The double bill has many acclaimed Hunter musical and opera performers. The songs from musicals in the first half include I Am What I Am, from La Cage aux Folles, presented by a colourfully garbed Wayne Rogers, who was a star of television show Australia's Got Talent. Rachel Davies will present She Used to be Mine from the Broadway musical Waitress, which has its Australian premiere in Sydney in 2020, Nic Stabler sings Why God, from Miss Saigon, which he made a showstopper in Opera Hunter's production, Drew Holmes presents I Don't Understand the Poor from A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder, Stephanie Priest Always Starting Over from 2015 Broadway hit If/Then, Michael Saunders This Nearly Was Mine from South Pacific, PJ Willis Where is the Life that Late I Led from Kiss Me Kate, Wendy Ratcliffe the Cabaret title song, and there are choruses from South Pacific, Fiddler on the Roof and Annie.

There is also a performance by Melbourne tenor Samuel Thomas-Holland of Joanna from Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

After another performer had to pull out of the show Samuel Thomas-Holland was recommended to Opera Hunter by the producer of a work he appeared in at Gosford in July. He plays the lead role in Cavalleria Rusticana of a young Italian man, Turridu, who returns to his village home after serving in the army to find that his fiancée, Lola (Joanna Andrew), has married the local carter, Alfio (PJ Willis). Turridu makes Lola jealous by seducing peasant girl Santuzza (Marian Moroney). And his mother, Lucia (Megan Williams), is repeatedly caught up in the young people's relationships as unexpected things happen.

Cavalleria Rusticana translates as "rustic chivalry", a tongue-in-cheek title as the characters' behaviour hardly suggests valorous natures.

The show will be presented in its English language version, with a supporting cast as the village residents.

While Samuel Thomas-Holland lives in Melbourne, he has appeared in operas and musicals around Australia and will be working early in 2020 with West Australian Opera in Perth.

Love, Life and Musicals & Cavalleria Rusticana is directed by Michael Blaxland, with Mercia Buck as musical director. It has 7.30pm shows at the NTC Theatre in Lambton nightly from Wednesday, December 4, to Saturday, December 7, plus a 1.30pm Saturday matinee.

Tickets, $40, concession and student $35; ring 4952 4958.

CARL Caulfield plays the title role of the famed eccentric painter in this premiere production of his new work, and is on stage for an unbroken 90 minutes as watchers follow Dali from childhood to late life and he has different interactions with the people he knows and makes contact with.

Those characters, who include his parents, his wife, Gala, poet Frederico Garcia Lorca, and other artists, are engaging figures through the performances of Shane Bransdon and Charlotte De Wit. And director Daniel Stoddart has made good, and often amusing, use of background projections.

The relationships between the figures come out well, with the demands of Dali's parents in his childhood and teens leading him to become more eccentric as an adult. And the audience can certainly understand why his words and movements are often idiosyncratic.

YOU don't need to be familiar with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to enjoy this amusing sequel by US playwrights Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcan, which director Fran Hodgson and the staging team have made very entertaining. The story is set two years after the original story at a Christmas celebration in the home of one of the Bennet sisters, Elizabeth (Lissy Shand), and her husband, Fitzwilliam Darcy (Daniel Dennis), which is attended by three of the other four sisters, Jane Bingley (Megan Connelly) and hubby Charles (Alex Burke), Lydia Wickham (Alexandra Comber), whose husband is absent, the unwed middle sister, Mary (Brooke Cowley), and two cousins, Arthur De Bourgh (Carl Gregory) and Lady Anne De Bourgh (Leilani Boughton). While Mary and Arthur are attracted to each other, Anne is determined that Arthur will marry her. So the celebration gives rise to surprises.

FRANK Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, adapted it into a musical a year after the novel was published in 1901, and it certainly has differences to the popular Judy Garland 1939 film version. It has been constantly been altered by staging teams, and that is the case with this enjoyable production.

Director Paul Causley has retained most of the original music, but he and others have rewritten many of the lyrics. The show's format has a colourful jester as a narrator who sets up the characters and their interactions.