Looking for Alibrandi? This cult classic is coming to the stage!

Posted on 17 September, 2025

Some of us may find it incredible to learn that cult Australian coming-of-age and Italian migrant-experience movie Looking for Alibrandi turns 25 this year.

So it’s perfect timing that this iconic and beautiful story is hitting the stage at Canberra Theatre next month.

For those of us who know, Looking for Alibrandi is a timeless classic – a film with both edge and heart that translates to a vibrant theatrical experience complete with live passata sauce making, traditional Italian music and a soundtrack of Australian pop classics.

For those who don’t know, Josie Alibrandi is in her final year of high school. Whip-smart and aspirational, she is a third-generation Italian teenager and scholarship kid, with the shadow of a family curse and a penchant for rule-breaking. Juggling grades, boys, and the claustrophobia of an overbearing nonna and saintly mother, Josie’s life becomes tangled in the webs of class, identity, and family history as she finds her place in a changing world.

Iconic novel, cult movie, and now magical theatrical experience, Looking for Alibrandi is the honest and empowered portrait of 1990s Mediterranean culture that spoke for the first time about systemic racism in Australia from a migrant perspective. It defined a generation, and to this day still resonates with those caught in the stranglehold of identity and othering in this country.

Directed by award-winning Stephen Nicolazzo (Loaded, Merciless Gods), Melina Marchetta’s best-selling novel has been brought to the stage for the first time in Vidya Rajan’s AWGIE-nominated adaptation. It joins three generations of women in a passionate, heart-wrenching, and unmissable rendering of the Australian classic with a cast of Chanella Macri, Amanda McGregor, Natalie Gamsu, Brigid Gallacher, Riley Warner and Chris Asimos.

For the audience, it is a trip down memory lane as they travel back to 1990s Australia to join Josie in her final year of school, where she is caught between old-world traditions and new-world dreams, eager to leave behind the complexities of family and expectations of her Italian heritage. Navigating love, lies, and long-lost family secrets that turn her world upside down, this is also the year she finds her voice, her heart, and the truth about what it really means to be an Alibrandi.

Lisa Freshwater, Canberra Theatre Centre Executive Producer, says she is “thrilled to bring one of Australia’s most treasured stories about family, identity and growing up between cultures to our stage. And for Canberra audiences to rediscover its magic or fall in love with it for the very first time.”

Full of passion, laughs and beauty, this show will appeal to fans of Alibrandi and newcomers alike.