QUIETLY, with none of the razzmatazz we’ve come to expect from The Q, The Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre has posted the first half of its 2021 season online, and it looks remarkably familiar.

The subtext is that in July, The Q suddenly let go its founding director and program manager Stephen Pike, described by me in November last year as “the canniest and most imaginative theatre programmer in town”.

At the time Pike said, with thinly-veiled disappointment, that he felt it was time to move on “to allow a new set of ideas to be implemented” after 13 years at The Q.

But even as The Q is, at last, advertising for a replacement, his covid-thwarted season of song and hard-hitting drama lives on.

Among the 2021 choices previously planned by Pike for 2020 are Eddie Daniels’ “Battle of the Voices: Roy Orbison vs Gene Pitney”, “Wolf Lullaby”, staged by Jordan Best for Echo Theatre, the heart-warming “Lamb”, a Red Stitch & Critical Stages touring production, Glenn Starr’s Hit Parade, and the riotous “Don Juan” from Slightly Isolated Dog Production.

View the 2021 season at The Q.