July events in Sydney

Las Vegas Entertainment dishes out a rip-roarin' mix of comedy and live music every weekend in the centre of the CBD. Every Friday night you'll find the $10 Comedy Club, which showcases rising stars of the local scene alongside long-term residents. Saturday night is all about Bonkerz, which sees a full evening of experienced comics hitting the stage from 8pm.  On the last Saturday of every month you can catch Magic Motown and the Whitney Houston Tribute Show featuring the Soulsville band. You can also make a night of it and add on dinner packages.  Time Out readers can also get a special discount this month – simply mention Time Out Sydney at the door and you'll enjoy two-for-one seats at either the $10 Dollar Comedy Club or Bonkerz. 

The young comedian won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s 2017 Director's Choice Award with this show – her second ever full-length – in which she gets inside the mind of a 46-year-old man called Gavin who is trapped in his basement. It's a little like Tim and Eric, but live and with no budget props. Glorious, surreal, silly fun. Look What You Made Me Do is showing as part of Bondi Feast.

The mirthful Mug and Kettle team (also behind Treehouse Comedy) have taken over one Sunday per month at Redfern's Eveleigh Hotel, with a night of stand-up featuring up and comers alongside proven giggle merchants.

Comedians Jamie Kirk and Ben Kochan host this open mic room, previously called POS Comedy; but it's still a space for comics to try new material and develop their craft in an intimate room (40 max audience). Comics have up to 4 minutes per set, and can sign up on the Cactus Juice facebook page from noon on Mondays. The show starts at 8pm, and includes two feature acts and a support doing longer sets.

This weekly Friday-night stand-up smackdown features a headliner and emcee with six shorter support slots from local talent. Even better: Staves brews its own ales, and there's plenty of choice on tap.

Patricia Cornelius’s new play is an outright provocation as the title suggests. It dares to put three female characters on the stage who are rarely if ever given a theatrical voice. Rough, rude and irrevocably damaged, they are the kind of people most theatre-goers would cross the street to avoid – but under the rich talents of the playwright and the extraordinary direction of Susie Dee, they make a compelling and heartbreaking subject.  Billy (Nicci Wilks) opens the play with an expletive-fuelled rant that is hilarious and also politically charged. She barrages the audience with more fucks than prepositions – something even her friends Bobby (Sarah Ward) and Sam (Peta Brady) find over the top. Cornelius’s particular talent for turning flat realistic speech into a kind of heightened street verse is on immediate display. And as the women’s stories become clearer, as the abuse and marginalisation eat away at any hope we may have for them, the play’s real power comes to the fore. Despite the characters’ energy and vigour, the sense of despair and inevitable narrowing of options begins to choke them. They turn on each other, they mock each other’s attempts to imagine a better life, and eventually they egg each other into senseless and self-defeating violence.  Cornelius’s play is in many ways a companion to her award-winning work Savages. That play was about four men aboard a cruise ship who channel their dissatisfaction and self-doubt into an act of random violence against an

Five editions in, Bondi Feast is looking a lot like Sydney’s “unofficial Fringe”: a curated festival of new independent work, unusual work, boundary-breaking work and experiments – all for the kind of price point where you the viewer can also afford to take risks. Having started as a project of Tamarama Rock Surfers (the now-defunct independent theatre company) in 2012, and after taking a year off in 2016, Bondi Feast is returning this year under the auspices of Waverley Council – and co-curated by founder, theatre-maker and Story Club regular Phil Spencer, with theatre maker Rachel Chant. Looking back across six years, Spencer sees an evolution from a theatre-focused festival into a more diverse program that includes cabaret and comedy. This year, around 30 shows were selected from more than 70 submissions – more than Spencer expected, and the highest calibre for Bondi Feast so far: “Obviously there’s a gap in the Sydney scene,” he says. In addition, Chant and Spencer invited a number of artists and shows they’d seen and loved (from the Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne Fringes, and elsewhere), including Melbourne comedian Tessa Waters, who will do a retrospective of her three shows; Demi Lardner, who will reprise her award-winning Melbourne Comedy Festival show Look What You’ve Made Me Do; Sami Shah reprising his show The Islamic Republic of Australia; and the hit Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe double bill Wank Bank and Pussy Play – a surprising mix of sex positivity, inter

The boutique opera company Opera Bites has several strong, well trained voices and is taking the classics in period costume into pubs, historic houses, restaurants and even sheds. It’s not always a full opera, or even an abridged one: we caught their Celebrated Highlights at Annandale’s ornately decorated Empire Hotel, enjoying two sets of ten arias close up and personal, plus fine finger food delivered continuously to the comfortable chairs and benches. It’s a really enjoyable experience, even if you’re not already a big lover of Verdi or Rossini. And even experienced opera goers will be impressed by the power of a good singer only a metre or two away. Singer Murray Dahm doubles as an MC/narrator, giving the context of each aria in the story of its opera, explaining why the character is feeling the particular emotion of the song. He also makes some gentle fun of the conventions and cliches of opera: “The tenor is always in love with the soprano,” he sighs, himself a bass. Everyone goes home humming their favourite number, and feeling they have been converted into experts.