Tim Finn’s new musical will tour Australia in 2017 after enchanting audiences in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Director Simon Phillips describes Ladies in Black as “the mouse that roared” noting that Tim Finn’s musical comes “with none of the brouhaha” accompanying big commercial musicals from overseas. And yet, it has captivated audiences, with sell-out seasons in Brisbane and Melbourne. It also won the 2016 Helpmann Award for Best New Australian Work.

Now the Queensland Theatre Company production is to tour Australia, opening as part of the 2017 Sydney Festival on January 3 before moving on to Brisbane, Melbourne and Canberra. Announcing the dates at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre, where the tour will begin, Finn delighted the assembled throng when he picked up his guitar to play one of the songs from the show called Model Gowns, sung by the exotic “continental” Magda.

^{Naomi Price, Kate Cole, Lucy Maunder and Christen O’Leary in Ladies in Black. Photo by Rob Maccoll}

Adapted by writer Carolyn Burns from Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel The Women in Black, the show is set in the 1950s in Sydney’s top department store Goodes (a...