Waiting for Monarto

★★★★★

Sandi McMenamin. Holden Street Theatres. 14 Mar 2026

 

Now we will really be Waiting for Monarto. Sandi Mac’s performance season was far too short—and it served as a teaser for the musical she has been writing (and waiting on) for years: Monarto Pastorale.

 

Artfully and wittily, she filled the waiting with songs about waiting. Who knew there were so many?

 

Of course, Sandi is the most in-demand accompanist in town, and she’s a positive Liberace on the keyboard. Her shows are alive, alive-o with deft digits and consummate chords.

 

And she’s not a bad singer either—though she cheerfully admits she has to sing her own songs because somebody has to. A prolific composer, she also worked, years ago, in creative partnership with the late Andrew Murrell, once one of Adelaide’s great revue talents. Here, Sandi honours him and even harmonises with a recording of Murrell singing a number from Monarto Pastorale. The full work isn’t about the zoo, but about the remarkable history behind its name. It’s quite a story. But, says Sandi, it still awaits approvals. She hopes it will be ready for next Fringe—or perhaps for a standalone launch somewhere. As she puts it in one of her pithy lyrics: it’s like Waiting for Godot, but with more flies.

 

Meanwhile, in the pleasantly packed Ruby’s Room at Holden Street, she engages warmly with the audience, coaxes a spot of singalong, and unearths some lovely voices in the process. She even costumes up a couple of willing volunteers for a wee skit and generally makes sure everyone has a darned good time.

 

It is impossible not to adore her.

 

Samela Harris

 

When: 28 Feb to 14 Mar

Where: Holden Street Theatres

Bookings: Closed

Waiting for Hamlet

★★★

Adelaide Fring. NJNG Productions. Ayers House State Dining Room. 12 Mar 2026

 

This much touted play by David Visick won the Kenneth Branagh Award for new drama writing at the Windsor Fringe in 2018, It was his first play, and it really is a cracker. While you don’t need to be completely au fait with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you will miss a few of the jokes if you don’t have at least a passing familiarity. If you’re acquainted with Waiting for Godot, Rosencratz and Guildenstern and the various Fool references, then you’re well on the way. And there’s a fart joke (or two) thrown in for good measure.

 

The two-hander is simply set and rightly so, it’s all about the text. On a sparse stage, American duo Christopher Gibbs and Mark Liebert play Hamlet the Elder (newly deceased) and Yorick, (who passed some 23 years prior) respectively. Hamlet is alarmed at finding himself in what appears to be some sort of limbo; he has not gone through to Heaven or Hell, but is not able to find his way back to the world he knows.

 

Yorick is a little more sanguine, and tries to explain to Hamlet the situation they find themselves in. It’s all a little difficult for Hamlet to accept, especially as it comes from a fool he has always considered to be his inferior.

 

It’s a canny plot line, as Visick explores class, the nature and value of democracy and the exercise of power, with the king claiming that he who wears the crown (uneasy as it may be) invariably wins the battle – it’s about the millinery, not the military, you see.

 

Threads are pulled from across the bard’s canon, coming together in a most colourful yarn. Gibbs and Liebert play off each other well, but the overall vibe is a little flat. There’s not really the punch or timing one would expect from a script that relies so much on wordplay, puns and repartee, and a number of the jokes just didn’t land. While it’s not to be expected that the literary references will all be recognised, it’s unusual for instance, for the central fart joke to be met with the lightest of chuckles.

 

The State Dining Room has been used for a number of shows this Fringe and having sat through many of them, this writer unreservedly awards the seating as the most uncomfortable to be experienced this year. It’s a good space, but please, change the chairs!

 

Arna Eyers-White

 

When: 12 to 14 Mar

Where: Ayers House State Dining Room

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

Gatz

Adelaide Festival. Elevator Repair Service, USA. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 13 Mar 2026

 

“Treat the novel as a novel and don’t try to make it into a play.”

 

That, America’s Elevator Repair Service decided while experimenting with ways to stage The Great Gatsby. And therein lies the secret of what we now see as Gatz: not an “adaptation” so much as a staged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, performed in full.

 

It is epic: eight hours, six of them solid words. In production for two decades and seen around the world, it arrives at the Adelaide Festival as a feast of pure Americana—an absurdly brave and brilliantly original act of theatre-making laid over Fitzgerald’s unadulterated prose.

 

It is not just clever. It is brilliant. The eight hours sag only slightly as the end draws nigh and the narrative tightens to its conclusion. Yet even those moments invite us to bask in the eloquence of the writing—especially when the actor lowers the book and the language hangs, unassisted, in the air.

 

This is leap-to-your-feet ovation material: exactly what festivals are for. An exquisite example of experiential theatre, the expiring hours bonding audience, actors, and narrative in a shared act of endurance and attention. Perhaps the audience tires more than the cast, because the cast does not flag. Book in hand, Scott Shepherd carries it all.

 

The conceit is a beauty. A drab worker in a dull, anonymous office-land somewhere in New York finds a copy of The Great Gatsby on his messy desk while waiting for his IBM green-screen computer to be fixed—mid-80s, perhaps, when those early desktops were indeed engines of weary frustration. The computer is never repaired. Time, in a sense, stops. The man reads aloud to no one in particular. Gradually his colleagues take notice; the reading becomes another reality; the office workers morph into Fitzgerald’s characters—and the reader morphs too. He becomes Nick Carraway, narrator of the novel, and—crucially—ensuring not a single word is lost, he connects the dialogue with all the interim “he said” and “she gazed” conjunctions. Shepherd becomes the dramatic pivot in a performance of naturalistic impeccability. And how perfect is that name for this role: “Scott” of the author, and “Shepherd” as the one who rounds up and guides the evolving cast of characters.

 

Fitzgerald wrote his book through the 1920s, drawing loosely on his own life and times. Post–World War I America was the flapper era: the hedonistic jazz age of bootleg liquor and libertines. A Midwestern boy and Princeton graduate, Fitzgerald shifted his social imagination eastward into the orbit of Ivy League privilege and Long Island luxury. These make up the Gatsby crowd, gathered at the lavish parties of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, whose passion is to reignite the flame he once had with the gorgeous Daisy—now married to a former Yale football star. The tale, of course, is doomed. The Great Gatsby is probably among the most universally read of novels, and it remains an irony that Fitzgerald died unaware it was fated for such success.

 

That success continues through today’s mediums—but never more vividly, perhaps, than in this trip to theatre heaven.

 

Delivering the pages word-for-word somehow heightens intensity. The affluenza of Gatsby’s world is cleverly offset by the marvellous set of office banality. There is a hint of TV’s The Office, with its battler workplace atmosphere—only here it is a design by Louisa Thompson with entrances and exits to other worlds. It is artfully embellished by actor/soundman Ben Williams, stationed in a cramped office of his own, overlaying the action with birdsong, traffic, party ambience, nocturnal insects, and occasional shattering eruptions of shock. This soundscape is a masterwork in its own right.

 

The production has clearly been forged through thwarting times and deep thinking, all of which pays off under John Collins’ deft direction. With narrator-led intermissions and a dinner break, its eight hours slither by surprisingly fast—though one must tip one’s cap to Shepherd’s seemingly tireless delivery. He is a sterling endurance player.

 

The cast is large, but physically and emotionally dominated by Jim Fletcher, who transforms from po-faced office colleague to the tragic anti-hero of the piece: the enigmatic Jay Gatsby. He has magnetic stage presence and, thanks to Colleen Werthmann’s well-considered costumes, cuts an imposing figure in a very handsome wardrobe.

 

The supporting cast members slip deftly into their dual roles and become wholly plausible as Gatsby’s circle, particularly Susie Sokol, highly simpatico as Jordan Baker. Former Melbourne actress Lucy Taylor dares to give surprising depth to vain Daisy, the object of Gatsby’s obsession. It was wonderful, too, to see our own Terence Crawford among the Elevator Repairers, delivering a moving cameo at the denouement as the patriarch Henry C. Gatz.

 

Gary Wilmes, Maggie Hoffman, Laurena Allan, Gavin Price, Frank Boyd, Vin Price, Kristen Sieh and Mike Iveson complete the company who brought this remarkable work to life at Adelaide Festival 2026.

 

Thanks to them all, and to the production staff and crew: it takes a moveable feast of skill and diligence to make art like this. The applause goes on.

 

We might have lost Writers’ Week but we seem to have gained Reader’s Theatre.

 

Samela Harris

 

When: 13 to 15 Mar

Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre

Bookings: ticketek.com.au

The Perfect Life

★★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. Book Music & Lyrics by Amity Dry. Arts Theatre. 12 Mar 2026

There are moments in the theatre when you know what you are watching matters. Not because it is flashy or provocative, but because it is resolutely true. Within the first five minutes of this show I felt that unmistakable certainty. This is one of those rare shows where laughter, recognition, discomfort and compassion sit side by side, and none of them feel forced.

 

Amity Dry, singer songwriter, musical theatre writer, has created something deeply humane here. She has also assembled a cast that is musical theatre dynamite. Their collective pedigree includes Miss Saigon, Les Misérables, Hamilton, Six and Urinetown. There is not a weak vocal moment. Harmonies are rich and assured, solos are delivered with interpretive intelligence, and the emotional shading throughout is the kind that only comes from performers who understand that singing is not about volume or virtuosity, but about meaning.

 

What struck me most powerfully is that this is a musical about ordinary women, and that is precisely where its brilliance lies. It’s not woke. It’s not driven by a gender identity agenda.

It is not an academic middle class didactic feminist treatise telling working class women how they should be. There’s little swearing. There are no tits and ass. There is fearless, if occasionally a little cliché, honesty. There is celebration of ordinary women that is deeply feminist in its spirit. Life, this show reminds us, is often messy, sometimes unfair, occasionally shit, but still worth turning up for.

 

There is a great deal of lived experience in Dry’s writing, and it shows. At times the book edges close to sentimentality but pulls back before slipping too far. Dry’s wit and understanding that clichés exist because they hold truth is evident. And it’s a musical, after all.

 

At the heart of the piece are four women whose lives intersect through a long-standing ritual of fortnightly Friday drinks. Time poor, emotionally stretched, and subject to life’s many curveballs, some thrown by circumstance, others by decades old choices or momentary lapses of judgement, they keep showing up for one another. That, too, is a quietly radical act.

 

Dry plays Lily with moving sincerity. A devoted wife to Patrick, who is, I think, an accountant, Lily is a proud café owner and unacknowledged community catalyst, and a mother of nineteen-year-old twin boys recently embarked on the adventure of a gap year, and she is left, suddenly an empty nester. Lily is lonely, disoriented, and quietly grieving the woman she once was. Dry’s performance is moving and personal. Lily is brave enough to acknowledge that sometimes endurance looks like resignation.

 

Jess, played by Chloe Zuel with panache, warmth and emotional nuance, is the free spirit returned home after six years abroad, with stories of her Latin lover, Lorenzo. But she returns for a far more sobering reason, to care for her mother, who has cancer. Zuel balances sass with vulnerability superbly, charting Jess’s journey from free spirited traveler to unexpected bridezilla with humor and heart.

 

Kerrie Anne Greenland’s extraordinary portrayal of Kate shows great attention to character arc, delivering what are arguably the most dramatically poignant moments of the evening. Fiercely independent, ambitious and self-sufficient, Kate is a solicitor whose carefully constructed life is derailed by a one-night stand with a man who was, quite simply, a dick, pun very much intended. Greenland portrays the progression from the initial crack in Kate’s armor to its complete breakdown so completely that it is deeply moving.

 

Then there’s Bec, played by Dee Farnell with a masterful balance of comic timing and gravitas. Bec is a mother besieged by three children, a loyal friend, Jess’s cousin, a weary yet committed partner to Matt, and a woman who uses sarcasm as both shield and sword. Farnell’s delivery is razor sharp, but she never lets humor blunt the truth.

 

The fractures that emerge between these women feel honest. Their different lifestyles, values and stages of life create tension, but ultimately sisterhood prevails. The triumph here is not neat resolution, but resilience.

 

Bec Francis’s set and prop design functions almost as a fifth character. Static, it is transformed through inventive and evocative use of projections within window spaces, creating a strong sense of time passing and lives unfolding. It is elegant, economical, and beautiful. Jo Casson’s direction holds the entire piece together with clarity and grace, shaping character arcs, visual cohesion and narrative flow. Nothing feels rushed or lingers too long.

 

Musically, Matthew Brind’s arrangements, augmented by Marco Callisto, give the tight, responsive band led by Martin Cheney a score that is rich, textured and emotionally moving. Dry’s musical sensibility shines throughout. The songs serve the story, and the result is clever, artful and moving. Of the twenty-two song set list, I was particularly taken by the ensemble renditions of Another Day” to open the show and Bridezilla but Lily’s How Did We Get here?, Kate’s pleading Go To Sleep, and Bec and Jess’s Come to Bed, blew me away!

 

This show made me laugh. It made me weep, with sadness and joy. It made me think of my late grandmother and mother, my partner, my female friends and colleagues, my niece, and the young woman at the checkout at my local Foodland. Exceptional women. Ordinary women. As if those terms are somehow opposed.

 

This is a triumph for Australian musical theatre. It deserves a life beyond Fringe. It should tour. I will be nominating this work for Adelaide Critics Circle and Fringe Awards. The Perfect Life should be seen widely, nationally and internationally.

 

There are only nine performances left, and they will sell out.

 

Go. See it.

 

John Doherty

 

When: 12 to 21 Mar

Where: Arts Theatre

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au