Some Shows Leave the Room Before the Lights Come Up. The Sapphires Was Never One of Them.

A reflection on Queensland Theatre Company's production of The Sapphires, Bille Brown Theatre, April 28 – May 24, 2026.

There is something that happens in a theatre when the room is small enough that you could, if you dared, reach out and touch the stage. The usual distance between audience and performer — that comfortable, polite remove — disappears. What replaces it is something closer to presence. To witnessing.

That was the Bille Brown Theatre for The Sapphires. And from the first note, the crowd knew it.

Queensland Theatre Company and Canberra Theatre Centre's production of Tony Briggs' iconic musical returned to the stage this season under the direction of the man who first brought it to life — Wesley Enoch — with a new generation of First Nations performers stepping into a story that, more than twenty years on, has lost none of its power.

The show is set in 1969. Four Yorta Yorta women from regional Victoria — sisters, dreamers, singers — are discovered by a city talent scout and propelled from a small-town dance hall to the frontlines of the Vietnam War, performing for American troops in the middle of a conflict they can barely comprehend. It sounds unlikely. It is entirely true.

Soul, Up Close

What struck immediately was the intimacy. The front rows of the Bille Brown sit at stage level — not raised above it, not separated from it, but alongside it. The performers were right there. Their breath, their footwork, their joy. When the four leads locked into harmony, it didn't feel like something being performed at you. It felt like something happening around you.

Ruby Henaway, Aurora Liddle-Christie, Tehya Makani and Taeg Twist — all making their Queensland Theatre Company debuts — brought an astonishing collective energy to the McCrae sisters. Each distinct, each fully inhabited, each carrying the weight of a story that belongs to real women and real history.

Jack Bannister as Dave Lovelace, the fast-talking, warm-hearted promoter at the centre of the story's most tender romance, found the perfect register — funny when he needed to be, quietly devastated when the moment asked for it. The love story between Dave and one of the sisters is the kind that sneaks up on you. One scene at a time, it builds into something genuinely moving.

A Live Band That Did More Than Play

Musical Director Nathaniel Andrew's arrangements were a revelation. The score — built on 1960s soul classics including Respect, Ain't No Mountain High Enough and The Shoop Shoop Song — was performed live, woven into the fabric of the production rather than separated from it. The band wasn't in a pit. It was part of the story.

Choreographer Yolande Brown's work was similarly integrated — joyful without being showy, precise without feeling mechanical. When the women moved, it felt earned.

The production design, from set and costumes by Richard Roberts through to Craig Wilkinson's video design and Ben Hughes' lighting, worked seamlessly to shift the Bille Brown between a country dance hall, a Vietnam staging ground, and everywhere in between. Props carried the period. Light carried the emotion.

Why It Still Matters

Tony Briggs wrote this story because he needed to. He heard his mother Laurel Robinson's accounts of her youth — the music, the touring, the history she carried — and realised he was being given access to something that could disappear. He turned it into a play. Then a film. Now, more than two decades on, it returns to the stage with the same original director and a cast who understand exactly whose legacy they are holding.

Wesley Enoch's program notes put it plainly: "Theatre is continuation." He wrote about the responsibility of storytelling, about the fragility of progress, about the women who stepped into a world that had only just begun to acknowledge them — and chose ambition anyway.

The Sapphires is not a gentle show. It contains racism, loss, war, grief that took years to be spoken aloud. But it holds all of that inside something fundamentally joyful. A story about women who sang when they were told there was no stage for them. Who showed up before the room was ready.

The Brisbane audience at the Bille Brown was ready. And they responded to every moment of it — the laughs, the silences, the standing ovations that felt less like courtesy and more like gratitude.

This was the kind of night that reminds you why local theatre matters. Why the small room, the live band, the performers right there in front of you — why none of that can be replicated anywhere else.

The Sapphires has finished its Brisbane season. But what it left behind — in the room, in the people who were there — will take considerably longer to fade.

The Sapphires was presented by Queensland Theatre Company and Canberra Theatre Centre at the Bille Brown Theatre, South Brisbane. Written by Tony Briggs. Directed by Wesley Enoch.