REVIEW: Off Broadway - Base Entertainment, Brisbane Powerhouse

Off Broadway

Presented by: Base Entertainment

Venue: Brisbane Powerhouse

Date Attended: 9 August 2026

Choreographer: Rachael Peters

“Get ready to kick line and jazz hands your way through Broadway history!”

Twenty-four musicals. Eight cast members. An alarming number of costume changes. Off Broadway barrels through Broadway history with its foot firmly on the accelerator.

This new musical theatre revue raids Broadway’s greatest-hits catalogue for two packed acts of familiar favourites at Brisbane Powerhouse. Off Broadway isn’t digging around for forgotten gems. It’s serving the big ones (songs that have escaped their original productions and become cultural fixtures in their own right). These are the numbers audiences will recognise within a few bars.

Having seen 22 of the 24 featured shows on stage (not to brag hehe), I came in with plenty of reference points. The only two missing from my theatrical bingo card were Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate. Everything else has reached me through Broadway, the West End, professional tours, community theatre, cabarets, cast recordings, pro shots, slime tutorials, film, TV (Glee lol), and basically every MT showcase ever. That left Off Broadway with the tricky job of competing with decades of very familiar versions. Its solution was... dazzle.

Off Broadway opens at full tilt, racing through numbers from Moulin Rouge! and Kiss Me, Kate. The choreography wastes no time showing off the cast’s stamina, with the dancers already attacking demanding movement in their mirrorball leotards. I was five minutes in wondering how these dancers were expected to survive the night!

With 24 shows on the itinerary, there’s no time to linger. Voiceovers and cast narration shepherd us through the decades, dropping in bits of Broadway history and giving the writers their proper credit along the way. Starting with the likes of Anything Goes and Guys and Dolls, we witness musical theatre’s sound, movement, and style evolve through the years. By the time Jesus Christ Superstar brings us into the ’70s, things have become progressively louder, sexier, and more complicated both musically and choreographically.

A Chorus Line receives its deserved place in the timeline (the show famously helped drag Broadway through one of its roughest periods), before Chicago gives the cast a chance to flex their Fosse skills. The dancers’ precision captures exactly why his style is still so satisfying to watch. Chicago gets FOUR songs, by the way (“Hot Honey Rag”, “Cell Block Tango”, “All That Jazz”, and “We Both Reached for the Gun”). Somebody involved has a clear favourite. And I get it.

The choreography is consistently one of Off Broadway’s strongest assets. Choreographer Rachael Peters keeps the cast in near-constant motion, with athletic movement, partnering, floorwork, and stylistic shifts between shows. The music for “Big Spender” gets a club-style remix, showing early on that the revue isn’t precious about preserving every iconic number exactly as we know it. In fact, it’s often most interesting when it makes its own choices. “The Sound of Music”, for example, gains a completely different character through a baritone interpretation. “Singin’ in the Rain” becomes a jazzy duet for Bridie Erwin-Keirl and Bailey-Nathan Park, who waltz gently around the stage as they sing.

Perri Espinoza carries a considerable amount of the vocal load across the evening. Anything Goes gives us our first look at her impressive breath control, before Cabaret lets her unleash the power, range, and charisma. Her Elphaba moment arrives, inevitably, with “Defying Gravity” (because a Broadway celebration was never getting out of that building without Wicked). I also need to acknowledge the costume because I loved it!

Alexander Thorpe proves particularly versatile. His Riff Raff in the Rocky Horror section has exactly the required bite, while his Phantom is commanding and vocally well suited. “The Phantom of the Opera” also delivered one of the evening’s funniest unintended moments when that organ blasted through the theatre and scared the absolute bejeezus out of the audience. Vocally, though, the number also exposed one of the revue’s recurring issues: not every song is equally well matched to its performer. Espinoza handles much of Christine’s punishing upper register, but the role sits less comfortably elsewhere in her range.

Similar issues crop up later. “Hopelessly Devoted to You” loses some of its lower notes, while Connor Micallef takes several passages down an octave for the Grease and Jersey Boys material. Micallef has considerable charisma, and the Jersey Boys sequence is fun, but with material so strongly associated with Frankie Valli, I did miss that famous falsetto. Almost everything in Off Broadway arrives with an iconic performer or production attached to it. That makes thoughtful vocal allocation especially important. The cast of only eight is asked to cover an enormous range of styles, voice types, characters, and decades, and there were moments where adjusting a key or redistributing a song could have allowed the performers to show themselves to greater advantage.

Bailey-Nathan Park throws himself into the Peter Allen section, with the audience clearly enjoying the exuberance of "Rio" (even as I wondered how anybody onstage still possessed functioning lungs). The ensemble’s stamina throughout is formidable. The boys have a particularly cheeky time with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

After the relentless movement and variety of the first act, the second becomes noticeably ballad-heavy. “Beauty and the Beast” uses the Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson pop duet rather than material from the stage musical for some reason, with Espinoza and Thorpe serenading one another while adding a very small amount of waltzing. Having the dancers take over the movement while the vocalists simply sang may have given the sequence more visual scale. Then there’s “Any Dream Will Do” with Thorpe in a rainbow blazer. I know Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is beloved, but I would still cut that song (sorry not sorry). By comparison, the final stretch is guaranteed to get people excited again, with Mamma Mia!, Fame, and Footloose helping close the evening exactly as a show like this needs to finish.

Visually, Off Broadway keeps the Powerhouse unusually connected to its audience. House lighting remains relatively bright for much of the performance, helping the whole room feel part of the celebration. The audience was bopping their heads, tapping their feet, and occasionally singing along. I don’t blame them. For audiences who haven’t had the chance to see many of these musicals live, Off Broadway works as a tasting platter of musical theatre hits. I can imagine that choosing the setlist was a nightmare to narrow down. There are some obvious omissions, including work by Sondheim, Lerner and Loewe, Gershwin, and Bernstein, as well as Les Misérables (presumably because of song rights), but there’s still plenty here to keep musical theatre fans mentally ticking boxes.

The costumes do much of the time travelling, rapidly shifting between eras, characters, and recognisable theatrical looks. I was less convinced by the AI-generated projections, which often look noticeably artificial beside performers. For a production built around Broadway spectacle, I would have loved the visual design to match that same level of human craftsmanship. Thankfully, the choreography and singing can’t be AI-generated. Sound is another area that could use some tightening. This is a very LOUD show, and the balance doesn’t always give the vocals much clarity against the tracks.

That cast is ultimately what sells Off Broadway. They dance like their lives depend on it, sprint through musical theatre history with barely enough time to breathe, and step into roles made famous by some of the biggest performers in the world without the luxury of a full production building around them.

Off Broadway will particularly appeal to audiences wanting Broadway’s greatest hits packed into one exuberant night. Musical theatre diehards may have opinions about the song choices and interpretations (hello, it’s me), but there’s plenty of fun in recognising what’s coming next. In the end, the dazzle did its job. I couldn’t look away.