The Stage Show ABC listen

For decades, Australia's Back to Back Theatre has been delighting audiences with shows performed and devised by an ensemble of artists who are neurodivergent or living with a disability. Following their most recent major international award win, we visit the ensemble at their Geelong headquarters as they rehearse their new show: Multiple Bad Things.

Also, alongside the stand-up, improv and cabaret at this year's Brisbane Comedy Festival, you can catch a play by one of our top writers: David Finnigan's 'apocalyptic rom-com', 44 Sex Acts in One Week. And singer, songwriter and comedian Jude Perl is staging her first full-scale musical at Arts Centre Melbourne this month. It's called Share House: The Musical.

It's Tony season on Broadway and this week we have two major figures of American theatre who have won nine Tony Awards between them: Audra McDonald and Jason Robert Brown.

Performer Audra McDonald is currently on a concert tour of Australia. Her first Tony Award came for her breakthrough role in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel and she's added five more Tonys to her collection since then. And the composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown won his first Tony Award for Parade, which is coming to Sydney's Seymour Centre.

Simon Burke is one of Australia's most cherished entertainers. 2024 marks his 50th year performing on stage.

He made his professional stage debut at just 12 years old and shortly after won an AFI Award for his performance in Fred Schepisi's film The Devil's Playground.

He's since become renowned as a musical theatre performer, having had major roles in Australia and on London's West End.

Right now, he's playing the Wizard of Oz in a spectacular new production of Wicked.

What does it mean to defy the conventions and test the boundaries of gender? These are questions posed by some of Shakespeare's most famous characters.

Wherefore, Shakespeare? is a series that explores the dilemmas, conflicts, and controversies in Shakespeare's major plays.

In our second instalment, we place gender in the spotlight. We're joined by Professor Jane Montgomery Griffiths, an acclaimed actor and the head of the School of Performing Arts at Collarts, Professor David McInnis, who teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne, and Peter Evans, artistic director of Bell Shakespeare.

Suzanne Chaundy is one of Australia's most in-demand directors of opera. Last year, she had the triumph of a lifetime with her direction of opera's most daunting challenge: Wagner's Ring Cycle. Now she's back with another big opera, Lucia di Lammermoor at the Melbourne Opera. So, what does it take to direct an opera?

Also, in Lose to Win, which opens soon at Belvoir Street Theatre, Mandela Mathia recounts his extraordinary journey from displacement in war-torn South Sudan to becoming an Australian and an accomplished actor, and opera singer David Hobson and comedian Colin Lane hit the road for a six-month tour of their show, In Tails.

Choreographer Johan Inger's first narrative work is a radically contemporary take on Carmen, which employs Bizet's famous score but draws on the confronting violence of Mérimée's original novella for its story. The ballet earned the Prix Benois de la Danse and is now being presented by The Australian Ballet.

Also, Victor Hugo's novel about an orphaned boy whose mouth has been cut into a perpetual grin has been adapted into a musical, The Grinning Man, and we mark the 100th anniversary of The Demon Machine, a dance work by Gertrud Bodenwieser who fled the Nazi occupation of Austria and founded the first modern dance company in Australia.