NEXT STAGE Original Productions

My Brilliant Career

Music theatre’s most dynamic duo, Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant, alongside Sheridan Harbridge, adapt Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career into a high-energy musical.

Golden Blood

Merlynn Tong both wrote and stars in this intense two-hander. Unfolding with all the urgency and pace of a rollercoaster in a lightning storm, Golden Blood will set your pulse racing.

37

Penned by Nathan Maynard, this powerhouse new production manifests the physical and psychological demands that a football team faces under the Friday night lights.

A Very Jewish Christmas Carol

A clever twist on Charles Dickens’s classic Christmas morality tale, A Very Jewish Christmas Carol is a funny and delightful journey of discovering who we are and remembering the things that unite us.

My Sister Jill

Against the backdrop of 1950s and 60s suburban Melbourne and in the wake of the Second World War, multi-award-winning writer Patricia Cornelius delivers a poetic, heart-rending tale that unpacks the shadow of war, and the trauma it leaves behind.

Jacky

Declan Furber Gillick brings his bold and dynamic voice to Melbourne Theatre Company’s mainstage for the first time with Jacky. This ambitious world premiere examines the personal costs of navigating it all in contemporary Australia.

Laurinda

Adapting Alice Pung’s award-winning book, writer and comedian Diana Nguyen and director Petra Kalive bring Laurinda’s schoolyard setting to the stage for a fresh and feisty new work.

Come Rain or Come Shine

The Helpmann Award-winning team behind the smash hit Ladies in Black returns with a sweetly stirring new boutique musical, an adaptation of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s wildly comic short story about music, memory and lifelong friendship.

The Heartbreak Choir

From the revered playwright behind one of Melbourne Theatre Company's most beloved recent hits, The Architect, comes this funny and uplifting celebration of music, friendship and community.

SLAP. BANG. KISS.

Exploring themes of activism, community and hope, this bold new play from multi-award-winning playwright Dan Giovannoni tracks three young people whose stories transform them into global symbols of revolution.

Berlin

In this spine-tingling romantic thriller, Joanna Murray-Smith creates a world of passion and intrigue, which asks what it really means to forgive the past.

Torch the Place

Benjamin Law makes his playwriting debut with Torch the Place, a poignant modern comedy about finding clarity in the clutter of life.

Golden Shield

The very first NEXT STAGE comission to be produced for the stage is a stunning new legal drama from a trail-blazer of contemporary theatre, Anchuli Felicia King.