Things to do in Sydney this week

This weekly curated night at Redfern's Tudor Hotel features a local emcee and short sets by emerging comics, but also has a bunch of spots for open mic – sign up from Tue (for the Thu show) and Sat (for the Sun show) if you want to have a go.

Alice Topp could be one of the Australian Ballet’s most exciting new choreographers. Since creating her first work for 2014’s Bodytorque season, the Bendigo-born coryphée has gone from strength to strength, presenting her first mainstage work, Little Atlas, to wide acclaim in 2016 and choreographing music videos for the likes of Megan Washington and Ben Folds. Her latest work, Aurum, made its world premiere in Melbourne last year as part of the Australian Ballet’s new triple bill, Verve, which celebrates the wealth and diversity of choreographic talent within the company and features creations from three generations of Australian Ballet choreographers. It's coming to Sydney for 2019. Set to the music of Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, Aurum is inspired by the Japanese tradition of repairing items with gold to show their story, and features Topp’s trademark emotional intensity and delicate but intricate partnering. It’s a deliberate contrast to the rest of the program, which includes landmark works by the company’s resident choreographers, Tim Harbour and Stephen Baynes. Opening the program will be Baynes’s work, Constant Variants. Originally created as part of the company’s 2007 New Romantics season, it’s a showcase for Baynes’ neo-classical style, set to Tchaikovsky’s graceful 'Variations on a Rococo Theme'. At the other end of the spectrum, the furiously modern Filigree and Shadow established Tim Harbour as one of Australia’s leading choreographers when

This rocking play with music was a big hit when it premiered at Belvoir at the end of 2017 (read our four-star review of that initial season below), so it was a no-brainer to bring it back to be seen by an even bigger audience in 2019. Belvoir will again be transformed into a sticky pub and Ursula Yovich and Elaine Crombie will reprise their roles. The Australian theatrical canon sometimes feels like we've run the national identity through Instagram; we put the filtered, carefully curated version of ourselves on display, keeping our mess neatly cropped out of frame. But Barbara and the Camp Dogs, Ursula Yovich and Alana Valentine’s devastating new musical, rips away the strategically placed curtain of performative Australian identity to reckon with the country's true nature: an open wound, raw and angry-red. Still weeping. Barbara (Yovich) is ferocious. A pub singer with a quick wit, healthy sexual appetite and unceasing reserves of anger, she performs with her sister René (Kiki and Kitty's Elaine Crombie) and their band the Camp Dogs. Gigs can be hard to come by in the Sydney of today, the one where the few live music venues left are curfewed by lockout laws. They don’t make much money, which is suddenly an unignorable problem: their mother Jill is dying, and they need to pull together funds for a trip to Katherine to say goodbye. Barbara doesn’t want to go. She loves Jill, the woman who raised Barbara when her own mother couldn’t, but Katherine has come to represent her

We’re all told nothing can prepare us for the death of a parent, but if anybody might feel prepared it should be Jedda (Stephanie Somerville). The young woman, who’s just finished her first year of uni, has long dealt with her mother Lily’s (Megan Wilding) ongoing illness, and has had to sacrifice a lot to care for her. But when Jedda finally gets that phone call from across the country to tell her that Lily has died, she finds herself strangely numb. What is she supposed to feel? What should she do? And if Lily is really gone, why does it feel like she’s about to take Jedda’s hands off her face and say “peek-a-boo”? Of course, that numb feeling doesn’t last long, and Megan Wilding’s debut play – inspired by the loss of her own mother – takes us on a journey with Jedda as she encounters unexpected stages of grief and attempts to deal with the people around her. That might sound like heavy going, but there’s a surprising lightness of touch to Wilding’s dialogue and an enormous amount of warmth and humour (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s seen Wilding’s previous performances as an actor). Wilding has written a series of two-hander scenes which drop in on Jedda at different points following Lily’s death: there’s a chat with her well-meaning but bumbling friend Mendy (Moreblessing Maturure) in the hours immediately after Lily’s death; that night of chain-smoking, cheap wine and cheap laughs with Chuck (Luke Fewster) to try to keep anything too emotional away

In the world of musical theatre, The Last Five Years is a cult hit. Premiering in 2001, it was written and composed by Jason Robert Brown, who is notorious both for his difficult piano arrangements and for writing a song for Ariana Grande’s album Dangerous Woman. The show was adapted for film in 2014, starring screen darling Anna Kendrick and stage darling Jeremy Jordan (whose take on the Celine Dion classic ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’ is required viewing). ‘JRB’, as he’s affectionately known by musical theatre students and fans, drew heavily from his real-life relationship when writing this chamber musical for two about a couple who didn’t get their happy ending, and it shows: the JRB character, Jamie, calls all the shots, and Cathy – the stand-in for his wife – spends the whole show floundering, denied of agency. Do you smell that? Why yes, it’s inbuilt misogyny. At least there’s this: through a 2019 lens, The Last Five Years feels like a self-own. Jamie is charming and playful, sure, but he’s also an unmitigated sexist asshole to Cathy and the women around him, and now that the work is nearly 20 years old and socially dated, it’s practically a guide book for women who date straight men: the show is dotted liberally with unintentional, but very big, red flags. The show is so popular because it’s built on a gimmick. Cathy (Elise McCann, in this production) and Jamie (Christian Charisiou) are moving different ways through time: Cathy tells her side of the story from

Uncover your eyes for Qui Nguyen’s American high school slasher comedy Alice in Slasherland, a wacky crossover where the dark witticisms of Heathers meet the tacky underworld monstrosities of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With badass teens fighting demons wielding bladed tools and donning bunny heads, there’s much to lap up in this campy and gorily fun production that feels fresh and fiery as hell. But before the pits of hell are quite literally unleashed, there’s just a normal teenage boy – Lewis (Bardiya McKinnon) – making bad internet vlogs, declaring his love for his cheerleader best friend, Margaret (Mia Morrissey). Of course, anyone who’s seen any type of teen rom-com starring an awkward adolescent knows this confession doesn’t play out so smoothly – especially when he’s pigeon-holed as the highschool geek. What perhaps isn’t as predictable is for a quasi-apocalypse to manifest itself in the form of a groaning, laconic Alice (Stella Ye) – a slain schoolgirl who emerges from the dead. This end-of-the-world situation soon spirals into an action-adventure quest that calls on Lewis, Margaret, Alice and a Teddy Bear (puppeteered and acted by Justin Amankwah) to find a way to close the rift between Los Angeles and the Hades underworld, all the while trying to not be eaten up by demons dressed up in some pretty grotesque morphsuits. So, you know, just your typical school week. Nguyen, whose play premiered in New York in 2010 and now makes its Australian premiere, writes with liv

This is Sydney Theatre Company's big classic for the year, and it’s being directed by the company's artistic director, Kip Williams, who won a Helpmann Award the last time he directed a Tennessee Williams play (Suddenly, Last Summer). If you don’t know anything about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it’s an explosive drama about a Southern family at loggerheads with each other. And it’s difficult to imagine a much more impressive cast: The Book of Mormon’s Zahra Newman will play Maggie the Cat opposite Hugo Weaving as Big Daddy and Pamela Rabe as Big Mama. Williams says: “This, for me, really is a play about the family being a political institution. A place of power navigation, and where that institution can regulate people and censor people, and make people feel controlled, stuck and disconnected from their own autonomy. And it’s a play about lies, and it’s a play about truth, and I think in the times in which we’re living where the notion of truth, both in a societal sense and in an interpersonal sense, seems to be debated on an everyday basis, this play feels like it really sings with a contemporary resonance.”

Alice Topp could be one of the Australian Ballet’s most exciting new choreographers. Since creating her first work for 2014’s Bodytorque season, the Bendigo-born coryphée has gone from strength to strength, presenting her first mainstage work, Little Atlas, to wide acclaim in 2016 and choreographing music videos for the likes of Megan Washington and Ben Folds. Her latest work, Aurum, made its world premiere in Melbourne last year as part of the Australian Ballet’s new triple bill, Verve, which celebrates the wealth and diversity of choreographic talent within the company and features creations from three generations of Australian Ballet choreographers. It's coming to Sydney for 2019. Set to the music of Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, Aurum is inspired by the Japanese tradition of repairing items with gold to show their story, and features Topp’s trademark emotional intensity and delicate but intricate partnering. It’s a deliberate contrast to the rest of the program, which includes landmark works by the company’s resident choreographers, Tim Harbour and Stephen Baynes. Opening the program will be Baynes’s work, Constant Variants. Originally created as part of the company’s 2007 New Romantics season, it’s a showcase for Baynes’ neo-classical style, set to Tchaikovsky’s graceful 'Variations on a Rococo Theme'. At the other end of the spectrum, the furiously modern Filigree and Shadow established Tim Harbour as one of Australia’s leading choreographers when

This rocking play with music was a big hit when it premiered at Belvoir at the end of 2017 (read our four-star review of that initial season below), so it was a no-brainer to bring it back to be seen by an even bigger audience in 2019. Belvoir will again be transformed into a sticky pub and Ursula Yovich and Elaine Crombie will reprise their roles. The Australian theatrical canon sometimes feels like we've run the national identity through Instagram; we put the filtered, carefully curated version of ourselves on display, keeping our mess neatly cropped out of frame. But Barbara and the Camp Dogs, Ursula Yovich and Alana Valentine’s devastating new musical, rips away the strategically placed curtain of performative Australian identity to reckon with the country's true nature: an open wound, raw and angry-red. Still weeping. Barbara (Yovich) is ferocious. A pub singer with a quick wit, healthy sexual appetite and unceasing reserves of anger, she performs with her sister René (Kiki and Kitty's Elaine Crombie) and their band the Camp Dogs. Gigs can be hard to come by in the Sydney of today, the one where the few live music venues left are curfewed by lockout laws. They don’t make much money, which is suddenly an unignorable problem: their mother Jill is dying, and they need to pull together funds for a trip to Katherine to say goodbye. Barbara doesn’t want to go. She loves Jill, the woman who raised Barbara when her own mother couldn’t, but Katherine has come to represent her

We’re all told nothing can prepare us for the death of a parent, but if anybody might feel prepared it should be Jedda (Stephanie Somerville). The young woman, who’s just finished her first year of uni, has long dealt with her mother Lily’s (Megan Wilding) ongoing illness, and has had to sacrifice a lot to care for her. But when Jedda finally gets that phone call from across the country to tell her that Lily has died, she finds herself strangely numb. What is she supposed to feel? What should she do? And if Lily is really gone, why does it feel like she’s about to take Jedda’s hands off her face and say “peek-a-boo”? Of course, that numb feeling doesn’t last long, and Megan Wilding’s debut play – inspired by the loss of her own mother – takes us on a journey with Jedda as she encounters unexpected stages of grief and attempts to deal with the people around her. That might sound like heavy going, but there’s a surprising lightness of touch to Wilding’s dialogue and an enormous amount of warmth and humour (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s seen Wilding’s previous performances as an actor). Wilding has written a series of two-hander scenes which drop in on Jedda at different points following Lily’s death: there’s a chat with her well-meaning but bumbling friend Mendy (Moreblessing Maturure) in the hours immediately after Lily’s death; that night of chain-smoking, cheap wine and cheap laughs with Chuck (Luke Fewster) to try to keep anything too emotional away