In Production

Newsies Jnr

Newsies Jnr will be the first youth production from the PATH program, produced by Music Theatre Projects. This work hasn’t been staged in Canberra, but its subject matter will resonate strongly in the world as our relationship with media rapidly transitions. The work is a great showcase for young singer/actor/dancers and highly entertaining. Tickets should be on sale soon. For now we are focussed on the casting process.

Background

Dianna Nixon has been working with young dancers, singers, musicians and actors from this region for the past 20 years. The ACT and Southern NSW region has many great dance schools and performing arts trainers, producing many young people who go on to tertiary and post-school training in Australia and overseas, mostly outside of the region. Music theatre is a major employer of performing artists, and a hugely popular and influential artform, so we felt we needed to create a clearer pathway from initial training in this region to the profession.

PATH – Performing After Training Hard – has been created to support young people from our region who wish to follow a professional pathway.

Every year we will produce a music theatre work, with a strong dance focus, showcasing the most serious young performers from the region.

We also hope that PATH will help build critical mass so that we might be able to produce professional work initiated in the ACT and toured to the rest of Australia.

Project Status

We have held our first PATH event workshop event – a 2 day audition workshop in Feb 2025, followed by our auditions for Newsies Jnr. We chose Newsies Jnr because of its strong subject matter, diverse characters, its focus on movement and its suitability for a young cast.

We have built a great team, and are partnering with The Street Theatre in Canberra, our premiere professional production house in this region.

Collaborators

Director/producer/vocal coach: Dianna Nixon

Choreographer: Helen Linkenbagh

Production designer: Martin Thomas

Musical director: Oakelani Edmonds

Work-In-Progress

We circulated audition information to our networks. Auditionees submitted an expression of interest and provided some training information. They received a couple of tasks to learn prior to audition day on Sunday March 16th 2025. We’ll run another audition round in April.

For audition info: mtprojectsltd@gmail.com

Important dates and activities

The season at The Street Theatre runs from Tuesday 14th October till Sunday 19th October, 2025.

These performances of DISNEY’S NEWSIES JR 2024 (Royalty Bearing) are licensed exclusively by Music Theatre International (Australasia).