Main Stage

Next date: Saturday, 08 February 2025 | 07:00 PM to Monday, 31 March 2025 | 11:59 PM

Live theatre offers many things to many people - the chance to socialise, to celebrate, to laugh, to listen, and to be transported to another time or place.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival Roadshow is always popular and delivers a little piece of gold with familiar faces and new up & coming comedians with a night of stand-up, satire, silliness and song to satisfy all your comedy cravings.

The Queens Nanny is inspired by historical events when a royal scandal ignites a blistering fire between the steely Queen Mother and her children’s doting Nanny in this new comedy drama.  This play imagines a series of pivotal moments between two strong spirited women harbouring complicated resentment.

Our partnership with Opera Australia continues as they presents La Boheme – the original bohemian love story.  Between the ideals of love and art and the cruel realities of cold winters, bitter jealousies and empty pockets, two sets of lovers are trying to find their way. By the time this emotional opera finishes, you’ll know the answer to an eternal question: is love enough?

Join the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and conductor Leonard Weiss for an unforgettable evening filled with timeless masterpieces from Glinka, Saint- Saëns and Brahms. The Overture to Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila is the epitome of orchestral curtain-raisers, with a furiously fast and infectious opening and rollicking good fun throughout.

We are absolutely honoured to announce a new partnership with an iconic Australian performance company of storytellers – Bangarra Dance Theatre who will perform this special first nations work – The Light Inside.  This main stage show will be the first of an ongoing program which will include multiple performance, workshops, community and school engagement.  This opportunity has been years in the making and we are so excited that for the first time we will be bringing Bangarra to Wangaratta. The Light Inside - some call it a feeling, some call it the mother spirit. It’s the place where sea meets sky, the horizon we all look to, the compass that guides us home. It will be a special performance not to be missed.

Our season concludes with Marina Prior and Michael Cormack who with an astonishing 50 stage productions combined unite for CenterStage after first performing together in CATS in 1986. Marina & Michael will perform songs from their hit musicals with gorgeous duets, iconic show tunes plus their own personal favourites.

After the success of our Black Box Series last year, we are keen to keep the momentum going and seek funding to plan for a bi-annual Black Box Series. This year we will create a one-off Black Box experience in the Memorial Hall where you can enjoy some canapes on arrival and sit with a beverage in hand for the hilarious Classic Penguins.

Garry Starr is back and he’s hell-bent on saving books from extinction by performing every Penguin Classic novel ever written. In an hour. Mostly naked (but with flippers).  Comic wunderkind Starr will take us on a literary adventure through the world’s most iconic works of fiction. From The Little Prince to Moby Dick and everything in between, nothing is safe from being lampooned with the utmost nincompoopery.

This year the WPACC team will be hitting the road with the Rural Towns Tour for the first time since Covid bringing Damian Callinan and Hall Stories to you.  Damian combines his skills as a storyteller, stand-up and character actor, to pull back the curtain and examine the quirks, traditions and characters of Australian rural halls and meeting places.  Damian knows how to talk over a bubbling urn; wind up when the CWA head into the supper room and stack the chairs in 5’s at the end of the night. You just let him know where to get the hall key, and he’ll do the rest.

Hall Stories will stop at the Cheshunt Hall, Eldorado Memorial Hall, Boorhaman Recreation Reserve and the Everton Hall in October with a sausage sizzle before the show.

 

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