This is not a review...it's 2024 in Three Acts

A Theory of the Gen Z Musical, listicles, reductive statements and a question about the politics on our stages. Here's three acts to summarise 2024 in Melbourne theatre.

Listicles are dead and so are reductive general statements. So here’s a quick summary of the state of theatre in Melbourne in 2024 with two listicles, some reductive statements and three acts that pull out some of the questions asked by our theatres in 2024: what does a musical for Gen Z look like? How can representations of community on stage be political? Why is Rent still being staged?

Act One: The Australian Musical

We open on a cynical audience: arms crossed, eyes glazed over with apathy (behind their eyes, a glimmer of hope). They’re watching the lights go up on a new Australian Musical. We’re in a country town, or a lead that starts their ‘I Want’ song with an exaggerated Aussie drawl meant to imply a regional setting (the writers live in Richmond).

The show for 2024 is an okay Australian Musical. There is incredible momentum behind this temperamental form right now. Where 2023 started the ball rolling with middling attempts like Bloom and Bananaland (and egregious failures we’ve collectively decided to forget like Midnights), 2024 drove things home with imperfect but ambitious hits. We had the Sydney Festival import, Big Name No Blankets; the Hayes Theatre/Griffin Theatre hyper pop collaboration Flat Earthers: The Musical, Jude Perl using a 15-piece band to underscore roommate drama in Share House: The Musical, an attempt at an immersive musical utopia with Darebin Art’s Peacemongers, the AFL-focused One Day In September or the critical success of My Brilliant Career to cap off the year. Then there was the specter of Yves Blake’s Fangirls making its West End premier, the flailing film adaptation of ATYP’s The Deb and Australian Ballet’s first original production: Oscar (not a musical but give me this - any Oscar Wilde show inevitably teeters close).

You notice a few things seeing these shows back-to-back. Firstly, there is the emergence of the ‘Gen Z’ musical, or at least a growing effort to create a musical that appeals to a Gen Z audience. As with all ‘trends’ in theatre, this began in our festivals - notably Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which, in 2024, cemented itself as our most viable launching pad for new theatre makers. Flat Earthers from the ever-batshit hilarious MICF-staple, Lou Wall is just one example of the ComFest-to-New-Musical pipeline. It offered a wry deep dive into conspiracy theories and sapphic love, lust and hate; a deeply referential, self-ironising and often absurd story backed by a hyperpop-esq beat. It’s nowhere near a perfect musical, with word of mouth surrounding the show often more negative than its critical reception (a slew of supportive three star and glowing four star reviews) might imply. But it represents an intentional effort on the part of its producers - Hayes Theatre and Griffin Theatre - to ask what theatre that caters to a Gen Z audience (or responds to trends within that audience) might look like.

We have seen new productions like Flat Earthers developed explicitly with this audience in mind, and new stagings of old shows that seem - in directorial vision, set design and performances - driven by a desire to appeal to this audience. Ride the Cyclone (another stellar production in a gangbuster year for Hayes Theatre) is a case-in-point. Despite being over sixteen years old, it was given new life this year with a modern restaging formed around this desire: to capitalise on ‘the show’s popularity with Gen Z’.

This is a trend in its infancy, granted, but it already has some specific formal and stylistic calling cards that I want to spend some time unpacking (listicles incoming, promise). There’s the overuse of A.V., for one - projection an easy way to explicitly represent online spaces and implicitly evoke the overstimulating grandeur and scale characteristic of the experience of those spaces. Dialogue will be (almost exhaustingly) referential, fragmented by meme-style shorthands and disconnected bits or energised by the sheer rate by which references are peeled off one after the other.

With these specific conventions come equally specific problems. The lexicon and iconography of online spaces has the shelf life of a raw steak on a hot day. What was relevant when one started writing a musical adopts the stench of the ageing millennial once it makes its way through the languorous process we subject all our musicals to. It doesn’t help that these initial efforts are, because of how long a musical takes and how slowly our producing infrastructure works, coming from young millennials and those at the edge of Gen Z. But the issue, as I see it, is in the handling of emotional beats and earnestness.

Yves Blake’s Fangirls has maintained a vibrant relationship to young audiences throughout its long life. Its London season this year seemed to have this relationship dulled by the whims of a producing team with a specific idea of how to make it better suited in style and form to a Gen Z audience. Reviews - from mates and critics, I didn’t get to see it - found issue with over-choreographed dance sequences, overly-ironic line deliveries and soulless AV design that came at the expense of what distinguished the show in the first place: its earnest characters and unpatronizing showcase of fan girldom. An allergy to earnestness also compromised Flat Earthers, with many of its emotional beats sacrificed to unfocused bits, subplots and side characters fired off helter skelter alongside an underdeveloped meta-self awareness that often detached us from the real emotional stakes of its absurd plot. Musicals are famously earnest artforms. But thinking that they might struggle to accommodate Gen Z’s ironic schtick for this reason is a misread of the form. Looking around you see two options for the artist trying to respond to Gen Z irony. There’s the ‘Olivia Rodrigo’ approach: art that presents its earnestness and cringe as a reaction against the cool aloofness of online irony. Successful national tours of &Juliet, Dear Evan Hansen (sigh) and Six are examples of this approach - unapologetically sentimental and self-aware enough to make a spectacle out of cringe.

Then there are the musicals that lean in, those that use irony well enough that it amplifies earnestness and strengthens emotional payoff. What I’m naming here is essentially just ‘meta-irony’; the name for those moments when you are so ironic that you actually just say something sincere (kissing the homies goodnight; ill kill u xx). The problem I found with Dear Evan Hansen this year (well, one of them) is its near-meta ironic style. It’s a deeply ironic show, stuffed with gallows humour and black comedy. Sincerely Me is the jauntiest tune to have ever been used to underscore two guys pretending to be a kid who killed himself; Only Us, the most romantic ballad for someone creating false memories of said dead kid to court his grief-stricken sister. Its biggest fault is that it eventually cops out of its meta-ironic approach for a hackneyed ending that side lines all the self-awareness it seemed to have for just pure, unearned sincerity. Sincerity isn’t the problem. What the show is saying sincerely is.

Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell’s Ride the Cyclone found popularity with Gen Z - propelled, in part by a helpful dash of Tik Tok virality - because it does meta-irony so well, offering an alternative (one that I hope upcoming musicals trying to cater to this audience - Bearded at Theatre Works, Converted at ATYP etc. - will follow). It’s a show about six teenagers who died tragically in a roller coaster accident. You’d think the emotional payoff would be obvious, and that’s the point: it is. It might feel like the show’s gallows humour and exaggerated style (expertly evoked by spectacular AV and comedic performances from this year’s Hayes revival) put us at a distance from feeling this tragedy, at least initially. But it recalls the irony and disaffected wit that you find in the handling of any tragedy online. It’s not that being ironic stops you from feeling. It is simply just another way to feel. The worst mode of irony is one that appears pompous or pious. Here the object of sarcasm is not feeling itself, by which I mean that we are not laughing at the feeling in a way that devalues it. Bit after bit, macabre joke after macabre joke, hides an earnest evocation of these characters - their backstories, beliefs, and the way they are feeling their way through their deaths. The heart-wrenching, tear-jerking emotional payoff at the show’s end does not land so successfully because we’re finally allowed to feel without irony. Rather, it comes because Richmond and Maxwell have never used their irony at the expense of being earnest. Their earnest anthem at the show’s end avoids being hackneyed or overly sentimental because it lets us sit with an emotion that has always been essential to the show’s irony, and that they have never treated less than earnestly. Their irony does not patronise us for feeling; it’s just a fun way to toy with how much we feel at any given point.

Bottom line, then: irony has a dramaturgical logic to it that this 2024 trend needs to heed. If you try and cop out of that logic at the end, as Dear Evan Hansen and Flat Earthers did in 2024, your conclusion will only ever feel unearned. Or, as with Jude Perl’s Share House: The Musical, if you avoid it altogether, you’ll skew too far into the territory of Millennial cringe that your audience won’t feel anything besides your desire to make us feel. But then again, Gen Z is also ageing. What does a musical for Gen Alpha look, sound and feel like?

Top 5 Shows of 2024:

5. My Brilliant Career

   Imperfect, ambitious; sporadic musical style redeemed by actor-musos at the top the game (least among them, an outstanding Kala Gare who we pray gets to ride this star-making vehicle to West End and beyond).

The second thing you notice in the Australian Musical of 2024 is the stronghold of the actor-muso ensemble cast. If the show for 2024 isn’t a musical, it’s at least paired with music onstage. There was My Brilliant Career and The Hall at fortyfivedownstairs at the end of the year. We had Melbourne Fringe winners Running into the Sun bring choreography and a band to underscore a deep dive into climate anxieties. There was The Roof is Caving In at La Mama Theatre, and four-piece band it used to dramatise cunty landlords. These are shows that asked interesting questions about the purpose and effect of bringing musicians on stage in a post-Once world (and answering the ever-present threat of budgetary restraints in the process). That My Brilliant Career brought in Victoria Falconer (music director of 2022’s Once from Darlinghurst Theatre Company) feels particularly important. It shows the production’s interest in recreating the intimacy of a pub-style gig, yes, but also the kind of audience experience you find in our independent venues and black box theatres. Key to the show’s success (and popularity, I’d say) is this formalised connection to our independent venues. We’ve seen this connection play out before, and there’s obviously rarely a musical that didn’t begin in with a small run at an independent venue (My Brilliant Career at La Mama, for instance), but for it to be more explicitly reflected at the level of musical form is exciting.

In 2025 we have Bearded at St Kilda’s Theatre Works and Converted at ATYP promising to continue the marathon run of new queer musicals. Then we have Phar Lap at the Hayes, an ‘absurdist, electro-swing musical comedy about a thoroughbred racehorse’; and (the artist formally known as) asking questions about musical form. There are whispers of a new Yves Blake musical, the promise of a bush doof show from Mel & Sam. There is, in other words, a palpable electricity surrounding the Australian Musical at the moment, led largely by sapphic, gender-diverse and female writers. Gone are the days when the Australian Musical put too much stock in plots that are ‘Australian’ and not enough in form and style. 2024 signaled a shift. Makers are asking what an Australian Musical might sound and look like as much as what it might say, and producers are backing them (though while also forcing them into impossibly truncated development periods).

Top 5 Shows of 2024:

1. My Brilliant Career

2. POV

   In a theatre-going world increasingly suspicious of metatheatre, POV offered something innovative and heart-wrenching. Cementing Belvoir’s 25A as the kiln for our best up and comers, it blended cine-theatre and deeply personal story telling to query the ways we ‘protect’ kids from hard conversations around mental health.

3. Ball Kids (or, scenes from a friendship), La Mama Theatre

   A stand out of this year’s Fringe; a fresh duologue, quietly ambitious in its scope and approach. Pulling back from melodrama just enough to offer an affecting portrait of life-long friendship. Ace.

Act Two: Politic

As an inherently communal form (in its creation as much as its reception), we know theatre can be easily called upon to represent a utopic vision of social cohesion or platform modes of creating that, at their most harmonious, have an air of socialist community about them. Our stages leant hard on this association this year. A lot of our best theatre were ensemble-led productions whose charm came from formal choices and producing approaches driven by an interest in ideas of community and how we engage with them. We might call this a revival of humanism in our theatres, a trend now less didactic, and more formally interesting than when it first appeared following the pandemic. That post-COVID emphasis on positivist plots and pure escapist spectacle feels more focused and less morally absolute. The most common story on our stages was one undergirded by an earnest belief in our capacity as individuals and the value of community as well as an interest in testing the limits and obstacles of this capacity. The influx of productions in 2023 that were interested in trying to understand ourselves amidst a climate crisis are gone, but the question those productions asked about our responsibility as individuals to our communities remains.

But our responsibility to do what, exactly? I’m not sure, and some might say that it’s unfair to expect an answer from our theatres, which develop too slowly to offer an immediate intervention into our politics or response to changes in our world. What I saw in 2024 was this brand of humanism become a feeling, and evoking that feeling become inseparable from contemporary politics and how we understand ourselves in relation to it.

Top 5 Shows of 2024:

1. My Brilliant Career

2. POV

3. Ball Kids

4. Topdog/Underdog

5. Interior

(honourable mentions: August Osage County (Belvoir St Theatre), Blood in the Water (La Mama Theatre), This is the dust we’re in (Hot Lunch, Meat Market Stables; Counting and Cracking (not included in this list simply because I wanted to prioritise 2024 premiers)).

In 2024 our most political playwrights struggled to ensure that their commentary, and the form they use to make it, resonated with contemporary audiences. Patricia Cornelius’s Bad Boy had a limp reception at best (*reductive, but I’d say one led by younger audiences). Van Badham’s Werewolf was divisive in the most boring way; it’s formal brashness a thin disguise for Badham’s centrist politics. Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know to Be True read more like a playwright trying to insert themselves into a contemporary conversation about trans experience than it did a nuanced engagement with that experience. Together they toll the death knell for the brand of political theatre associated with companies like the Melbourne’s Workers Theatre of the 1980s. I don’t mean to belittle the incredible contributions Cornelius, Badham and Bovell have made, and continue to make, to our theatrical landscape. That Bad Boy was less effective at landing its commentary might simply be because Cornelius is our most in-demand playwright working today, stretched thin by back-to-back seasons across most of our national stages. But there’s something to make of the limp reception across the board - that the opaque self-consciousness and darkly witty hyperrealism these playwrights (and the formal movement they were associated with) is just not the vibe anymore. Covert sentimentality, and a realism amplified by romantic earnestness is in the air.

I think of the most critically lauded, and successful show in recent years, Counting and Cracking. It premiered in 2019 (and has been in development since 2015) but it came to 2024’s Rising Festival at a time particularly receptive to its epic form and the communal feeling at its emotional centre. That it exists at all in our risk-adverse industry is a miracle in and of itself. A 3 hour and 30 minute-epic with nineteen performers (and 50-plus characters) following a Sri Lankan-Australian family over four generations, from 1956 to 2004? It recalls the scale of playwright Jez Butterworth’s work (The Ferryman, Jerusalem), one usually reserved for late-career playwrights backed by West-End levels of funding, not a debut playwright supported by our emaciated Grants funding bodies. It came to Melbourne at the end of two years touring and nearly ten years of development. The emphasis on family at the heart of this story found a deep metatheatrical resonance in the communal nature of staging theatre in this country. Early productions featured a ‘communal pre-show meal of Sri Lankan food’. The playwright’s mother, Anandavalli, contributed to its choreography and its story. It is rooted in Sri-Lankan Australian experience and never less than utterly specific; offering a ‘more inclusive view of Australian identity’ and history for this reason, Time Out Melbourne wrote. ‘Inclusivity’ is an oft-weaponised political talking point used to evoke a utopic ideal of Aussie identity without any clear understanding of what that ideal looks like or how it might be actioned. By leaning so intentionally on the implicitly communal nature of theatre - in its form and, more metatheatrically, in the systems by which it is produced - Counting and Cracking is a show that renews the term’s meaning by evoking, and immersing us, in it as a feeling. As Tim Bryne wrote for The Guardian: ‘the play’s central thesis: war is a terrible fissure, and the strands of community come leaking out through its gaps. Reconciliation is messy and protracted, and the gathering up of all that’s been scattered is agonising and slow.’ Walking away from the theatre, you felt the hopefulness that drives this process of ‘gathering up’.

It was also one show among many to pull off such an evocation of community in 2024; to make a politically viable (or at least, politically energising) feeling out of theatre’s communal character. Seeing the many iterations of this trend back-to-back and you notice a shared interest in testing the limits of communities and our ability to participate in them; personal beliefs forced to navigate complex collectives. There was MTC-highlights 37 and English; two productions of The Inheritance featuring a thirteen-strong cast. In fact the director of the Melbourne season of The Inheritance, Kitan Petovski, finished a cracker of a year withThe Hall at fortyfivedownstairs, a show that framed a three-person family drama with a chorus of singers. In the show, this chorus became a theatrical evocation of a church choir and its community that one of the show’s lead characters had been unfairly expelled from. Its an example of a stylistic choice driven by the intention to amplify emotional beats and affect an atmosphere rooted in the experience of community. I’ve already spoken about our many actor-muso-led new Australian musicals. Many of them share this interest. Across the board they spotlight specific subcultures and theatricalise the unique difficulties that come from trying to maintain the relationships that make them via specific formal choices. There’s Sybylla’s resentment of farm life at Possum Gully in My Brilliant Career, the homophobia in the AFL theatricalized by One Day In September or the warm-hearted flat-earther conspiracists that make up Flat Earthers.

All the productions I’ve mentioned here not only prioritise ideas and feelings of community, but they test these ideas. What are the limits of community? From 37 to The Hall, we see specific communities grappling with individual differences. There’s the racism and homophobia that fractures a football club in 37 and One Day, the classism that makes Sybylla detach from her community and the patriarchal assumptions that make that community alienate her in Brilliant; or a difference in beliefs accepted for the sake of love in Flat Earthers. We’ve had years of discourse about the erasure of bipartisanship by this point, years of catastrophizing declarations that healthy conflict has been lost to the absolutism of online culture. Thank god for theatre like this that is responding to this oft-weaponised sensitivity with a full-throated, ‘and, what?’ These large ensembles and the earnest belief in community in the scripts they both model and perform do not indulge this oversensitivity. They make difference essential to community but refuse to make the cohesion of that community a weapon to be used against specific differences - be they racial, sexual, gender-based or otherwise. So many of these shows follow characters asking why specific communities matter to us more than others, and how those communities might be changed. I’m not so naive as to think that all these shows pull this idea off in a way that might cause real political change, but I do think they each represent a more focused encounter with it than we have seen in recent years.

Fringe Award Winner, Running Into the Sun distinguished itself by filling Trades Hall’s Solidarity Hall to the brim with dancers, musicians (and one clown) to explore the idea of having children in a climate crisis. ‘Solidarity’ became an all-too apt descriptor for its deeply hopeful, and collaborative hybrid approach. Like Counting and Cracking, the show transformed a personal story into a shared communal experience by leaning into its large ensemble, using group choreography, orchestrations and soft audience interaction to create an intimacy rooted in a theatricalisation of community. Other highlights from Melbourne Fringe this year came from practitioners asking similarly interesting questions about how immersive theatre practices might contribute to explicitly community-based stories and in fact cultivate a community of its own. Oliver Ayres’s one-on-one I’m Ready to Talk Now or the imperfect but earnest forum for our shared futures, FUTURE facilitated community-oriented engagement by drawing on immersive theatre practices. Thank god Malthouse Theatre (a company increasingly on the backfoot of things thanks to a listless Matthew Lutton) avoided immersive theatre this year so that we could spotlight these independent attempts at using the form as a way to build community, or build theatre around community.

The monodrama returned to Melbourne stages with Patrick Livesy’s I hope this means something and Benjamin Nichols’ Milk/Blood and the stand-out duologue from MTC, Topdog/Underdog. While there will always be an appetite for a tight monodrama or topical duologue, these felt like outliers. They seemed detached from our cultural imagination; too reminiscent of a COVID-era theatre landscape overflowing with the stark realism of minimalist monodramas and duologues. Theatre makers in these forms face more pressure to distinguish themselves, and have to work harder to affect us.

Meanwhile our pre-eminent comedy troupes, Bloomshed and PonyCam, enjoyed huge success this year. The popularity of their shows is due, in part, because of their shared interest in innovating group-devised theatre. But their charm also feels inseparable from the ways in which they both lean into the inevitably collaborative nature of that form, finding joy and thematic rigor by playing with the limits and possibilities of a more communal theatrical experience. Bloomshed restaging their early show, We're Banking On It! at fortyfivedownstairs earlier this year in collaboration with students from Monash University is perhaps the most explicit example of this ethos provoking an approach to staging theatre that seeks out collaboration in relationship to communities. But the idea that the communal experience of theatre might contribute to a show’s politics or themes is the engine that drives both companies.

Theatre companies gaining momentum in 2024 were those pursuing a similar theatre practice explicitly in conversation with community groups and institutions. Community is an ethos that elevates the social causes foundational to Back to Back, Antipodes, RAWCUS, and La Mama Theatre among others, while also proving integral to their development of specific (and innovative) experiments of theatrical form. That La Mama Theatre is shutting its doors this year after missing out on an important Grant is a tragedy. That it raised 123,000 at a community-led fundraiser and theatrical feast, Avant Guards, tells you why these formal trends seem to resonate so deeply.

Writers to keep an eye-out for:

1. Em Tambree (Altar, Midsumma Festival 2024)

2. Amarantha Robinson (ILARUN: The Cutting Comb, fortyfivedownstairs (5 – 15th December 2024)

3. Mel O’Brien and Samantha Andrew (The Platonic Human Centipede, Melbourne Fringe (5 - 6 October))
   *Full transparency, I know these legends very well so feel free to dismiss my bias and make your own decision but anyone who has been to a Mel & Sam show will know that if there’s a musical coming out of their incredible brains it is destined to be hilarious, chaotic and whip smart.

4. Oliver Ayres (I’m Ready to Talk Now, Melbourne Fringe (9 -13 October))

Obviously there are also examples from last year when this emphasis on community became politically vapid; more a spoonful of sugar that makes it easier to swallow wider injustices than a light prompt to resolve them. It’s true that the escapism favoured by art following the pandemic swayed toward the apolitical, peddling positivism as a way out of difficult conversations or politically vital questions for the sake of celebrating progress or feeling good. ‘Queer optimism’ is one culprit, a trend easily weaponised to make any dissent - whether political in nature or aesthetic - seem like a wet blanket. The Trump-era overuse of sentimentality and earnestness is another. Both come together in Matthew López’s The Inheritance, two productions of which tail-ended 2024.

Like Counting and Cracking, the emotional payoff from these productions of The Inheritance (the first at Melbourne’s fortyfivedownstairs, the second at Sydney’s Seymour Centre) is inseparable from the sheer fact of it having been produced in the first place. The emotional effectiveness of its seven-hour depiction of a community of New York gay men is strongly tied to the fact that we’re watching a community of queer people on stage acting it out despite the obstacles of Australian theatre for seven hours. But the evocation of community at the heart of the show is at best politically stultifying and at worst utterly vapid. It’s a show that sidelines its politics for easy sentimentality. But the question it asks about gay men and how they might reckon with increased acceptance and a near-successful assimilation (for white New York gay men, of course) means it strikes an interesting conversation with the other evocations of community on our stages in 2024.

Lopez often explicitly reckons with a problem: that gay men, by being at the forefront of social progress for queer people, now inhabit an identity that does not inevitably implicate a political position because it is transgressive or marginalised. In his reckoning we see the tension between individual responsibility (a politics that begins and ends with whether I am assimilated into normal society) to a social responsibility determined by collective actions (not necessarily oriented toward assimilation as an end goal) that support and advance those who are more marginalised. We might say that queer people have always known some form of social responsibility. And we might also say that it becomes easier to forget that knowledge (and its histories) when your experience of navigating the world day-to-day doesn’t force you to remember them. The queer political project is at risk of stalling with efforts too individualist in nature. Not because it does not have reasons to continue momentum (Pink Washing by the Zionist state of Israel comes to mind) but because it, like much of the left, has lost the reactionary energy that propelled it in 2016. Those that are not immediately impacted by marginalization can easily count things like a successful marriage plebiscite, or a win for Labour, as ‘enough’ progress. Social responsibility is not assumed.

A play like The Inheritance that models community but has no answer for how this community might function politically is boring. But that Lopez wields out the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City to obscure his thinly veiled apoliticism, to make us weep our way out of needing an answer to it is boring in 2019 and maddening in 2025. What kind of relationship to our past is it engendering? What kind of community is it advocating for? Sitting with our shared history is a beautiful way to cultivate a shared sense of community. But Lopez overemphasizes this history for the sake of easy sentimentality, meaning that any idea of how it might embolden community is lost to simply mourning it. Where does the weeping take us? I would go so far as to say that much Melbourne-based theatre by gay men faces a similar problem: stuck in its history and struggling to be propelled by it.

But the other encounter with community seen in our theatres in 2024 didn’t happen on our stages. October 2024 marked a year since the genocidal assault against Palestine by Israel began. Though there wasn’t any theatre that explicitly addressed the genocide to my knowledge, it was in the air of many theatre lobbies and opening nights. In my review of Yentl I mentioned the security manning the door of Malthouse Theatre on opening night after pro-Palestinian Clementine Ford’s show (which had nothing to do with Palestine) was moved from Malthouse’s outdoor stage to Trades Hall. In my newsletter earlier this year I mentioned the ongoing discussions had about Palestine in the rehearsal room for Peacemongers during its development at Darebin Arts. People often react to references to Palestine in our theatres, or to rallies on our streets, with language that weaponises an idea of social cohesion. Some cast members wearing a keffiyeh during the bows of The Seagull alienates some individuals, thereby compromising what they think theatre is meant to offer them, and how the shared experience of being an audience member is meant to feel. Are audiences communities, and is theatre merely an affirmation of that community? Or does it become one only when these presumptions are apparently threatened? If we say that content that explicitly mentions Palestine is beyond the reach of our theatres - whether on or around it - then we are eliminating the possibility of theatre that questions what we think community looks like and what it asks of us. Our best theatre in 2024 centred these questions, and modelled an idea of community formed around asking them.

Act Three: Burnout

What looks like a ghost light sits on an empty stage. On closer inspection it’s a candle, burning at both ends. “A hackneyed symbol for burnout sacrifising nuance for sentimentality,” The Age writes. And they’re right.

I burnt out this year, which is a quick shorthand for a complex thing. But it’s why this newsletter went silent for much of the year. I’ll have more to say on burnout, what it looks like in critical spaces and why it happens but this newsletter is long enough. Suffice it to say: here’s to 2025 and a monthly newsletter to come.

Top 5 Reviews:

1. Diane Stubbings, Hamlet (2 1/2 stars), Australian Book Review

   Stubbings is truly one of our best. You read her reviews like you would float down a river of oil flecked with thorns. Her arguments move with breakneck momentum. Her astute and cutting assessment of fortyfivedownstairs Hamlet was an outlier in the show’s critical reception (I personally loved it), but swimming in Stubbings work and you’ll soon be inhaling the water.

2. Across the Aisle, Final Episode

   Across the Aisle was a shining gem in the often critically limp world of podcasts about theatre. Closing shop early this year, they leave a gap in Melbourne Theatre discourse yet to be filled.

3. Cassie Tongue, Dear Evan Hansen struggles to live up to the hype, The Saturday Paper

   Tongue takes a beloved show, and an already critically lauded production and offers a stylish, astute recontextualisation that balances commentary and praise.

4. Tim Bryne’s Two-Star review of A Streetcar Named Desire and Alison Croggon’s in The Saturday Paper

   A beautiful year for discourse.

5. Cameron Woodhead’s Five Star Review of Rent in The Age and Tim Bryne’s Two-Star Review in The Guardian

   Fight (dialectically).

(honourable mention to Ryan Hamilton’s ‘238 Shows in 366 Days An analysis of my theatre-watching habits in 2024 plus my top ten shows of the year’; an incredible, data-based deep dive)

Happy (ten days into the) New Year.