Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage is renowned for her incisive, moving and witty plays about the intersections of race and class in America. Her Tony-nominated Clyde's was the most-produced play in the United States last year and its Australian premiere is now coming to the Ensemble Theatre.  Also, Driftwood the Musical tells a true Australian story of a family's escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, and Lara Ricote, a Mexican-Venezuelan-American comedian living with a disability, questions the labels placed upon on her in GRL/LATINX/DEF. 

Not long ago, Liz Kingsman was doing improv and sketch comedy with her friends in England. Now, this Sydney-born comedian is the talk of the comedy world. She's taken her universally acclaimed satire One Woman Show to the West End, it's now on at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and her next stop is New York. Also, Berlin art rocker siblings Otto and Astrid from Die Roten Punkte go solo together in Otto and Astrid's Joint Solo Project and Circus Oz return to the stage for the first time since 2021 when the company was threatened with closure.

The Australian Ballet have brought their iconic production of Don Quixote, choreographed by and originally starring Rudolf Nureyev, back to the stage. Nureyev's production became a film in 1973 which has inspired new designs by one of our most venerable stage designers, Richard Roberts. Also, Richard Wagner's epic four-opera Ring Cycle comes to regional Australia for the very first time and includes a concert held in a gold mine, and we meet 'the mother of African contemporary dance,' Germaine Acogny, the co-founder of the famous Ecole des Sables in Senegal.

Lucy Guerin is one of the most awarded choreographers working in Australia today. To mark 21 years of her company Lucy Guerin Inc, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) will host NEWRETRO — a massive durational performance installation. Also, we examine the well-established trend of choreographers presenting contemporary dance in galleries and museums and ask: How does our relationship to dance change when it's not experienced in a theatre? And ahead of the return of Madama Butterfly to Sydney Harbour, we meet Brian Castles-Onion, the conductor of every Handa Opera in the series' 11-year history.

Great performers, writers and directors emerge from the smallest of theatres — venues where new talent is nurtured and writers and performers are free to learn the ropes and take risks. Liz Jones AO has been making that kind of theatre happen at La Mama for over 50 years. Now she is passing the torch. Also, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Tony Award-winning masterpiece Into the Woods returns to the Australian stage and we learn all about the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt who is being portrayed on the Melbourne Theatre Company stage by Kate Mulvany in the new play Bernhardt/Hamlet directed by Anne-Louise Sarks.

Imagine a world with no Macbeth, no Tempest and no Twelfth Night. Without the First Folio, published 400 years ago this year, those plays may have been lost to history. To mark its anniversary, Bell Shakespeare is presenting three plays from the First Folio in their 2023 season, starting with a new production of Macbeth directed by the company's artistic director, Peter Evans.  For further insight into the publication and importance of the First Folio, we're joined by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. She's the author of Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book.

After several years of delays, the Ballett Zürich production of Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem will feature at this year's Adelaide Festival. Brought to life by 36 dancers and over 170 singers performing with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, we meet the show's award-winning choreographer Christian Spuck. Also, the oldest theatre on mainland Australia hosts a thoroughly modern makeover of Hansel and Gretel written by Lally Katz, and Australian Dance Theatre Artistic Director Daniel Riley pays tribute to his great-great uncle Alec Riley in Tracker, a co-production with Ilbijerri Theatre Company co-written by Ursula Yovich.

Ivo van Hove is renowned as one of the most innovative — and divisive — theatre directors working today. The Belgian's enthralling stage adaptations of classic works consistently subvert expectations. Now, van Hove's adaptation of the confronting novel A Little Life is coming to the Adelaide Festival. Also, a married lesbian couple with two children face divorce in Blessed Union, a new comedy at Belvoir, and Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the longest-running play on London's West End, is touring Australia. But is it a paragon of modern theatre or a tourist trap?

We celebrate Sydney WorldPride with cabaret performer and drag artist Reuben Kaye. In his breathlessly entertaining shows, Kaye shares his family's extraordinary story of survival and how the arts carried him through trauma — all while singing up a storm. Also, the Hayes Theatre Co revive Gentleman Prefer Blondes — but how is it a queer story? And we consider the evolution of queer performance through the years. In an era of increasing recognition of LGBTQIA+ rights, how does queer storytelling maintain its vitality?

This year's Perth Festival takes us to the stars, with many events in the program inspired by stories of the cosmos. The West Australian Symphony Orchestra's concert Music of the Spheres included music from Australian composer Richard Mills' forthcoming opera Galileo, inspired by the life of the pioneering Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Also, Aboriginal dreaming stories inspire bold new theatrical work being staged under — and among — the stars, and Palawa writer Nathan Maynard and Māori writer Jamie McCaskill take us on an adventure across the sea and through the stars and spirit world in Hide the Dog.