey Parker and Matt Stone? Not a sure thing. Their co-writer, Robert Lopez, had won a Tony and a Grammy Award for his subversive puppet musical Avenue Q, but repeat success wasn’t guaranteed. But as we now know, it was an immediate hit. Not even celebrities were guaranteed tickets, and prices skyrocketed to meet demand. Its cast recording was the highest-charting musical album in over forty years, until Hamilton smashed all records. Its two lead actors – Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad – booked sitcoms and Disney movies. In the seven years since, Robert Lopez has not only won the EGOT (the full complement of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards) in the shortest amount of time for any recipient, he’s the only person in the world to EGOT twice. The show has toured all over the US, has a long-running production in the West End, and recently opened in Sweden. So is it worth all of the fuss? Does it still hold up in 2018? The answer is yes. We follow two young Mormon missionaries, Type-A Narcissist Elder Price (Ryan Bondy) and Elder Cunningham (AJ Holmes), a mess with a geeky streak, as they’re paired up for their tw

At first glance, there’s not all that much connecting the two parts of Sydney Dance Company’s latest double bill. One feels lavish and expected, and the other feels brittle, sparse and satisfyingly surprising. The first piece is a revival of Rafael Bonachela’s superb Frame of Mind, which premiered back in 2015. It’s very much core territory for the company – beautifully athletic and inventive contemporary dance set to a wrenching score composed for a string quartet by Bryce Dessner. The second, called Forever & Ever, is a dark and intoxicating new work by Antony Hamilton that often seems as much like an installation as it does a dance piece, inspired by fashion, nightclubbing and electronica. It starts with Jesse Scales performing a solo in total silence, activating body part by body part as she moves around the stage in an intricately choreographed and tightly wound routine. She then picks up a light that’s been sitting on the stage, and the music suddenly takes over the theatre. Composed by Hamilton’s brother Julian (who’s one half of the Presets), the score features a near constant rhythm that hypnotically repeats for almost the entire 35 minutes of the performance as a simple synth soundscape evolves around it. It’s as if you’re reaching the end of a night in some underground Berlin club. A line of figures in giant black cloaks slowly approaches Scales, like a centipede, waving white cones through the air. The towering figure at the front of the line (Izzac Carroll)

1966. The last night of the legendary Tivoli circuit. Singer Evie May takes her final bow and retreats to her dressing room for one last drink with Cole, her dresser. Television has, effectively, killed the vaudeville star. Where else can Evie May (Amanda Harrison) go but back into the past? Prompted by the earnest questions of Cole (Keegan Joyce), Evie drifts back in time…  And becomes Evelyn May Murphy (Loren Hunter) all over again: young, stuck in regional Western Australia, and sneaking off to Perth to see a variety show. One broken heart and several family issues later, Evelyn is off to Sydney to find a life of her own under the stage lights. This new Australian musical, written with sensitivity upon nostalgia-flecked theatrical folk-pop landscape by Naomi Livingston (music and lyrics) and Hugo Chiarella (book and lyrics), re-writes showbiz history to reveal the minefield of compromise, risk and reward that awaited women from the 1930s through to the ‘60s who dared to dream. And it throws the spotlight squarely on two queer women: our lead, Evie, and the woman she falls for.   With a solid book and the biggest heart in the world, it’s hard not to love the characters. There’s the bright, ambitious, country-bred Evie; Harrison and Hunter play her at different stages of her life with intelligence, wit and compassion, and she manages making telling people not to “hang around like a wet fart” endearing. And then there’s June – a luminous, irresistible Bishaniya Vincent

If your company was poisoning its client base, would you speak out? Or would you keep your mouth shut to keep getting paid? In An Enemy of the People, a work by 19th century realist Henrik Ibsen, this is the scenario that has befallen his hero, Dr Stockman. In Melissa Reeves’ pointedly 2018 take on the story, Stockman is no longer a man on a solo crusade against the closed ranks of a community looking the other way. Instead, Reeves asks: what happens when the only person who cares about the truth is a woman?  Did you guess gaslighting, steamrolling and silence? You win a big and very depressing prize for being aware of how the world continues to work! Here, Stockman is played by Kate Mulvany. She’s a doctor who has returned to her hometown after the death of her husband to be chief wellness consultant of a new and ritzy health spa. It’s been good for her and her emotional health, but it’s also been great for the town – the spa has brought in jobs, the local economy is up, and there isn’t a single boarded-up shop on the main drag anymore. But when she discovers the water is contaminated with heavy metals, Stockman knows she needs to pull the plug – but no one else, except for her daughter Petra (Nikita Waldron, bright and earnest here as a feminist vlogger), seems to agree. Her brother (an appropriately slimy Leon Ford), the town’s mayor and a significant investor in the spa, doesn’t want to lose out on money. And the editor of the local newspaper (Steve Le Marquand, easy

A poet and a scientist meet at a radio telescope in an outback observatory. It’s been a popular tourist spot ever since the movie. But this visit is different: our poet is here to write about the scientist and her work for a poetry anthology. And the scientist is pissed off.  Her name is Martina (Gabrielle Scawthorn), she’s in the business of pulsars, and she doesn’t trust poets or their work. Poetry isn’t accurate. The poet, Daniel (Tim Walter), maintains that poetry can communicate the beauty Martina sees in the numbers that make up the edge of the universe.  Martina makes a discovery – a double pulsar – but another, more senior scientist based at the telescope (Christopher Stollery), runs her numbers first, effectively stealing that discovery from her.  Martina is upset – she says she wanted to crack open the ribcage of the universe and pull out two beating hearts (and she isn’t even the poet here) – but credit isn’t supposed to be important in science. She’s only a PhD candidate, anyway; her supervisor would be lead author on the published paper announcing the find. But Daniel, an artist to whom ideas and discoveries have ultimate currency, can’t let this go. Shouldn’t Martina demand recognition for her work? Isn’t this one of the many ways that the work of women scientists – who, due to systemic, centuries old gender discrimination, aren’t often in the position to be lead authors – is left out of history books? On a set dominated by roiling images of sky and stars by

It’s difficult to describe what Nick Coyle’s wickedly funny play The Feather in the Web is really about. It starts in one place but takes so many detours on its way to its end point that you mightn’t recognise the play itself – or its extraordinary protagonist Kimberly (Claire Lovering) – by the time it concludes. Kimberly is bold, uncompromising and terrifying. She’s as repulsive as she is admirable, steamrolling across the world with astonishing speed. She mightn’t entirely understand people – and certainly doesn’t think or act like the rest of us – but she understands how to manipulate everybody around her to get her way. When we first meet her, the young woman explodes into a lounge room where she terrorises two women sitting down for cake (presumably one is her mother). She shoves the cake into one woman’s mouth. She grabs the other’s breast and honks it. She then announces she’s going to the mall and never coming home. “Do you think she means it?” asks one woman. “My god, I hope so,” responds the other. She hitchhikes her way to the mall, again terrorising the family who pick her up, with stories and songs of bloody and violent car crashes, and while at the mall convinces a man working at a make-up counter to flop his dick out for her to play with. She then finds her way to an engagement party where she ends up posing as a waiter. Then something suddenly changes. She sees the groom-to-be Miles (Gareth Davies) and is overcome with love. Earth-shattering love. She’l