The Year's Best Arts - Sydney

There are only a couple weeks left of this god-awful year, thank fuck. The past 12 months have dished out enough disappointment, outrage and head-shaking bewilderment to last a lifetime, but it wasn't all bad. Sydney's arts lovers were treated to a fair few reasons to feel a tiny bit hopeful that humanity hadn't totally lost the plot.

While the rest of us may be happy to see the back of 2016, director Kip Williams had very little to complain about this year (save for his largely panned production of Miss Julie for MTC, but let's not dwell). Starring Australian stage stalwart Robyn Nevin, Williams' production of Arthur Miller's classic, All My Sons, for Sydney Theatre Company, was a blistering example of how to revitalise an old text. His trippy, feverish staging of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream found brilliantly original solutions for a narrative that after four centuries of scrutiny could easily be threadbare. Williams rounded off the season by landing the top spot at STC as its new Artistic Director, stepping into the breach after the recently appointed British incumbent, Jonathan Church, tapped out after only a few months in the job.

Musical theatre can usually be relied on to be in fine form in Sydney, and this year was no different. Director Dean Bryant's brilliantly executed production of Little Shop Of Horrors at Hayes Theatre, starring Brent Hill and Esther Hannaford, was a standout hit both technically and visually. One of the great Australian entertainers of his generation, Anthony Warlow, was a powerhouse lead in Fiddler On The Roof and Disney Theatrical's latest juggernaut production, Aladdin, delivered all the glitz and magic that anyone could wish for. One of the surprise hits of the year came from bright young thing, director Lucas Jervies, in his immersive, cabaret-inspired ode to the Kings Cross of yesteryear, Hidden Sydney. Due to popular demand, a second season was added just a few months after the premiere run, and word on the street is Jervies is now hatching a plan to stage similar events in other Australian cities.

Sydney was also wowed by politically powerful theatre with important social messages. Leah Purcell's visionary reimagining of Henry Lawson's short story, The Drover's Wife, for Belvoir St Theatre, transformed this story of colonial frontierism into a parable of Indigenous injustice. Sport For Jove artistic director Damien Ryan repurposed the Classical text Antigone to explore the complexities of empathy and ideology in the age of terror. Griffin Theatre Company's world premiere production of Stephen Carleton's The Turquoise Elephant offered a chilling vision of the coming climate apocalypse and the blinkered people who might inhabit this bleak future.

Dance fans were also well served this year, with several standout productions gracing Sydney's stages. Following its highly acclaimed Melbourne season, The Australian Ballet's mounting of John Neumeier's Nijinsky, charting the rise and fall of the greatest male dancer of all time, was a proud showcase of the world-class skills of this company's talented men. Sydney Dance Company continued to impress with two stellar world premieres by artistic director Rafael Bonachela - Lux Tenebris and Anima- further cementing the choreographer's reputation as Australia's most significant dance maker.