July events in Sydney

Muriel’s Wedding the Musical will leave you smiling for days. Directed by our finest big-picture showman Simon Phillips, this is the film-to-stage adaptation critics, audiences and creatives dream of: an updated and evolved version of the original story that stands proudly as its own creation.

Director Iain Sinclair has had plenty of success with Arthur Miller's 1950s Brooklyn masterpiece. Now he's bringing the show to the Ensemble Theatre. The gripping play takes place in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, where a family of migrants is almost torn apart when two cousins from Italy come to stay and work illegally.

Mia Wasikowska, who played Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland movies, probably isn’t the first person you’d think of to cast as one of the young boys in Lord of the Flies, but Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams is giving the story a significant rethink. 

Meyne Wyatt made his professional debut as an actor at Griffin Theatre in 2011’s Silent Disco. Now he’s returning with a semi-autobiographical work about an Indigenous actor from Kalgoorlie who angers his community by starring in a controversial Australia Day ad. 

You probably haven’t heard of Oriel Gray or The Torrents, but in 1955 it was the joint winner of the Playwrights’ Advisory Board Competition with Australia’s most famous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. It’s been rarely performed since the 1950s, making it a hugely neglected classic – and look, that’s probably because it wasn’t written by a man.

This new work is about a feminist academic called Ish and a pick-up artist called Jake. They’re not exactly fans of one another, but when Jake falls in love with a Danish librarian, he needs to call in Ish for advice on how to woo her in a less problematic way.