Likening the coming season at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre’s 2025 theatre program to a patchwork quilt, The Q’s artistic director and programming manager Jordan Best promised at the season launch on Monday that it would be “always colourful, interesting and full of excitement”.

Continuing the metaphor, Best promised changing shapes and colours in a patchwork of opera, comedy, popular music, Shakespeare, cabaret, drama, and musical theatre.

Enjoyment, she said, had been foremost in her mind as she planned this, her fifth season, as she sought to bring “something that engages with sections of our community who perhaps haven’t come to the theatre before”.

The Q, she said, would have plenty to offer families, with the return of comedians The Listies, Mr Snotbottom, the Trash Test Dummies and a story from Terrapin in Tasmania.

Mayor of Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council Kenrick Winchester was on hand to assure those present that the Q The Locals program would be back to help local theatre practitioners develop new work, stage existing texts, and learn from those more experienced in the industry.

There’ll be crowd-pleasing silliness when Garry Starr returns to perform every Penguin Classic novel ever written in an hour, mostly naked, although he will wear flippers, then in a first, Echo Theatre is joining forces with Lakespeare to bring Macbeth to Aunty Louise Brown Park in February.

Trash Test Dummies Circus will kick off the year of children’s entertainment in April as the household wheelie bin is taken to new heights.

In a coup for The Q, Opera Queensland’s hybrid show, Are You Lonesome Tonight, makes its first  interstate tour, featuring songs by Puccini, Verdi, Slim Dusty, Troy Cassar-Daley and Dolly Parton.

The first Q The Locals show for 2025 sees local playwright Joanna Richards’ comedy Lifeboat staged by Caitlin Baker following a Q The Developments program held this year.

From Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in June comes Canberra playwright David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era, 65 short vignettes billed as “comic, tragic, and everything in between.”

For NAIDOC Week The Q has scored an appearance by Yothu Yindi, another coup.

M’ap Boulé by Nancy Denis is a play with songs about a child born of immigrants growing up here featuring stories from Denis’ journey to embrace her black, queer, Haitian and Australian identities.

David Milroy’s satirical Aboriginal music theatre work, Waltzing the Wilarra, set in 1940s post-war Perth, follows. Then from Tasmania’s Terrapin comes The Paper Escaper, written by GitaBezard and staged with puppetry, physical performance and a fun soundtrack.

Ahead of a regional tour supported by Arts on Tour, Echo Theatre’s God of Carnage returns to The Q for four performances in August, after which during October, Melbourne duo Jon & Jero will perform STUFF, high high-energy hour combining physical comedy, big characters, and improvisation.

The Listies will return to The Q with their latest show, 110% Ready, full of puns, sight gags, and a splash of improvisational idiocy.

The final Q The Locals production for 2025, Kendall Feaver’s work, The Almighty Sometimes, directed by Lachlan Houen.