I don’t do stars, but giving this one five. As one of my colleagues said, it’s Iolanthe’s year.

This tightly choreographed two-hander is a bruising examination of a gay man reflecting on the traumatic origin story of how he came into his sexuality, and its long shadow through a life.

Lim has gathered us all into her consciousness, assigning us the role of both active participants and welcome witnesses, as she travels back in time to answer the seemingly irresolvable questions which have dogged her all her hyphenated ‘Asian-Australian’ life. Who is she? Where does she fit?

Jack Karlson may have unwittingly become part of our nation’s underdog mythology, but like all myths, the real personal history got overlooked. A Succulent Chinese Musical?! seeks to partially rectify this, while paying fond tribute with appropriately over-the-top dramatics and confabulatory licence to the boys’ home runaway turned serial prison escapee.

First staged in 2010, A Czar is Born returns with old-fashioned silliness, musical numbers, and a solid cast.

Self-aware, careening, and sickeningly hilarious.

A communion of shared fairy bread. A sudden outpouring of light. A red ute. With PACT’s ambitious production, Salusinszky is in a firmament of her own, incandescent with her own strange light.

A thick spire of twisted fabrics reaches up, or plunges down; a heavy umbilical cord between sky and earth. A frozen vortex is at its base, or a dark and oily mirror.