SHORT +  SWEET is the biggest little theatre festival in the world, On Thursday February 1st, it opens at an all-new venue, with the first of the summer’s selection of over 120 tasty, ten-minute bites.

SHORT +  SWEET has spread the popular 10-minute format in theatre, dance, cabaret & comedy across Australia and the globe – with festivals now as far afield as Hollywood, India, Malaysia, Dubai and NZ.  Its Hollywood festival is one of the world’s go-to showcases for new talent on stage and screen. But the original Sydney theatre festival is now in its 17th year and has a new home in Surry Hills’ Tom Mann Theatre.

Festival Director Pete Malicki is a SHORT +  SWEET legend, having written and directed for the fest for well over a decade. This year S+S will again feature not only the judges’ voting and the People’s Choice audience votes, but his director’s picks – all heading for the April Gala Finals.

SHORT +  SWEET  (Facebook) opens at the Tom Mann Theatre Theatre, 136 Chalmers St, Surry Hills on 1 Feb and runs through to April with both a Top 80 (Thur-Sat 7.30pm, Sun 6.30pm) and separate Wildcards program (Sat 3.30pm, Sun 2.30pm). The gala finals take place in April. 

Week One – with 10 short plays nightly.

Reality Check by Elizabeth, an hilarious one-woman play about on-line dating, is a comic tour-de-force by writer, director, actor and film-maker Annisa Belonogoff. “Searching for love, with a little too much wine. What could go wrong?”

Another Dead Body Play is a debut play for new Sydney company Pumphouse Productions. Steven Williams piles cliché upon cliché to make ‘a foul play about foul play’!! His cast features Lucy Tassell, Remy Danoy and Nigel Malcolm.

Victorian writer Katie Lee’s comedy I Like Chocolate… is that so Bad?  is a comic vehicle for Short+Sweet veteran Henrietta Stathopoulos’ Captivate youth theatre company from Western Sydney. A Chocoholics Anonymous meeting goes feral! Starring young actors Gabrielle Green, Guet McAcuek, Nicholas Menouhos and Connor McInerney.

In The Eulogy by Kel Vance and directed by Brendan Paul, a teenage boy observes his own funeral. He soon learns how different his life could have been when the girl he loved from afar but never met begins to eulogize him. A moving play about lost chances and overcoming fear, starring Lola Bond and Archit Mahajan.

In the Wildcards section (weekend matinees).

Nisrine Amine directs Ange Farrow’s absurdist play The Perfect Life, which follows ‘Jethro’ from birth to death as he tries (but fails!) to script for himself the perfect life. Starring Charles Upton, Abi Rayment, Leilani Loau and Lisa Robinson. 

Psych Nick by Scott Lummer (US) follows a man who claims to be Jesus into a psychiatrist’s office on Christmas Eve. Is he or isn’t he? And why is he suffering from depression? Leanne Sampson-Bowden directs Firdaws Adelpour, Olga Olshansky and Jasynda Radanovic.

Working Romance  written and directed by Liam Danaher is about sex and religion… and bad puns! Starring Ethan Dale as the wayward antagonist with Biddy O’Sullivan, Ryan Bates, Chloe O’Neill, Ashleigh Earley and Brianna Porter. 

Finally, Scripted by popular US writer Mark Harvey Levine sees a couple wake to find a script which outlines exactly what will happen to them that day! Jack Mitchell and Indigo Hallet - directed by Isabel Zakharova – star in this uplifting comedy about the power each person has to alter their story…