As Australians woke this morning, the music of ambition was rising in theatres across the country. My Brilliant Career, Melbourne's most in-demand ticket in 2024, returns for another season with a story that refuses to fade. More than a century after Miles Franklin published her 1901 novel, one of the major Australian literary works of her time, the character of Sybylla Melvyn still speaks directly to audiences with the force of someone who will not apologise for wanting more.
The musical version, created by Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant with music by Mathew Frank, strips away the gentility of history and gives Sybylla a voice that cuts through the present. Kala Gare plays the fiercely intelligent young woman in 1890s Australia who rallies against the idea that her ambition should start and end at finding a wealthy husband. What makes the performance land is not nostalgia for the past, but the fierce contemporaneity of her refusal.
The numbers are compelling. The production earned multiple five-star reviews in its sold-out premiere season, and won five Green Room Awards, including Outstanding Production. Critics have called Gare a versatile actor whose effervescent performance is undercut with raucous feminist sass. Yet numbers alone do not explain why a musical about a rural girl from the 1890s continues to ignite conversation about who deserves the freedom to choose their own path.
Why the Character Endures
Stella Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career when she was still a teenager, and after its 1901 publication under her masculine-sounding middle name Miles, the novel eventually enabled the creation of the Miles Franklin Literary Award following Franklin's death in 1954. What is remarkable is not that the novel still exists; it is that Sybylla's voice still demands an audience in the same way it did to readers in 1901.
The musical does something traditional adaptations sometimes avoid. Rather than softening Sybylla's edges, it amplifies them. Gare frames her portrayal with wry asides to the audience, including the line: "I am being overwhelmed by my hot untamed spirit." The direct address breaks the invisible wall between stage and auditorium. Sybylla is not on a platform above us; she is one of us, and her fight is ours to witness and recognise.
This immediacy carries weight. Sybylla dreams of becoming a writer despite her family's poverty and society's expectations of marriage. In 1890, that was radical. Today, those pressures have evolved rather than vanished. The names and forms change, but the fundamental tension remains: the world offering women a narrower set of choices than it offers men, and women resisting that constraint.
A Show Built on More Than Music
The production has been described as "the holy grail of Australian musical theatre," with The Guardian calling Gare "a total powerhouse." Yet the show's power derives from more than individual performance. The creative team has maintained the late 19th century setting while allowing audiences to view it through a contemporary lens, with colloquial contemporary language melding perfectly with the period setting and songs embracing a rich array of musical genres.
This balance matters. The musical does not transform Sybylla into a modern woman awkwardly placed in the past. Instead, it suggests that the hunger for freedom, the refusal to accept limitation, and the demand to define one's own life have always been Australian qualities. Miles Franklin was born at Talbingo, NSW, and grew up in the Brindabella Valley near Goulburn, and My Brilliant Career is based on Franklin's life growing up on her parents' outback farm. The story is rooted in actual Australian soil and Australian experience.
The musical's highly anticipated Sydney premiere follows its Melbourne season, where it was heralded as "the holy grail of Australian musical theatre" and won five Victorian Green Room awards. The show begins performances at the Roslyn Packer Theatre from 21 March 2026, with seasons also planned for Wollongong and Canberra.
What the Show Asks of Its Audience
Part of the reason My Brilliant Career continues to resonate is that it does not ask Sybylla to compromise. She does not marry for security. She does not quiet her voice. She does not pretend to be less intelligent than she is. These refusals would be radical even today. In the context of 1890s rural Australia, they are staggering. And in the musical, they are rendered with such clarity and such force that audiences leave the theatre having been asked a question: what are you willing to refuse in order to be yourself?
That question, once posed by a teenage girl writing in secret on an outback farm, now echoes through Sydney theatres to audiences of people of all ages and backgrounds. The setting is historical. The character's ambition is not. And that is why, more than 125 years after Franklin first imagined Sybylla Melvyn into being, her story still matters. The song remains the same: on the backs of women who have claimed their right to be heard, later women find their own voice. And the story goes on.