From TISM to Ben Elton, seven shows you must see in March
Your downtime won’t be a letdown with our guide to some of the best shows happening around the nation next month.
There’s nothing worse than wasting your time and money on a mediocre show. So we’ve assembled a handful of what promise to be the best performing arts offerings going around the country in March.
Music
TISM at Cataract Gorge | Mona Foma Festival
Bankrolled by gambler turned gallerist David Walsh, Tasmania’s Mona Foma festival is known for memorable musical moments. Like that time in 2018 when festival director Brian Ritchie got Tassie’s then premier, Will Hodgman, to strap on a guitar, don a onesie and become a temporary member of Ritchie’s band The Violent Femmes for a Hobart performance.
Ritchie has scored another coup for Mona Foma 2024, convincing Melbourne-based dance polemicists TISM to reunite for only their third gig in 20 years. The setting for the free show will be fittingly special – Launceston’s jaw-dropping Cataract Gorge. With typical Mona Foma eclecticism, First Nations heavy metal band Mulga Hard Rock are one of the supports.
March 2, Cataract Gorge, Launceston
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder | Simone Young conducts Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Simone Young has just extended her contract as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to 2026, and she’s celebrating in the best way she knows – with a monumental work by a Central European composer.
Renowned as one of the world’s finest Mahler interpreters, Young will present the Sydney debut for the only work that outguns Gustav – Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. This song cycle, based on Danish legend, requires five soloists, a 125-piece orchestra and – count them – three choirs.
The Opera House’s Concert Hall stage will have to be almost doubled in size to accommodate everybody, so it’s unlikely Gurrelieder will be back this way again any time soon.
March 15 & 16, Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
Comedy
Pride in Prejudice | The Wharf Revue
After 24 years spent satirically pricking political pomposity, The Wharf Revue has become the sort of national institution its members usually prefer to send up. The latest of its annual shows is called Pride In Prejudice, which in a post-Voice world gives you a hint of the sharp edges within.
Jonathan Biggins is one of Australia’s great impersonators, and among his many pitch-perfect characters here is King Charles, complaining to the ghost of “Mummy” after his coronation that “the last time a chap smeared me in oil behind a screen was in boarding school”.
Mandy Bishop, meanwhile, plays everything from a personification of Robodebt to a Play School-hosting Jacqui Lambie.
March 5-9, Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Work In Progress | Ben Elton
The co-writer of The Young Ones is probably the most famous Brit living permanently in Australia – sorry, Leo Sayer – so it’s a bit of a treat that the comedian’s warm-up gigs for a major UK tour will happen on these shores.
Ben Elton has resided with his family in Fremantle since 2009 and this run of shows will be down the road in Perth, with any profits going to the Wallcliffe Volunteer Bush Fire Brigade in the Margaret River.
Elton is quick to point out his motives aren’t entirely altruistic – he’s got a holiday house in the wine region.
March 5-9, Her Majesty’s Theatre, Perth
Circus
Bypass | SA Circus Centre’s Youth Troupe
So it seems not all members of Generation Z are screen-addicted layabouts. A bunch of them attend Cirkidz, a circus school established at Adelaide’s SA Circus Centre in 1985, which has supplied graduate talent to such death-defying organisations as Gravity & Other Myths.
Trained on more than 50 different apparatus at the school, the teens of SACC’s Youth Troupe promise human pyramids, juggling, hula hoops and backflips galore in Bypass, a show that questions the individual’s need to join a collective.
You’ll likely feel very inflexible but, with a Coopers or Barossa shiraz in hand at the Gluttony precinct of Adelaide Fringe, at least you’ll be feeling it.
March 3 and 10, The Peacock at Gluttony, Rymill Park, Adelaide
Musical Theatre
& Juliet | Michael Cassel Group
From Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time in 1998 to The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights in 2019, the music of Swedish producer Max Martin has been a ubiquitous presence on the pop charts.
So you might as well succumb and watch how the songs translate to a Shakespearean context in this musical, which imagines what might have happened if Juliet didn’t die at the end of the Bard’s famous play.
First Nations talent Lorinda May Merrypor received rave reviews playing the title role during earlier runs in Melbourne and Perth.
Throughout March, Sydney Lyric Theatre
Theatre
37 | Melbourne Theatre Company
The title of this play and the promotional images of footy players suggest it might be about a former champion pondering retirement. But no – 37 was the number worn by erstwhile Sydney Swans captain Adam Goodes, and this production is set during that racially fraught era for the AFL. It centres around a small-town footy team that gets the chance to finally climb off the bottom of the ladder when the Marngrook twins show up – if only everybody can just get along.
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