Eight Tony Awards. One Academy Award. One Grammy. One Olivier.
The only show in Broadway history to have its music win all four. And somehow, in a converted chapel on a side street in Prahran, with a cast of actor-musicians playing live instruments three metres from your face, none of those awards are the reason you will leave unable to speak.
She sees him before he sees himself. A Dublin busker, already gone, already halfway to giving up on everything he was supposed to become. She stops. Not out of pity. Out of recognition. She knows exactly what he is capable of and she decides, quietly and without ceremony, that she is not going to let him waste it.
What follows is the most honest love story currently on a Melbourne stage. They do not get each other. She pushes him toward his music, toward London, toward the version of himself she can see and he cannot. She gives him everything. He becomes everything. And then he leaves. The last thing he does before he goes is buy her a piano.
What Is Once the Musical? The Show Melbourne Has Been Waiting For
You have probably heard of Once. Eight Tony Awards. The Oscar-winning song. A small Irish film in 2007 that became a Broadway sensation and then a West End institution. What nobody tells you is what it actually does to a person. Because Once is not a musical in the way we have been trained to understand musicals. No eleven o’clock number, no triumphant finale where love conquers everything and you leave feeling vaguely uplifted and slightly hungry. It does something quieter and considerably more dangerous. It tells you the truth about love. We are glad to share our honest thoughts after opening night.
Once the Musical Melbourne 2026: Before the Lights Went Down
You do not wait for Once to begin. It begins the moment you walk in.
The cast were already on stage, playing and singing with the kind of vivid, generous energy that pulls a room together before a single scripted word has been spoken. The crowd was clapping, strangers were smiling at each other, and the whole space felt genuinely delighted rather than merely warmed up. It felt less like a theatre and more like a pub session populated by extraordinarily talented people.
What Cherry found particularly impressive was the stage itself. The backdrop never changed. No grand set reveals, no elaborate scene transitions. Instead, lighting and props did all the heavy lifting, shifting the atmosphere from a Dublin street corner to a recording studio to something achingly intimate, sometimes within the same breath of a scene. It is the kind of design intelligence that only reveals itself when you are paying attention, and in a room this small, you are always paying attention.
Then the lights dropped. The entire room went silent without being asked. Every single person turned to the stage and stayed there for the next two and a half hours. That kind of collective attention is not manufactured. It is earned, and Onceearned it before the story had even properly begun.
Once the Musical Melbourne 2026: Meet the Cast Carrying This Story
Sian Fuller as Girl: The Beauty of Sacrifice, Fully Realised
Girl is a Czech woman with a bold personality, a warm heart, and a love she never once declares out loud. She pushes Guy toward his dream, toward his music, toward his ex-girlfriend, all while quietly carrying something enormous beneath the surface. That is the beauty of the role and the specific cruelty of what it asks of its performer.
To me, Sian Fuller nailed her character, completely.
Her voice was the first thing that stopped in my tracks. Warm, precise, and capable of doing things emotionally that dialogue alone could never achieve. Fuller did not play Girl as a woman concealing her feelings. She played her as a woman who has already made peace with her choice, and that restraint is what made every scene land harder than the last. She presented herself fully as her character from the first moment to the final note, and there was nothing performed about it.
The ending of Once is painful in the most realistic and beautiful way, and much of that lands because of what Fuller does not say and does not do. The sacrifice reads as genuine because she made it feel inevitable rather than noble. That is a rare and extraordinary thing to pull off eight shows a week. Girl is the soul of this show. Fuller is the reason that soul has a pulse.
Rose Chambers as Reza: The Performance Nobody Saw Coming
Dustin’s highlight of the night, and honestly, once Rose Chambers opened her mouth, it was difficult to argue with him.
Reza arrives with a specific energy. Sexy, reckless and magnetic, the kind of stage presence that makes the rest of the room feel slightly peripheral when she is in it. We genuinely could not take our eyes off her, which is saying something in a production this densely talented. The high notes stopped the room cold. Chambers reaches them with an ease that feels almost unreasonable, and her movement, precise and joyful and utterly committed, gave Reza a dimension that elevated every scene she inhabited. A genuinely unexpected standout, and a name worth remembering.
Frazer Shepherdson as Billy: The Reason the Room Kept Cracking Up
Nobody warned us about Billy, and that was perhaps the greatest gift of the evening.
Frazer Shepherdson plays him with an aggressive bluntness that should not be funny and absolutely is. Every sharp line, every confrontational delivery landed the whole crowd in laughter, and what made it work is that the humour never felt inserted or performed. It arrived naturally from character, which is the hardest kind of comedy to sustain across a full production. The jokes did not feel stuffed. They felt inevitable. Shepherdson understood exactly what Billy was there to do and executed it with complete commitment and impeccable timing.
The Ensemble: Every Person on That Stage Is a Musician
This is the thing about Once that is genuinely unlike anything else in musical theatre. Every single cast member plays a live instrument on stage, and not just one instrument. Multiple instruments, across the full two and a half hours, with no pre-recorded orchestration and no safety net beneath them.
What impressed us most was not the musicianship in isolation but the extraordinary coordination of the whole production. Everyone on that stage is doing several things at once, acting, singing, playing, moving, and the whole thing is so beautifully assembled that none of it ever feels like effort. It simply feels like a world that exists and breathes and has always been exactly this way.
There is also something that live musical theatre offers that film simply cannot replicate. The camera in a movie decides what you see. Here, the whole scene is yours. I found myself watching what ensemble members were doing in the background during scenes, small and unscripted-feeling moments of physical life that revealed just how deep the attention to detail ran throughout this production. That level of craft only discloses itself when the audience is close enough to notice it, and at Chapel off Chapel, you are always close enough.
Why Chapel Off Chapel Is the Only Place Once the Musical Could Work
Chapel off Chapel is the most intimate professional theatre setting either of us had experienced. The cast are not on a distant stage behind glass. They are right there, three metres away, breathing the same air, and the proximity creates a bond between performer and audience that I had never felt in a musical before. That closeness makes the emotional honesty of Once completely unavoidable. There is nowhere to hide, not for the performers, and not for you.
The lighting deserves particular mention. Designed by Abbey Stanway (Production Manager), lighting transformed the chapel into the world of the story. Rather than functioning as conventional theatre illumination, Abbey Stanway’s design operates more like a camera lens, leading your eye with deliberate intelligence, drawing focus to a face, a hand, an instrument, a moment, at exactly the right second. It is the work of a storyteller. Combined with a fixed backdrop that never changed across the entire production, the lighting and a handful of carefully placed props did all the atmospheric heavy lifting, shifting the world of the story from a Dublin street to a local pub to something achingly private, sometimes within the space of a single scene.
Falling Slowly: Hearing the Most Awarded Song in Broadway History Live
The score by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová is the only music from a Broadway production to have won the Academy Award, the Grammy, the Olivier Award, and the Tony Award. In a larger venue that registers as an impressive fact. In Chapel off Chapel it registers as a physical experience.
Dustin was undone by the cello on the sad melodies, that low and aching tone that seems to locate something in you that you did not know was exposed. I felt it most acutely on the piano, those keys arriving with a tenderness that produced goosebumps before I had consciously decided to have them.
The final song, Girl alone at the piano, was my favourite moment of the entire evening. The melody, the lyrics and Fuller’s voice in that room at that proximity touched something that language struggles to reach adequately. We will leave it at that, because some things are better experienced than described, and this show will be playing until 6 June.
Once the Musical Melbourne Tickets: Everything You Need to Know
Once the Musical plays at Chapel off Chapel, 12 Little Chapel St, Prahran, until 6 June. Runtime is 2 hours 30 minutes with a 20-minute interval. Tickets are available here with allocated seats at $109 and restricted view seats at $65.
Arrive early. The pre-show alone is worth the extra time, with the cast on stage playing and interacting with the audience before the house lights drop, setting a tone of warmth and aliveness that carries through everything that follows.
Should You See Once the Musical Melbourne? Our Verdict
If you love music in the way that means it finds the parts of you that words cannot reach, if you love watching genuinely talented people perform from their hearts, if you want a night that asks nothing of you except your complete attention and gives everything back in return, you have to go see Once.
One honest note from Cherry: the chemistry between Guy and Girl did not always burn with the electricity the story calls for. With so much happening on stage at once, the spark between them occasionally got absorbed into the fullness of the production rather than cutting through it. In the context of an evening this rich and this beautifully made, it is a minor thing. But we said honest and we meant it.
What we will say is this. After watching this Australian cast carry these characters, these accents and this story with such conviction, Cherry is already curious about the original Broadway production, not because this one fell short, but because it raised the question of how much further this material can go. That is perhaps the most generous thing a production can do. It made us want more of the world it came from.
Once does not try to dazzle you. It puts two people in a room, hands them instruments, and trusts that what happens between them is enough. It is enough. It is more than enough. Book before Melbourne works out what it has on its hands.
Glamorazzi representatives Cherry Vuong and Dustin Vu were guests of AE Creative Communications at the opening night of Once the Musical Melbourne, Chapel off Chapel, Prahran, 13 May 2026. As always, our opinions are entirely our own.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Once the Musical about?
Once follows a Dublin busker who has all but given up on his music and the Czech woman who refuses to let him. It is a love story in the truest and most painful sense — not because they end up together, but because she loves him well enough to let him go. Based on John Carney’s 2007 film, the stage production features Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s spellbinding score, including the Oscar-winning song Falling Slowly.
Where is Once the Musical playing in Melbourne?
AG Theatre’s production of Once is playing at Chapel off Chapel, 12 Little Chapel St, Prahran VIC 3181. The venue is accessible via Chapel Street trams and a short drive from the Melbourne CBD.
When is Once the Musical Melbourne 2026?
Once the Musical runs until 6 June 2026, Wednesday to Sunday. Opening night was 13 May 2026.
How long is Once the Musical?
The production runs 2 hours 30 minutes with a 20-minute interval.
