The Hayes 2024 season announced
Hayes Theatre is celebrating 10 years with their 2024 season! Richard Carroll & Victoria Falconer are also celebrating their first full-year season as inaugural Artistic Directors, and this is the first annual subscription season the Hayes has announced since 2019. Subscriptions are on-sale now.
In 2024, Hayes is inviting you to see musical theatre differently. The season encompasses the hotly-anticipated Zombie! The Musical, the new show from musical theatre virtuoso Laura Murphy (The Lovers, The Dismissal); the Australian premiere of the subversive, hilarious and surprisingly moving Ride The Cyclone; and Hayes’ co-production with Griffin, Flat Earthers: The Musical, featuring the queer electro-pop stylings of theatre-comedy provocateurs Lou Wall, Jean Tong and James Gales.
Add to this a partnership with Adelaide Cabaret Festival to launch a joint cabaret commission, and Hayes’ first ever Festival of New Work – alongside a rich selection of shows from independent artists and producers both new and returning, including two in the beloved Neglected Musicals series. It’s proof that Australian music theatre makers are among the most exciting in the world.
Kicking off the season 10 January is the Australian Premiere of The Hello Girls. March into the extraordinary world of The Hello Girls, a contemporary musical brimming with folk and pop earworms, charting the journey of a feisty bunch of trail-blazing women who turned the US Army on its head and made history.
It’s like 42nd Street… but with ZOMBIES! Zombie! The Musical, runs from 8 March. It’s the turn of the 21st century, and a dedicated community theatre troupe are frantically rehearsing in the final hours before their big opening night. Little do they know that beyond the theatre’s walls, a highly infectious disease is rapidly spreading through the city – turning its victims into full-blown zombies. Will humanity take its final bow, or can the power of musical theatre save the friggin’ world?
A new look at the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s classic Tell Me On A Sunday is up next, running from 12 April. This Andrew Lloyd Webber classic is a one-woman show that charts the course of a young English girl newly arrived in New York. Brimming with optimism, she sets out to seek success, companionship and, of course, love. But as she weaves her way through the maze of the city and her own anxieties and heartaches, she begins to wonder whether – in fact – she’s been looking for love in all the wrong places.
From 23 May, Hayes Theatre Co presents the Australian premiere of Ride the Cyclone. In this hilarious and exhilarating story, the lives of six teenagers from a Canadian chamber choir are cut short in a freak accident aboard a rollercoaster. When they awake in limbo, a mechanical fortune teller invites each to tell a story to win a prize like no other – the chance to return to life. Bursting with witty, memorable songs and featuring some of the most compelling characters in modern musical theatre, this remarkable show makes a uniquely uplifting and deeply funny case for what makes a life worth living.
Joshua Robson Productions is thrilled to present Little Women, an enchanting production that continues to resonate with audiences, reminding us of the enduring relevance of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel. Little Women captures the essence of sisterhood, love, and the pursuit of one’s dreams. It runs from 12 July.
For the first time ever, opera fills the intimate Hayes space with Benjamin Britten’s spine- chilling masterpiece The Turn of the Screw from 16 August. This gripping tale unfolds in a remote English manor, as a young governess arrives to care for two orphaned children, Flora and Miles. She soon discovers that the grounds, and the children themselves, are haunted by mysterious apparitions. As the governess fights to protect her wards from the sinister forces that surround them, the line between sanity and madness becomes thrillingly blurred.
Somewhere on the fringes of the internet, Ria e-meets Flick and instantly falls in analogue love. They’ve never actually met IRL, but their passion is as real as the moon landing, the Loch Ness Monster and the flying saucers over Roswell. That is, until Ria learns with horror that Flick is a ‘Flat Earther’ – and Flick learns with horror that Ria is a ‘Globe Earther’. In this beautiful and chaotic electro-pop musical epic, star-cross’d lesbians tumble into the depths of the dark web – where the most far-out, dangerous conspiracy theories turn out to be very, very real…Flat Earthers: The Musical runs from 11 October.
Bursting with irrepressible charm, irresistible humour and a nostalgia that promises to delight – Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn tap dances onto the Hayes stage to ring in the Christmas season.
Hoofer Jim Hardy says goodbye to the hustle and bustle of big-city showbiz to settle down on his farmhouse in Connecticut. He longs for fresh air and ‘Blue Skies’, but it turns out life isn’t the same without his beloved song and dance. Enter Linda, a passionate schoolteacher with talent of her own. Together, Jim and Linda – with the help of unlikely friend and local handy-gal Louise – transform the farmhouse into a fabulous inn, with dazzling performances to celebrate the holidays.
Click here to find out more about Hayes’ 2024 season.