Busy season for Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre in 2017

For its ninth season in 2017, the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre – the Q – is making some changes. Program manager Stephen Pike says two free initiatives are intended to make the theatre more appealing, particularly to younger people: the Q-U25 Club offers special pricing and promotions to patrons aged 25 and under. For general audiences, the Q-Club is a loyalty program with discounts, rewards, promotions and members' only events. Two of the shows will be presented in the Bicennential Hall rather than the Q itself and patrons will be encouraged to bring a picnic and buy drinks from the bar to make it a more festive occasion.

But the main focus, as always, is the program that's on offer to see with those tickets and Pike has assembled a busy year full of plays, dance, musicals, and a couple of more unusual items.

In June, veteran actor and Gold Logie winner John Wood will appear at the Q with fellow Blue Heelers star Julie Nihill in the 2011 comedy Bakersfield Mist by Stephen Sachs. Maude (played by Nihill) is an unemployed bartender living in a trailer park who buys a painting from an op shop for a few dollars. Then she finds out it might be a Jackson Pollock, worth millions, and New York art expert Lionel Percy (Wood) comes to authenticate it.

"It's a terrific piece on the nature of art and what it means, the gender war, the class war," Wood says.

"It's a very funny play, very interesting."

British actress Mandi Lodge will star in two productions. She'll be in the first show of the season in February, Always ... Patsy Cline.

"I'm a little old for Patsy Cline," Lodge says. (Singer and actress Courtney Conway will play the legendary American country and western singer of the title.) Instead, Lodge will play Louise Seger, the real-life Houston fan who befriended Cline in a Texas honky-tonk in 1961. The two maintained their relationship by letter and telephone until the singer's death in a plane crash in 1963.

The play explores their friendship and there will be 27 Patsy Cline songs, including such hits as Crazy, throughout the show.

This is one of the shows that will be presented cabaret-style in the Bicentennial Hall; the other, the Adele tribute show Rumour Has It, starring Naomi Price (The Voice Australia), will be on in April.

In May, Lodge will swap the Texas twang for something closer to her native Yorkshire accent when she plays the frustrated middle-aged Liverpool housewife and mother who takes a transforming holiday in WIlly Russell's one-woman play Shirley Valentine.

"It's a little bit dark; a very realistic comedy," she says.

Lodge says Shirley is a woman whose self-esteem has been battered by long years of school, marriage and parenthood. She feels her life has stagnated, but when her best friend wins an all-expenses-paid holiday to Greece for two and invites her along, it's revelatory.

"To me, it's a journey of self-discovery," Lodge says. She sees it as a meaningful exploration of someone rediscovering what she's lost in life and thinks this might be why it's been popular for many years. The play was one of the first presented in the Q's opening season in 2008.

Notable about a couple of the shows next year is that they use small casts to play many people, frequently a necessary economy on tour but also a test of talent. In Marie Jones' Stones in his Pockets (March), a comedy about an Irish community turned upside down by the arrival of a Hollywood movie shoot, two actors play more than a dozen characters, from Hollywood big shots to local extras, with minimal costume shifts and props to facilitate the quick changes.

Around the World in 80 Days (August), adapted by Toby Hulse from Jules Verne's novel, has three actors but is much bigger in its scope, bringing to the stage an international adventure and a lot of characters as it follows Mr Fogg and his valet Passepartout as they try to win a bet by completing the title journey while being pursued by Detective Fix of Scotland Yard, who suspects Fogg of robbing a bank.

Pike says, "It looks like it will be fun ... the director, Terence O'Connell, has done a lot of good work."

Local theatre is represented by Pigeonhole Theatre's production of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (September). After its critically acclaimed production of Playhouse Creatures at the Q this year, Pike says he wanted to support the company in its efforts to produce high-quality theatre and bringing the Australian classic – about sugar-cane cutters and the women who love them – to the Q seemed like a good idea.

Music and dance fans will be catered for by From Broadway to Ballroom (October) starring Liz Beamish (Phantom of the Opera) and Lachlan Davis (Les Miserables) along with 2015 World Dance Council Champions Emma and Rhett Salmon, in a show that combines musical theatre numbers and ballroom dancing.

For ballet aficionados, there's Melbourne Ballet Company's Arche! (August) – directed by former Canberran Simon Hoy, described by Pike as "a very creative young man". This is an original ballet based in part on Swan Lake but also drawing inspiration from other sources including the Greek myth Leda and the Swan. It has a score including music by Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Einaudi and Morricone.

A new original musical theatre show – being written and produced locally – is JULIA: the Musical (July). The librettists are John Camillo and Francesco Sofo, the music is being composed by Sofo and his son Adam, and Pike is directing this look at the career of Australia's first female prime minister.

Pike said that when Francesco Sofo brought the idea to him he was intrigued and when he heard some of the music and delved deeper into the project, he was hooked, especially considering the success of Keating! the Musical. He says this show is "more tongue-in-cheek" than its political predecessor. Queanbeyan City Council is producing the show with Sofo, Pike says, and Gillard is not involved in any capacity: "She said good luck with it."

Slightly unusual offerings next year are Hypnolicious, British comedy hypnotist Matt Hale's show in which audience volunteers come on stage to have fun while others watch and marvel at what happens (May) and Cinema Fiasco: Trolls 2 (July) with Janet A. McLeod and Geoff Wallis, in which the pair of bad-movie buffs present a screening of the 1990 movie Trolls 2 – which, despite its title, is not a sequel to the 1986 movie Trolls, nor does it, in fact, feature any trolls, but is merely an attempt to cash in on the earlier film. Audience members are encouraged to heckle the bad acting, poor dialogue and decidedly un-special effects of this cheaply made horror movie.

Other, non-season offerings next year include Queanbeyan City Council's production of another musical, The Addams Family; the children's shows 6D by The Listies, Horrible Harriet, and The Wind in the Willows; some Morning Melodies concerts, and Town Folk with Damien Callinan, a project in which the comedian will capture local identities on camera and combine interviews, interactions and live segments (August) in a multimedia show.

Pike says he wants to keep things at the Q how people say they like them: intimate and engaging, while also providing plenty of entertainment. "That's what we do."