Arts in the City is HELEN MUSA’s weekly wrap of arts news from around the town.

In what looks like an arts traffic jam of a weekend, Mockingbird Theatre Company is opening Steve Martin’s absurdist comedy, Meteor Shower, to be directed by Chris Baldock. Jess Beange, Maxine Eayrs, Anto Hermida and Sachin Nayak play two couples planning to watch a rare meteor shower. But as the stars come out, so do the home truths. Belco Arts, June 25-July 5.

Opening on the same night is Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s famous drama, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, set in a small, rural cottage in Connemara County Galway where middle-aged Maureen and her ageing, manipulative mother, Mag, live their isolated existence. Directed by Cate Clelland for Free-Rain Theatre, it runs at ACT Hub, Kingston, June 25-July 5.

There’s one more opening that night: NZ comedienne Penny Ashton’s Promise and Promiscuity. Billed as razor-sharp, it’s a romp through the Regency period with characters created in the likeness of Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines and is said to have been performed more than 600 times to sell out houses from Edinburgh to Adelaide. The Street Theatre, June 25-29.

Canberra Qwire is going operatic, reinterpreting Purcell’s 1689 opera, Dido & Aeneas, to explore themes of Queer love, loss and heartache. Joined by four soloists and a chamber ensemble led by the Ellery Quartet, the Qwire will perform the work in its entirety, returning to the stage after intermission to offer a musical response to the opera with contemporary repertoire. These Precious Hours: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas Reimagined, Llewellyn Hall, June 28.

Canberra Youth Theatre, armed with a one-off funding boost from the ACT government, will take its comedy, Work, But This Time Like You Mean It, to Sydney in October for a one-week season at The Rebel Theatre in Walsh Bay. Written by Melbourne playwright Honor Webster-Mannison, it was the winner of Canberra Youth Theatre’s Emerging Playwright Commission in 2022. 

The Animals were a major force in the British Invasion of the 1960s. They’ll take the stage for their Final Curtain Tour at The B in Queanbeyan on November 2 to perform classics such as We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood and The House of The Rising Sun.