This year's program sees five companies featuring for the first time, 10 productions in their world premiere seasons, two major musicals and, as of Monday, there are 12 new productions going on sale, adding to the 29 that have already been announced.

"It's a season bursting with innovative Australia work and superstar talent," Canberra Theatre Centre director Alex Budd said.

"It's been more media for the Canberra Theatre Centre over the last two years about our business. But sadly, it's been about the business of being closed. We're now back. We're staying back like I said last year, and we're back in the business of being open."

Joining the previously announced musical, Six - which focuses on the wives of Henry VIII - is a second, major musical, Girl From North Country, the star of which, Lisa McCune was alongside to make the announcement.

Featuring the music of Bob Dylan, the critically acclaimed musical set in 1934 Minnesota has already found a home on London's West End and Broadway, and the Australian premiere season is set to come to Canberra in August.

"The way I see it, it's a play with music, which happens to be the music of Bob Dylan in a reimagined way," McCune said,

"The words that I would use to describe it is soulful, hopeful, emotional and the perfect tonic for our times. And I think it's just very special.

"It's a beautiful piece of playwriting. And for people that like words, I think it's just beautiful. He's a gorgeous playwright, Conor McPherson and obviously, the songs of Bob Dylan are quite poetic."

The annual Reconciliation Day Eve event is set to return, featuring singer Christine Anu, and Australian circus company Gravity & Other Myths will mark their debut in Canberra with their production, Backbone. And as always, the new variant of The Wharf Revue will be unleashed on Canberra in October.

Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who shot to fame after his performance at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding, will also be on stage in August. Australian Dance Theatre will return with Savage, a new work by artistic director and QL2 alumn Daniel Riley, and Back to Back Theatre will be in Canberra for the first time with The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes.

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Meanwhile, Canberra playwright Dylan Van Den Berg's new play Whitefella Yella Tree, directed by Griffin Theatre Company's Artistic Director Declan Greene, will transfer directly from Griffin Theatre in Sydney to the intimate Courtyard Studio in its world premiere season.

"It's the story of two young Aboriginal boys who meet under a strange tree that grows yellow sour fruit, and they have an important job - to exchange information on the white fellas who've just arrived in what we now call Australia," Van Den Berg said.

"They build a friendship based on teenage one-upmanship and mucking about, and that soon turns into a romance. So they fall in love in a context that is yet to be tainted by religion, colonisation and anti-queer mentality."

For more information go to canberratheatrecentre.com.au.

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