This week, Opera Hunter will begin the two-week season of Young Frankenstein, a darkly funny musical with songs by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan which has Frederick Frankenstein, a university lecturer who specialises in anatomy, attending his grandfather's funeral, with his surname leading to him being asked to find the Monster his grandfather created, and the subsequent search having him encounter many unusual people.

The musical has a good cast, with Drew Holmes as the young Frankenstein, Danny Folpp as the Monster, Carl Gregory in two roles, one of which is a police inspector, plus Dom Lacey, Alana Wilson, Stephanie Hilkmann, Trish Aumuller, and Mike Peters, with Zac Smith as director, Alexandra Rigby as musical director, and Jody Hooker as choreographer.

The musical has six performances at Warners Bay's Lake Macquarie Performing Arts Centre between March 19 and 28 - Friday and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. Tickets - $35, concession $30 - can be booked through Sticky Tickets.

Newcastle Dinner Theatre Company's Bloody Murder, an amusing send-up by Ed Sala of Agatha Christie's plays that was to open in March last year, will finally hit the stage at St Matthew's Anglican Church Hall, in Georgetown, with seven performances between April 16 and May 1.

While there will be no meals because of COVID restrictions, the $25 tickets will include coffee, tea and biscuits.Phone 0403 705 680 to book.

The show is directed by Sandra Monk, with the cast including Geoff and Steve McLauchlan, Jack Madden, Abigail Woods, Jennifer Masson, Ann-Maree Day, Suellen Hall, and Natalie Burg.

Recently staged shows have confirmed the talents of the region's theatre people of all ages.

The senior acting students at Hunter School of the Performing Arts, for example, made the characters and situations in English playwright Dennis Kelly's DNA very realistic and engaging.

The play looks at the reactions of teenage school students to an action they took against a male class member that they fear led to his death.

While the text has the action moving between different places such as a street and a hillside, this production had everything happen in Australian bushland.

The play was staged in an intimate studio, with watchers sitting around a grassed area. There was a large tree with names scrawled on its bark, and lots of dead leaves on the ground.

The most constantly viewed of the 11 characters were Phil (Nathaniel Frost), who is initially quiet, but tells other students what they need to do to avoid being arrested, and Leah (Shyla Schillert), who wants to be his girlfriend, but is continually ignored by Phil as he keeps eating chips.

The actors, under the direction of two other students, Clarence Lawrence and Zubin Rawal, had watchers engrossed through its unbroken 90-minute running time.

The English comedy Two, by Jim Cartwright, which is set in the saloon of an English hotel, and has a male and a female actor each playing seven very different characters, had its initial four-day season at Newcastle Theatre Company's venue from March 3 to 6.

It subsequently moved to Adamstown's Brunker Community Theatre, formerly known as Theatre on Brunker, which had to cancel its 2020 shows, including one that had begun its season, when COVID restrictions were imposed.

Most performances before the virus struck had meals before the show, and, while that still can't be done, the Brunker performances of Two, which are on Friday and Saturday, at 8pm, until March 27, plus a 2pm show on Sunday, March 21, have the audience seated in what looks like a hotel saloon.

People sit at tables of various sizes and generally have a glass of wine, beer or soft drink in front of them.

The actors, Lynda Rennie and Richard Murray, under the guidance of director Rosemary Dartnell, certainly make it a pub.

Tickets, $25, include a free cup of tea or coffee. Phone 0412 797 395, or email brunkertheatre@gmail.com.

Pay for the tickets on arrival.

Knock and Run Theatre's The Unseen finally had its season at the Civic Playhouse last week.

The play, written by Craig Wright, has two prisoners, who have been jailed for a decade, conversing through the walls of their cells each day, with their words indicating they have no hope of being released and that they will continue to be brutally treated by a guard that one of them refer to as Smash.

But when a new, unseen prisoner is put in a cell nearby and uses an unusual code to communicate with them, their exchanges have more hope.

While the actors, Phillip Ross and Matthew Heys as the prisoners, and Paul Sansom as Smash, did a good job, the play didn't grab me as much as other stagings I have seen. It ran for just over an hour, whereas the story generally runs for 80 minutes, so cuts had been made.

A new locally developed rock musical, The Road to Tibooburra, which looks at an aging singer's concerns when he joined a bus tour across NSW, needed more rehearsals, as the loudness of the large band often made it hard to hear the lyrics.