The Addams Family Young@Part Presented by: Second Star Youth Theatre Book: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice Music and Lyrics: Andrew Lippa Based on characters created by: Charles Addams Director and Musical Director: Lauren McNamara Choreographer: Isabella Maric Date attended: 3 October 2026 “That’s a good distance for romance.” Uncle Fester is talking about the moon. Naturally. The Addams Family Young@Part is packed with gloriously odd lines, and Second Star Youth Theatre’s young cast has a good feel for the comedy. A pause here, a look there, one perfectly dry response, and suddenly I’m cackling at children discussing torture, marriage, death, and the unbearable humiliation of having parents. That last one is what the story comes down to. Wednesday Addams has fallen in love with a normal boy and would very much like her family to behave themselves when his parents visit for dinner. Her parents proceed to do what parents do best: embarrass their child spectacularly. Led by director Lauren McNamara, this show's premise is particularly well suited to this age group - where the horror of your family being weird in front of someone you like probably rivals anything the Addamses keep in the basement! Sacha Fleming as Gomez Addams gets plenty of laughs with his accent, drawn-on moustache, and melodramatic delivery. He knows how to find the always find the joke without forcing it. “When You’re an Addams” quickly introduces both the family and the considerable talent spread through the company. Chloe Coleman as Morticia has suitably formidable presence, although perhaps her greatest threat is a high kick performed in those heels. Lethal! Her quieter tango moment with Gomez during “Live Before We Die” gives the pair a chance to step away for a softer scene together. Harper MacGregor gets an early chance to show off her lovely voice in Wednesday’s solo “Pulled”, a tricky number that she handles with impressive ease and no visible nerves. There’s plenty of strength in her sound, and she has just as much fun with Wednesday’s permanent exasperation outside the songs. Once the Beinekes arrive, Harper wears the growing frustration of realising that absolutely nobody is going to cooperate. Ronin Cooper-Jackson is completely adorable as Pugsley, whose main worry about Wednesday growing up is that she might stop torturing him and ruin all their sibling fun. Ronin gets a lovely vocal moment in “What If”, showing off a powerful, blossoming young voice with plenty of promise. Sacha’s own version of the song gives Gomez his turn to show off his rich voice too. In true Addams fashion, both characters are basically saying “I love you” in their own strange way. Harry Zappert is a particular highlight as Uncle Fester. His wig may leave him looking slightly more Voldemort than Addams on occasion (sorry, Harry), but his performance is so entertaining! There’s a gentleness to his singing, including a soft vibrato that suits Fester’s utterly sincere romantic ballad. With little glowing spherical props, the Moon Dancer (Victoria Rezende), and Harry singing earnestly about his celestial beloved, the number becomes one of the sweetest oddities in an already very odd musical. Leo Crowther is hilarious as Mal Beineke and gets some of my biggest laughs of the show. Isabel Notari-Markey as Alice Beineke acts peppy and sweet, while Nate McKenna as Lucas is simply trying to survive introducing his girlfriend to his parents. The fun is watching this supposedly normal family get dragged further and further into Addams territory. By “Crazier Than You”, both couples are embracing the hullabaloo, with Wednesday/Lucas, and Alice/Mal, all getting their turn to prove that “normal” was never going to last very long! Around them all, the Ancestors have plenty to do rather than becoming decorative ghosts parked at the back of the stage. Choreographer Isabella Maric gives them featured moments through almost every number, while “Full Disclosure” uses the whole company particularly well, with energetic choreography and group tableaux built around the long dinner table. Visually, the production keeps things gothic with red velvet curtains, projections, and that long, dark table. The costumes and wigs add to the characterisation: Morticia’s sleek silhouette, Gomez’s snappy suit, the pale Ancestors, and Fester’s very committed bald look. Also, one useful lesson for any young performer wearing a microphone: assume it is always on! We can hear you backstage darlings. That’s an easy technical habit to learn, though, and it hardly dents the fun of watching this company tackle such character-driven comedy. The jokes depend heavily on timing and delivery, and these young performers understand far more of that rhythm than I was expecting! Second Star Youth Theatre’s The Addams Family Young@Part is full of dry one-liners, odd family affection, strong young voices, enthusiastic dancers, and children discussing torture with alarming casualness. For a family this obsessed with death, they’re having a very good time.

ESCAPE by DIAVOLO | Architecture in Motion Presented by: Brisbane Festival in association with Queensland Performing Arts Centre Venue: QPAC Playhouse Date attended: 23 September 2026 Creative Director & Choreographer: Jacques Heim Associate Choreographer: Kate Dougherty Writer & Dramaturg: France Nguyen-Vincent Sound Designer & Media Specialist: Simon Larson Greenberg Lighting Designer: Jean-Yves Tessier Costume Designer: David Touster Structure Designers: Adam Davis and Daniel Wheeler Photography: George Simian, Cheryl Mann, and others “Stability is not the absence of movement.” People throw themselves from cages. Doors tilt beneath dancers. Metal arcs become an enormous human hamster wheel. Bodies fling themselves through the air on the assumption that another person will be standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right millisecond. My jaw was clenched for much of the hour. My brain, meanwhile, was going weeeee! Created by Los Angeles company DIAVOLO | Architecture in Motion®, ESCAPE began taking shape during the pandemic, when confinement had become a very literal part of daily life and the urge to get out was hardly an abstract concept. The performers move through a changing landscape of enormous engineered structures, finding themselves trapped, thrown off balance, climbing out, and relying on each other to bring them safely back down. Their backgrounds span dance, gymnastics, parkour, acrobatics, and tricking. You can see those disciplines constantly colliding onstage. They're like very athletic monkeys who’ve been given access to expensive construction equipment. The opening cage proves the comparison immediately. Performers scramble across the metal frame, hanging, leaping, and squeezing themselves through its gaps with a kind of Tarzan abandon. My less sophisticated thought was that I would hit my shins on this thing SO much if I tried that. A performer falls. The audience gasps. Someone catches her. This becomes a dominant rhythm throughout ESCAPE. The company repeatedly introduces the possibility of disaster, lets us imagine it for half a second, and catches the body before gravity finishes the job. There’s no room for vague timing here. The performers call across the stage and yell cues to one another, and I loved hearing the work happen. Their communication becomes part of the score of the production. Things get angrier during the “boxed in” material. Numbered vests replace the earlier black costumes, spoken text asks “Is there anybody out there?”, and the song Another Brick in the Wall hardly needs its metaphor explained. The choreography begins with rigid unison before bodies become more agitated. The spoken language circles confinement, pressure, and a refusal to be constrained. Even the scene changes belong to the company. They haul, rotate, assemble, and climb on this mega playground. Architecture isn’t decoration in ESCAPE. It keeps changing the rules. Curved metal pieces first behave like individual seesaws before combining into the enormous circular structure. With EDM thumping around the Playhouse theatre, performers climb through its spokes while others propel the whole contraption across the stage. Human hamster wheel feels like an undignified description for such a feat of engineering, but I mean it affectionately. This company understands physics in the coolest possible way! In another sequence, a performer holds themselves inside a metal tube with ridiculous upper-body strength. Nearby, a rounded structure riddled with glowing holes looks like a chunk of cratered moon. Bodies pop through its craters like curious aliens. Jean-Yves Tessier’s lighting deepens that otherworldly quality, moving between stark beams, silhouettes, shadows, starlight, and pools of colour. A contemporary duet around a single doorway turns an ordinary object into a balancing apparatus. The dancers climb its frame, counterweight one another, and hang from positions requiring iron grip! Their safety repeatedly sits in the other person’s hands. Set against “Can You Hold Me”, it’s a striking change of scale after all that machinery. The soundscape sees EDM, rock, spoken word, drums, screams, and atmospheric music hammer through the theatre with considerable force. There are gentler stretches too. Twinkling light and softer music give us a break from all that impact. One “Falling Far” sequence had me giggling with glee. That response probably tells you where I sit on the sophisticated contemporary-dance-critic spectrum. The biggest balancing act comes at the end. With choral voices and increasingly insistent drums underneath, an enormous boat-like structure rocks to and fro like a gigantic rocking horse. Performers scatter across it at different heights, adjusting continually as the floor beneath them rises and drops. I hope nobody got seasick! “Someone will always be there to catch you,” we’re told. After watching bodies genuinely catapulted into the air, the idea has muscle behind it. Their colleagues are quite literally the difference between completing a trick and falling. I left with aching sympathy for their shoulders, stunned by their grip strength, and a strong desire to climb on almost every piece of equipment despite possessing none of the qualifications required to survive the attempt. I’d definitely see ESCAPE again.

Shrek the Musical JR Presented by: Stage School Australia Book and Lyrics: David Lindsay-Abaire Music: Jeanine Tesori Date Attended: 1 October 2026 Director: Georgia New Musical Director: Lucy Ross Choreographers: Grayson McBurney and Caity Bond Assistant Musical Director: Lauren Bull Costume Supervisor: Morgan McAleer Sound Operator: Derek Wilson Lighting Operator: Sev Harman Photography: By B'rit Creative "Do you know the muffin man...?" I have now seen Shrek the Musical enough times that I should probably be paying council rates in Duloc. Thankfully, Stage School Australia’s Shrek the Musical JR gives me a new cast of young performers to cheer for, wrapped up in a fast, colourful school holiday production. This is Stage School Australia’s third full-scale Brisbane production (and the third I’ve seen). Directed by Georgia New, the show flies by! It packs a lot of story, music, costumes, and fairytale creatures into its shortened junior runtime. Although I do quietly mourn a few of my favourite songs that have been sacrificed along the way… Harrison Slater plays a sweeter, gentler Shrek than many I’ve seen. I also love the decision to use green face paint rather than covering him with a heavy mask, leaving Harrison’s expressions visible throughout. His enunciation is excellent, and I applaud his attempt at the Scottish accent. Shrek doesn’t actually get a huge amount of solo singing in the junior version, but Harrison opens strongly with “Big Bright Beautiful World”. Also, shoutout for spending the better part of a week painted green. Theatre is so glamorous! Neil Marco II Aballe is an adorable Donkey, tackling one of the wordiest roles in the show and the sheer quantity of memorised dialogue valiantly. His enunciation stays strong through all that chatter, too. “Travel Song” captures the pair’s growing friendship (and the experience of being trapped on a road trip with someone who will not stop talking), while “Make a Move” lets Neil lead the company with full gospel-choir enthusiasm. The duet between Shrek and Fiona, “I Think I Got You Beat”, remains a thing of beauty (romance via competitive childhood trauma and bodily noises). What a courtship ritual! Esperanza Falconi has fun with Fiona’s two settings: pristine storybook princess and ball of aggression. One moment she’s all poised smile and perfect princess manners, and the next she’s ditched the whole facade because Fiona’s impatience or competitive streak has won. Essie carries that same split into her singing. “Morning Person” sits in a pretty, bright head voice, while the unhinged bridge of “I Know It’s Today” (“the waiting, the waiting…!”) lets her unleash a crazed belt. Across both, she has such a strong, assured musical theatre voice, and I really hope this is a path she keeps pursuing. Alongside Indiana Osborne and Chelsea Carman as Young and Teen Fiona, the three voices blend beautifully once the harmonies start stacking together in “I Know It’s Today”. Lucie Roy gets another of the production’s biggest vocal moments as Dragon in “Forever” amid enormous castle gates, glittering knights, and huge dragon wings. Excellent. More is more. I’d love to see gloves added to complete Roy’s Dragon costume and disguise the mechanics of manoeuvring the wings a little more, but the overall effect is suitably grand. Duloc is colourful and mildly terrifying, populated by cloned children maintaining the strained smiles (mostly) through “Welcome to Duloc”. The synchronised choreography is wonderfully rigid and cheerful. A few of the kids occasionally dissociate instead of grinning, which I assume is what happens after several days of rehearsals, performances, and being ordered to smile like a tiny citizen of a fascist theme park. Oskar Stam’s entire Lord Farquaad situation deserves appreciation, from the costume and physical comedy to the small matter of spending virtually the entire week performing on his knees. My knees hurt simply thinking about it! The costumes have plenty to look at, from the detailing on Fiona’s dress and wig to the endless parade of fairytale creature looks. “Story of My Life”, led by Eliza Cullerton as Pinocchio, gives those characters their first chance to spill across the stage together, each with their own personality. Eliza later transforms into the Pied Piper and leads a troupe of tap-dancing rats! “Freak Flag” brings the whole collection of oddballs together. Shoutout to Mina Brailov as Mama Bear and Gracie Ollerenshaw as the Wicked Witch in their lovely featured vocal moments. With such a large company, performers are continually rotated through the musical numbers rather than disappearing into the background for half the show. Grayson McBurney and Caity Bond’s choreography helps with that too, keeping the ensemble busy rather than letting every number dissolve into the same lines and formations. The spoken comedy doesn’t always receive the laughs it’s reaching for, and the accents occasionally take an international holiday between Scotland, America, and Australia. The leads’ clear dialogue helps enormously, particularly given how quickly this version races along and how little time the cast has to learn it. One detail I particularly enjoy is that the experience doesn’t begin and end with the curtain. Characters mingle with audiences before and after the show, with plenty of photo opportunities for kids. School holiday productions like this give young performers a concentrated taste of putting on a full musical: learning choreography, managing costume changes, developing characters, singing as an ensemble, and facing a live audience after an intense rehearsal period. And after all that, everyone still has enough left in the tank for an encore of “I’m a Believer!" Stage School Australia’s Shrek the Musical JR is bright, busy, and fuelled by a young company throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the swamp.

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< Back BALLET: Bespoke - Queensland Ballet 2 Oct 2026 Season: October 2nd - 17th, 2026 Title: Bespoke Presented By: Queensland Ballet Genre: Contemporary Ballet / Dance Synopsis: Queensland Ballet’s contemporary series returns with three world premiere works exploring identity, belonging, climate change and rebellion. Choreographers Claire Voss, Victor Zarallo and Paul Knobloch collaborate with composers and designers to create new works combining movement, music and design. Written By: Original works by Claire Voss, Victor Zarallo and Paul Knobloch Performance Dates: 2–17 October 2026 Performance Times: 2 October – 7:30pm 3 October – 1:30pm & 7:30pm 7 October – 6:30pm 8–9 October – 7:30pm 10 October – 1:30pm & 7:30pm 11 October – 1:30pm 15–16 October – 7:30pm 17 October – 1:30pm & 7:30pm Performance Location and Address: Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre, 406 Montague Road, West End QLD 4101 Ticket Costs: Adult $89 | Concession $76 | 30 & Under $72 | Child $45 | Group 6+ $76 | School Group $35 Ticket Link: Book Tickets – Queensland Ballet Warnings: Likely to contain strobe lighting, theatrical haze and smoke effects. Recommended Age: All ages Duration: 2 hours, including one 20-minute interval and one 25-minute interval. Creative Team: Claire Voss, Victor Zarallo & Paul Knobloch – Choreographers | Connor D’Netto, Brady Watkins & Matej Perunicic – Composers | Michelle Potts & Bethany Cordwell – Costume Designers | Anthony Lee & Matthew Allan – Lighting Designers Production Website: Queensland Ballet – Bespoke Other information: The season comprises three new works: Where the Water Once Was , What Remains and Between the Line . The 17 October 1:30pm performance includes an Auslan-interpreted post-performance Q&A. Previous Next

< Back THEATRE: Picnic at Hanging Rock - Act1 Theatre 2 Oct 2026 Season: October 2nd - 18th, 2026 Title: Picnic at Hanging Rock Presented By: Act 1 Theatre Genre: Drama / Mystery / Australian Gothic Synopsis: On Valentine’s Day 1900, three schoolgirls and their teacher mysteriously disappear during a picnic at Hanging Rock. Years later, the unanswered questions surrounding their disappearance continue to haunt those left behind in this atmospheric adaptation of the iconic Australian novel. Written By: Tom Wright, adapted from the novel by Joan Lindsay Performance Dates: 2–18 October 2026 Performance Times: Fridays & Saturdays – 7:30pm | Sundays – 2:00pm Performance Location and Address: Act 1 Theatre, 238 Gympie Road, Strathpine QLD 4500 Ticket Costs: Adult $30 | Concession $25 | Member $20 Ticket Link: Book Tickets – Humanitix Warnings: Mature themes and references to death and disappearance Duration: Approximately 90 minutes, no interval Production Website: Act 1 Theatre Previous Next