The stage is set for 2024
Bio-ballets, Broadway musicals and new Australian operas are bound for our theatres next year, writes Matthew Westwood
From Leonard Bernstein to biographical ballet and Broadway musicals, the arts calendar for 2024 is literally bursting at the seams. Excuse the awkward alliteration – consider it the gaudy gift-wrapping around a parcel of the year’s best performing arts. What follows is a mere selection of concerts, plays, ballets and operas coming to theatres around the country. Look to your local arts companies for more shows to excite your appetite for great music, drama and dance.
Bio-ballets appear to be a thing next year, where choreographers have been inspired by the life and work of real people from history – not the swans and sugar-plum fairies that are the mainstays of the repertoire.
Coco Chanel: The Life of a Fashion Icon is coming to Queensland Ballet from Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. The production is a venture between Atlanta Ballet and Hong Kong Ballet, where it had its world premiere earlier this year. It promises to transport audiences to 1920s Paris where Gabrielle Chanel opened her fashion business, and features costumes by Jerome Kaplan that capture the essence of Chanel’s timeless elegance.
From The Australian Ballet comes the world premiere of Oscar, a full-evening work by Christopher Wheeldon based on the glittering triumphs and desperately sad fall of Oscar Wilde. This portrait of the playwright in dance will reunite Wheeldon with composer Joby Talbot, who together produced a much-loved production in The Australian Ballet’s repertoire, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, returning to the stage in 2024.
Broadway musicals about to enjoy their local premieres have a large helping of Australian creative talent. Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of beloved comedy Groundhog Day opened at the Old Vic in London in 2016, then transferred to Broadway. It opens at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in February. Eddie Perfect’s musical treatment of Beetlejuice, which opened on Broadway in 2019, is coming to Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in 2025.
And two brand-new Australian shows are making their debuts: Melbourne Theatre Company is staging a musical version of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career in November, and Queensland Theatre is presenting a new musical, Round the Twist, based on the beloved children’s stories by Paul Jennings.
In the best of all possible worlds, a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s glittering operetta Candide would be staged in every city, every year. Instead, Australian audiences can look forward to two separate productions of Candide, in Melbourne and Adelaide. Dean Bryant directs the Melbourne performances for Victorian Opera, featuring Eddie Perfect as Voltaire/Pangloss, and Mitchell Butel directs and stars in the Adelaide season, from State Theatre Company South Australia and State Opera South Australia. Keeping with the Bernstein theme – and following Bradley Cooper’s cinematic portrait of the composer-conductor – is the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s performance of his Symphony No.3, Kaddish. Set to the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish symphony will be performed alongside a new work by Elena Kats-Chernin, The Night of Broken Glass, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps.
Highlights of the classical music calendar include the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s film-with-concert, River, on a national tour from February, and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra will present a musical portrait of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, with spoken text by Alana Valentine.
New Australian operas having their world premieres at Opera Australia are Jonathan Mills’s Eucalyptus, based on the novel by Murray Bail, and Gilgamesh by Jack Symonds and directed by Sydney Theatre Company’s Kip Williams. Hamlet, the internationally celebrated opera by Brett Dean and Joseph Twist’s oratorio Watershed: The Death of Doctor Duncan will both have their Sydney premieres as part of OA’s 2024 season.
Ever-popular composer Giacomo Puccini, in the centenary year of his death, is represented with four productions at OA: a regional tour of La Boheme; a new Tosca from Britain’s Opera North; a Puccini Gala concert; and a new production of Il Trittico, a trilogy of one-act operas where each is staged by a different director.
Grand theatre has returned to the commercial stage where musicals formerly held sway. This year’s critically acclaimed production of Death of a Salesman, featuring Anthony LaPaglia in the title role, and directed by Neil Armfield, will transfer to Sydney’s Theatre Royal in May. The same theatre is the venue for one of the most acclaimed new plays of recent years, The Lehman Trilogy, charting the rise and eventual collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank. The play by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power, is directed by Sam Mendes and features actors Aaron Krohn, Howard W. Overshown and Adrian Schiller as, respectively, brothers Mayer, Emanuel and Henry Lehman.
