Their nature often has watchers smiling and laughing and occasionally seeing a more serious side of what is happening.

Grainery's 2019 show I'll Be Home For Christmas, for example, looked at the disappearance in 1967 of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt just a few days before Christmas when he had an afternoon swim in a bay near his Melbourne home. The disappearance led to revelations about Holt's marriage and other women in his life.

There were many rumours about what happened to Holt, such as him having been kidnapped by the crew of a Russian submarine that had been seen off the southern Australian coast.

I'll Be Home For Christmas, which was written and directed by Theo Rule, the head of the Grainery Theatre team, received eight 2020 CONDA Award nominations and won three trophies: Best Musical Production, Musical Direction (Stuart Brown and Okke Klassen), and Performer in a Supporting Role in a Musical (Jerre Succar).

Succar played a Russian spy who was sent to indoctrinate Holt into communist ideology, but ended up befriending him.

The show included a bright mix of new songs and numbers from the 1960s.

As the COVID-19 restrictions prevented the Grainery Theatre team from putting together and staging a new musical at the Civic Theatre from December 19 to 20 this year, it will present an online musical feature, The Grainery Christmas Hour 2020, on YouTube on Thursday, beginning at 4pm.

It's a variety show with singers, dancers, actors, puppets, clowns, live animals, and more. You can join the free celebration at grainery.org.au or search for Grainery Christmas Hour on YouTube.

Theo Rule has advised watchers to grab a fruit mince pie and gather around the TV with your family and friends, "because we've got something for absolutely everyone."

Rule is hopeful that things will get back to normal by early next year. He has two shows listed for 2021.

The first is an independent three-hander comedy, Dale and Kevin Go To Heaven, that he wrote in association with Jared Mainey, which will be at the Civic Playhouse from July 1 to 3.

The Grainery Theatre, which is an offshoot of the Grainery Church, will return to the Civic Theatre from December 21 to 23 with a Christmas show, Good King Wenceslas, that features an original musical score and book.

The Grainery Christmas Hour 2020 will mark the end of the theatre shows presented in Newcastle this year, with the COVID-19 restrictions, hopefully also being near an end.

The initial restrictions were imposed in mid-March, just as Hunter School of the Performing Arts began staging the premiere of an Australian play, As I Lay Dreaming, that had watchers engaged. The production team managed to squeeze in a couple of shows.

HSPA is renowned for getting students to perform in new plays of many types. This play, by Catherine McKinnon, had many very different characters meeting on a river bank where three people and the 10-year-old daughter of one of them had come together to reminisce about a young woman who had drowned in the river a decade earlier, with her ghost appearing to watch them. The play, which featured senior students, had watchers intent on the performance.

Another HSPA production, Shrek: The Musical JR, which had been chosen at the end of the previous year for a performance by primary school students in October this year, went ahead as planned.

People were able to watch it as a live streaming show. The show was a stage adaptation of a classic animated film that had its title character, a young male ogre who lives in a swamp with his demanding parents, meeting many colourful fairy tale characters when he flees from his home.

As the production had two alternating casts, many people watched the show twice.

And Bearfoot Theatre, a company formed by young people in their early 20s, engagingly put together live-streamed shows, such as a book-reading meeting, that were enjoyable reliefs from the pandemic stresses.

Youth theatre companies certainly led the way in putting together shows that people could see as the restrictions began to ease.

Young People's Theatre, for example, had to postpone its April-May production of the popular musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang JR that has three young people restoring an old race car that turns out to be a magic vehicle with the ability to float and take flight.

The new opening date was September 28, with people sitting widely apart to meet the restrictions, open-mouthed in awe of the car's movements.

Newcastle Theatre Company, which decided to present the shows it had been unable to stage this year in 2021, had theatre teams eagerly seeking to perform shows at its Lambton venue when it re-opened in September.

The October show staged there, The Fix, by Newcastle's Dez Robertson, had a short premiere season at the Royal Exchange in 2017.

The Fix had watchers pleased thrilled as they watched the interactions between two men on the rooftop of a high building.