There are, as they say, two sure things in life: death and taxes.

Part of me is disappointed that the Australian Theatre for Young people did not, in its new production, present a series of monologues about teenagers grappling with taxation.

What they have given us instead in The One Sure Thing is an exploration of what death means for people who are coming to it for the first time. These are budding actors, some as young as 16, working with material penned by writers as young as 18. As you might expect, there are a handful of false starts: the grieving flit too quickly from chatter to howls of guilt, or their reminisces of the dead try too hard.

But there is ample compensation for the moments that misfire. Lucy Coleman’s eight-year-old social climber is perfection, all bated breath and childish self-importance in the face of desperate tragedy. Emma Campbell’s account of the cruel and unusual disease that is slowly killing her schoolgirl character is, by turns, crushing and laugh-out-loud funny.

And canny direction from Tanya Goldberg transforms some pieces from soliloquy to a drama that consumes the stage – and the audience.

A touching production that reminds us what is at stake for us all.

Until Feb 18, atyp Studio 1, The Wharf, Pier 4/5, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, $15-25, 9270 2400, atyp.com.au

Otherwise known as reborner or deciduous teeth, babyteeth are those that precede your adult set and are kind of like the training wheels for your mouth. Often wished upon or traded in for gold, they are both valuable and impermanent. In the freshly-penned Rita Kalnejais play of the same name, there is a bittersweet edge to this concept of childhood chrysalis – as 14-year-old Milla (Sara West) is very, very sick, and like her one remaining baby tooth, may not make it to adulthood. For this inaugural staging, we speak to director Eamon Flack (As You Like It) about how he pulled out this challenging little tale …

What compelled you to direct Babyteeth? There are very few reasons NOT to do a play like this. It’s wildly alive, it’s difficult to direct (which I like), it’s funny, it’s full of wonderful ways of seeing the world, and most brilliantly of all it’s a love story. Theatre has so few of these nowadays. Theatre yielded the love story to opera and film a century ago, and modern love stories on stage are rare. This is one of them, and a glorious one at that.

Tell us about Milla, the dying teenager? She has cancer but she’s also 14 and it’s this gap between illness and the ordinary teenage urge to live and experience that gives the play its force. The fact that she’s dying makes her living all the more important – she’s trying to find a way to leap into the thick of life while she can, and in a stroke of madness or sheer sanity, depending which way you look at it, she falls instantly in love with a junkie [Eamon Farren] ten years her senior and invites him home. The situation is part screwball and part tragedy. It’s quite brilliant.

And how about the other characters. How do they fit into the story? There’s a family of three – Milla and her parents – and each of them, in the course of dealing with Milla’s illness, find themselves forging an unlikely bond with a random stranger. As Milla’s illness takes over the life of the family, these people from the world at large become their most important anchors to a wider sense of life and living. It’s beautifully simple storytelling, really, but unexpected, idiosyncratic and alive.

How have you prepared the cast for their performances? To be honest it’s not really something I talk about. Characters are just people with intense complexes of obstacles and desires, so you spend most of your time talking about obstacles and desires. Having said that, the marvellous Russell Dykstra is playing a Latvian violin teacher, so Russell has heroically learnt both a Latvian accent and the violin. He’s also had to learn to be a lot ruder than he himself is. Other than that – no characterisation, just six weeks worth of painstaking accumulation of details of human behaviour!

Babyteeth is described as dark, a whimsical comedy, bittersweet and a love story where, ‘love undoes you and makes you honest’. How do all these differing themes connect to one another? I think LIFE has multidimensional themes – it’s pretty normal for it to be funny and awful at the same moment – and life rarely ties its themes up neatly. Babyteeth is adamantly life-like in that sense. It refuses to package the themes into a single pill. But at the centre of the living mess of it all is a moment-by-moment interest in what it means to love another person when you know that, somewhere along the way, one of you will end up losing the other person to oblivion. Love is not a feeling, it’s a constant activity you engage in, especially when someone is dying.

How has the play been staged? What visual or sensory tools have been utilised to enhance the story-telling, the mood or emotional landscapes of the characters and their interactions? Bob Cousins is the set designer – he really is one of the best – and we spent long hours trying to find some very practical solutions to staging a very eventful play. It has lots of locations – it’s very filmic in that sense – so we needed to find something that could do a lot of work with great ease. But the play also has this unusual and very beautiful kind of poetry of space going on – this remarkable way of constantly unfolding and opening up and just when you think it can’t open up any more it does. So we’ve found ourselves putting three rooms on a revolve, when the interior of each room is the exterior of the room next door – a kind of Escher-esque world of interiors becoming exteriors. But the moods and rhythms and emotional landscapes of the staging really come from the dialogue, which is intricately musical in a very special way. We’ll be using very gentle music and lighting to support those rhythms, rather than invest too heavily in a theatricality.

What do you hope the audience will take away with them? Oh – that great and classic feeling of having had a good laugh and a good cry in the same few hours – you feel like your lungs and your stomach and your heart have had a good physical workout just by sitting in the dark – and when you walk away with those feelings you also end up somehow more open-minded and more compassionate, which is always a good thing! I also hope lots of people fall in love after watching the show.

Feb 11-Mar 18, Upstairs, Belvoir St Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills, $42-62, 9699 3444, belvoir.com.au

Tamarama Rock Surfers’ The Jinglists is a perverse yet delightful absurdist musical romp exploring the world of two jingle writers confined to one dingy room: the playfully unstable Leigh and Loman, played by co-writers Warwick Allsopp and Tamlyn Henderson. Crude and uplifting jingles are contrasted with the crippling tale of love, loss and emotional stagnation. The codependent half-brothers, who sleep huddled together after their nightly puffs of laughing gas, were abandoned by their mother as children and haven’t left the room they reside in for 30 years, ensuring surreal scenes depicting the duo’s dreamlike unreality.

While the production was originally directed by Darren Gilshenan before highly successful London and Edinburgh seasons in 2010, this reworking directed by Jo Turner had the audience in stitches, with the quirky set and brilliant costume design by Jemima Snars highlighting the fantastic chemistry between Allsopp and Henderson, slapstick extraordinaires. The result is undoubtedly silly, but witty and brutally moving at times. You are guaranteed to be shocked, laugh until it hurts, and come out feeling warm and fuzzy.

Until Feb 18, The Bondi Pavilion Theatre, Level 1, Bondi Pavilion Queen Elizabeth Drive Bondi Beach, $21-33, 8019 0282, rocksurfers.org

BY MARILYN HETRELES

The story of Pygmalion is about as old as Jesus.

Although George Bernard Shaw’s play is perhaps the most well-known version to modern audiences (particularly after the film adaptation My Fair Lady), the original Pygmalion myth is drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, finished around 8 AD. It’s little wonder, then, that one of the biggest challenges for director Peter Evans in staging Shaw’s classic play for the STC this season was giving it a new life, making it palatable for new and younger theatre-goers.

The play represents a new direction in education for the STC, having been selected partly because it features on the school syllabus this year, aiming to give students across the state the chance to see a high-quality, challenging, and thoughtful production of what could seem on first glance a somewhat outdated choice.

There is plenty in Pygmalion to resonate with contemporary audiences, however, and Evans’ production plays on this timelessness – the desire to change oneself, the pressure to fit in, and the age-old battle of the sexes, are themes that are unlikely to date as long as humans walk the earth.

The first half of the show sparkles. Engaging, sweet, tight, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, it showcases the tremendous talent and commitment to the story of the leads. Although still carried along by wonderful performances (particularly from STC newcomer Andrea Demetriades, who is magnetic as the complex and tumultuous Eliza Doolittle), the second half seemed to fall a little flatter, bringing audiences well and truly back to earth with the bordering-on histrionic fallout of Professor Higgins’ ‘experiment’. Despite this, Pygmalion is delightful when it delivers. The performances are what really hold it all together in a set so sparse its barely existent, and these are on the most part flawless, with theatre veteran Marcus Chiappi’s Professor Higgins’ also worth particular mention.

Until Mar 3, Sydney Theatre Company, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, $45-130, 9250 1777, sydneytheatre.com.au

It was a kind of code language; a way of navigating the murky waters of a still deeply conservative America. Utilised by activist Harry Hay and his costume designer lover Rudi Gernreich (cue the closet jokes) in the 1948 formation of the first sustained LGBT rights organisation, the Mattachine Society, the term ‘temperamentals’ was early 20^th century slang for ‘homosexual.’ The 2009 play of the same name by Jon Marans (Old Wicked Songs) follows the turbulent history of those seeking the freedom to love, long before the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the political wins of Harvey Milk in the 70s.

Kevin Jackson will direct this Mardi Gras-programmed production, and says of the script: “It’s not just a ‘history lesson’; it’s also a very funny and very moving study of human behaviours. Jon Marans deftly manages to cover both the public and the personal, bringing in many historical points of the Mattachine story whilst subtly weaving in the personal stories of the actual men: their struggles, in very unsympathetic times, with sexual identification and with the self-permission required to live the lives that they instinctively knew were their destiny and right.” (AB)

Feb 7-Mar 3, New Theatre, 542 King St, Newtown, $15-30, 1300 131 188, newtheatre.org.au

A reader in the New York Times theatre section lamented it was, “dreadful,” but that the, “youngsters seemed to like it.”

We’re not sure what they were expecting from a play entitled That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play by a young gun writer, Sheila Callaghan, named one of Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch and a Successful Woman out to Change the World according to Marie Claire.

Allegedly inspired by an article Callaghan read that gave an overview of plays in which men behave badly, and perhaps obliquely spurred by a trend finding only 12.6% of productions written by women in the so-called capital of the free world, That Pretty Pretty takes aim at the American Pies of the world, the MILFs and the teen sluts that populate the predominant representation of women in the entertainment biz.

For its inaugural production Workhorse Theatre is bringing the incendiary piece to TAP Gallery, and Zoe Trilsbach, who also stars as a bloodthirsty ex-stripper, takes a moment to tell us more…

What drew you to That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play? Katherine [Beck] (another member of Workhorse) and I worked on this play in an acting class we we’re doing with a coach named Lynette Sheldon. Apart from the fact that we loved Sheila Callaghan’s writing, we loved the intricacy, the intelligence and the issues tackled within the script.

The script has been described as, ‘forthrightly feminist.’ How true do you think this is? And to what extent is the message still relevant to a 2012 Australian audience? After deconstructing the script I wouldn’t say it’s a feminist play. It’s a protest in numerous forms … sensationalising war, women in media, self deprecation and coping with society’s ideals.

That Pretty Pretty involves jelly wrestling, Jane Fonda, and ex-strippers… a kind of low-life, seamy underbelly landscape. Where does your character fit in? And is it difficult to keep the tone ‘real’ despite all the ridiculous scenarios? In the play there is actually only one ‘real’ scene (that’s up to the audience to work out which one). It sits in a realm between absurd and naturalism, so the ridiculous scenarios are actually ridiculous. Agnes (my character) represents the challenges many women face today…body image, identity, acceptance, self acceptance and how women choose/want to be perceived by the opposite sex.

As a kind of call-to-arms for females and female performers, has it been empowering taking part in this kind of production (written and also directed by a woman)? Absolutely! AND to be a woman who co-owns the theatre company that is putting it on.

And what’s one thing you hope audience members take away with them? I would be happy just to get our audience members thinking. Thinking both literally and laterally about the fragility of our society and what we teach our youths.

Feb 7-18, TAP Gallery, 278 Palmer St, Darlinghurst, $15-28, 1300 314 151, workhorsetheatreco.com

Ordinary Days is an original musical following four young New Yorkers whose lives intersect serendipitously in some of its most famous streets, parks and museums. Talking to the audience and each other through a score of songs, they each share their struggles to find love, happiness and meaning as they negotiate the complexities of life in the big city.

While this production might seem awash with sentimentalism due its messages about letting go, taking risks and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, luckily this isn’t cheesy or overdone. In fact, the production strikes the right balance by employing irony, humour and the subtlety of music, allowing the elegiac tunes of the piano to amplify the emotional beats.

This is also helped by first-rate performances. Rachael Beck is a natural singer and performer, seeming to float around the stage while Michael Falzon is steadfast and powerful. Together, they bring a genuine intimacy to their roles as Claire and Jason, the couple deciding whether to make a long-term commitment.

Erica Lovell is a standout as Deb, the angry grad student, who constantly wants to be someone where else in a bid to realise her ‘big picture’. Through her interactions with the unwavering idealist, Warren, played by Jay-James Moody, she invokes the sardonic wit of the character with razor-sharp timing, bringing some of most humourous moments.

In the end, I couldn’t helped be moved by Ordinary Days, its music and message. As Warren explains to Deb while gazing at a gallery painting: artists make us see the beautiful in the ordinary and, “beautiful takes reflection; beautiful takes someone to make a connection”. This production certainly lives up to this credo and the result brought tears to my eyes … Oh well, I guess that’s the beauty of living in the moment.

Until Feb 19, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, 19 Greenknowe Ave, Potts Point, $33-38. 8356 9987, darlinghursttheatre.com

Adelaide-based theatre company, Isthisyours?, make their Sydney debut with Adelaide Fringe-award winning production, Best We Forget.

The experimental play explores notions of memory in our daily life and people’s desire to be remembered posthumously.

“It’s a piece we’ve devised around the idea of forgetting and what it means to forget,” says performer Jude Henshall.  “From forgetting names, faces and doctor’s appointments, up to larger instances of forgetting such as, ‘I don’t want to be forgotten when I die’”.

Henshall and two other performers, Nadia Rossi and Ellen Steele, play many different characters through unconventional theatrical forms.

“We explore many schools of thought from literature to arts, science to neuroscience and psychoanalysis, and use them in varied theatrical ways to understand and explore forgetting with the audience,” says Henshall.

“The show gives the opportunity for the audience to understand their own processes of forgetting,” says Henshall.

Directed by Tessa Leong, Best We Forget is one production we reckon might be worth remembering to check out.

Feb 7-25, The Old Fitzroy Theatre, cnr Cathedral & Dowling Sts, Woolloomooloo, $21-41 (play, pie & plonk), 8019 0282, rocksurfers.org

Turnandot was Puccinni’s final, uncompleted opera, composed in the 1920s as the last of the grand Italian opera composers succumbed to throat cancer. The opera is set in ancient Peking, where men literally lose their heads in pursuit of a beguiling princess named Turnandot. Any suitor who wants her hand must first answer three perplexing questions. Get them right and you will win the hand of the princess in marriage. Fail the quiz and you are decapitated at sunrise. The imperial palace is littered with the scalps of many a failed suitor, until a unknown prince answers all three questions correctly to the dismay of an icy Turnandot.

One of Australia’s greatest choreographers, Graeme Murphy first directed this production in 1990, which is staged magnificently as a chorus of courtesans and soldiers swirl around the opulent palace set. Tenor Rosario La Spina is wonderful in the role of Calaf, the unknown prince, who sings the famous aria Nessum Dorma, None Shall Sleep – while the whole of Peking is awakened to learn his name by a desperate princess. Turnandot is performed stupendously by American soprano Susan Foster. But in the end, it is the whole of the Opera Australia chorus who takes centre stage and makes this production well worth seeing.

Until Mar 19, Sydney Opera House, $58-297, 9318 8200, opera-australia.org.au

This new production of The Magic Flute is likely the most accessible opera we’ve ever seen. A “singspiel” opera, combining song and spoken dialogue, it is sung in English, with supertitles.

Designed by Julie Taymor, director of The Lion King, The Magic Flute’s enchanting stage and actors ­are sprayed with bright colors, scientific figures, and geometric shapes, and the set is brought alive with puppets and perpetual movement.

The story follows bird-catcher Papageno (Andrew Jones) and Prince Tamino (Andrew Brunsdon) who are tested as they strive to find love and truth. Meanwhile, the virtuous Sarastro (David Parkin) and the dark Queen of the Night (Emma Pearson) vie for influence. Of course, a magic flute and musical bells help the two achieve love and happiness.

The magic is in the music, and although the cast must compete with this over-the-top staging, Mozart’s last opera gives them the power to do so. Papageno dances through his role, and Queen of the Night pulls out the stops for her difficult aria.

Until Mar 23, Sydney Opera House, $70-297, 9318 8200, opera-australia.org.au

BY KRISTIN HENNING