Looking for Alibrandi by Vidya Rajan from the novel by Melina Marchetta. Directed by Stephen Nicolazzo. Brink Productions. Canberra Theatre Oct 3-4.

Chanella Macri as Josie.

It was a novel, then it was a film, now it is a stage show. Canberra only got a fleeting season but what a mesmerising look at Melina Marchetta’s powerful story of growing up Italian in Sydney in the 1990s this turned out to be. 

At its centre is Josie (Chanella Macri), in the final run up to leaving school and in the throes of dealing with her Italian heritage and the family secrets. There’s no father in evidence at first. Mother and grandmother talk a lot in Italian and the past is all a bit of a mystery. 

But Macri’s magnificent, funny and assertive Josie is forthright, smart and capable. By the end of the story she has gained some insight into the circumstances of her birth and the difficulties her mother and grandmother faced in the generations before her. 

Five other actors, Amanda McGregor, Natalie Gamsu, Ashton Malcom, Riley Warner and Chris Asimos play a raft of other characters in Josie’s life with verve. They populate the stage marvellously with school friends, fierce teaching nuns, boyfriends and a raft of little Italian nonas. Only stoical friend John, coping with a different sort of family where arid old fashioned Anglo Australian men have to follow each other into parliament, seems to find it hard to see an independent  future. 

A set rich with red velvet and crates of red tomatoes and the business of cooking becomes the central focus for traditions still adhered to and for old haunting superstitions. How Josie begins to find her own way makes for an absorbing story clearly being rediscovered by a youthful audience.

Alanna Maclean