With Three Tours Closing Early, Is Everything Okay With Australian Theatre?
All upcoming Sydney shows of Waitress the musical have been cancelled. (Photo: Jeff Busby)
by Chris Peterson
One early closing is unfortunate. Two starts to feel like a pattern. Three makes you wonder what exactly is going on.
Over the past several months, Australian musical theatre has seen a rough run of news. Back to the Future: The Musical closed on January 25, after earlier plans for a wider national tour were scrapped. Beetlejuice is now closing in Brisbane on July 5, with stops in Sydney, Perth, and Adelaide canceled. Now Waitress will end in Melbourne on July 19, with its planned Sydney season no longer happening.
The strange part is that Australia’s musical theatre scene is not empty. Far from it. MJ the Musical is playing Perth through July 19, The Lion King is running in Sydney, and there are other professional titles either playing or coming soon, including Pretty Woman, Anastasia, Heathers, The Book of Mormon, Six, Fiddler on the Roof, and A Beautiful Noise.
So this is not really a “do Australians still like musicals?” question. Clearly, they do. The better question is whether the commercial touring model is starting to buckle under the cost of moving big Broadway-style productions across a country as geographically spread out as Australia.
Live Performance Australia reported record overall ticket revenue and attendance in 2024, with $3.35 billion in ticket sales and more than 31.4 million tickets issued. But that growth was driven heavily by contemporary music and major international tours. Musical theatre revenue actually fell 2%, even while attendance rose slightly. Theatre revenue fell 13.4%.
That is a weird and very specific problem. Audiences are still going out, but they are choosing carefully. Creative Australia’s latest survey found that 74% of Australians attended at least one live arts event or festival in 2025, the highest level recorded in that survey. But 60% also said ticket prices were the biggest barrier.
For a large musical, that math gets ugly fast. Sets, crew, freight, housing, marketing, venue costs, musicians, tech, and insurance all add up. If ticket sales are soft, even for a recognizable title, there may not be much room to ride it out.
That is what makes these closures worth watching. Back to the Future, Beetlejuice, and Waitress are not obscure shows. They are known titles with marketing hooks built in. If those productions cannot make the numbers work across Australia, producers are going to think twice before sending the next big tour everywhere.
Australia clearly still has an audience for musical theatre. The issue is whether the current financial model is making it harder for those shows to actually reach them.