Things to do in Sydney today

The Harbour City does a good line in immersive light experiences, and if you can’t wait until Vivid takes over the city later in May, Luna Park is here to help. The iconic attraction’s newest installation – Sonic Neon – is now open, with tickets on sale until the end of June. Housed in Crystal Palace – a building which dates all the way back to 1935 – Sonic Neon will take visitors on a journey through six different rooms, with state-of-the-art visuals and a layered soundscape creating a transportive experience. Illuminating more than 150 metres of the historic building, the experience will feature more than 26,000 lights set to a pulsating soundtrack using state-of-the-art technology that’s never been used before in Australia. Tickets to the event are available now, which you can purchase online or in person. Plus, save money by purchasing bundles like the Unlimited Rides Pass and Lunaverse Superpass, which includes Sonic Neon, Dream Circus and unlimited rides.  The family-friendly rave and experience will run daily from 10am. Tickets for the self-guided Sonic Neon experience (estimated to take around 30 minutes) start at $29 per person. If you’re keen to secure your tickets, you can do so over here.  Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out Sydney newsletter for more things to do, travel inspo and activity ideas, straight to your inbox. RECOMMENDED: Keen for more luminous fun? This immersive experience is coming to the Blue Mountains Lightscape will be taking over the

How can one of the world’s most remarkable, transcendent myths of love be possible? Can we love what we make war with? What are the limits of forgiveness? Clever, savage, sensuous and very funny, Isolde & Tristan speaks to our torn world loudly and clearly. Penned by German playwright Esther Vilar, Sport for Jove brings this mediaeval tale to the subterranean intimacy of The Old Fitz Theatre (May 3–June 1). Drawn from Celtic legend and told in numerous variations since the 12th century, this is the tragic tale of the illicit love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult, who is promised in marriage to the King of Cornwall. Putting an incisive spin on Richard Wagner’s extraordinary opera, this short and sharp play combines live soaring opera, stunning music, raw performance, drunkenness, violence and passion. Prepare yourself for this exceptional cast to draw you into the wild sea of this beautiful, brutal story. Sitting below Time Out Sydney’s favourite pub in Woolloomooloo, the Fitz is Australia’s last remaining pub theatre – so really, it’d be rude not to grab a comforting pre-show meal and a post-show debrief over a glass of something. Between May 21 and 31, you can also catch a double bill, with Lally Katz's black comedy The Eisteddfod taking to the stage after the cast of Isolde & Tristan take their final bows. (Booking a ticket to both a paired Mainstage and Late Night show will automatically apply a 20 per cent discount to your Late Night ticke

In excellent news for sauna lovers, what began as a dreamy pop-up has now become a (relatively) permanent feature at Manly’s Quarantine Beach. The 10-person Finnish sauna from Cedar the Salt will be stationed on the shores of Sydney Harbour throughout the winter – offering a very Scandinavian experience from arguably the most stunning sauna location in the city. Sydney's first pop-up seaside Finnish sauna launched as a thirteen day pop-up, but due to huge demand (around 150 sauna-goers per day), it will be staying put until spring. A 45-minute ocean-side sauna experience will set you back $35, and you’ll have easy access to the ocean to cool off between steams. If you’re keen to take over the entire sauna for a celebratory sweat, private sauna sessions are also available, and there's a soundbath experience available for those who went to level up their relaxation. If you want to make the seaside sauna a regular component of your wellness routine, you can nab a pack of three, five or ten sauna sessions.  The sauna is open from sunrise (between 6.30am and 7.15) until sunset (around 4.30pm), seven days a week, with the current closing date currently estimated at "springtime". Keen? You can learn more and book your session over here. Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out Sydney newsletter for more news, travel inspo and activity ideas, straight to your inbox.   RECOMMENDED:  We tried this beautiful affordable bathhouse. These are Sydney’s best spas.These are the best da

A borderline psychedelic, kaleidoscopic environment awaits you at this major solo exhibition by one of Australia's foremost contemporary artists, Dale Frank, presented across two floors at The National Art School gallery in Darlinghurst.  Growers and Showers (free to visit until June 1, 2024) is filled with bold colours, glossy abstract paintings, and highly experimental assemblages that play with unexpected surfaces like shattered glass, mirror, foam, human hair, CDs and foil ducting. (If you have an aversion to creepy clowns, proceed with caution.) Coloured lights, incense, and soundtrack personally picked by the artist himself (it’s Foreigner’s 1997 debut album, on rotation) further alter the atmosphere of the space, creating an immersive viewer experience that tests the boundaries of abstraction. Presenting 45 large-scale paintings, sculptures and installations created over the past decade – including nine never-before-exhibited works – this significant survey exhibition delves into Frank’s enduring commitment to experimentation and ongoing investigation into the potentiality of painting, alongside his multidisciplinary approach. Speaking with Katraina Cashman, Senior Curator of NAS Galleries, she explains that the artist's use of pop culture references and unconventional materials serve to challenge and stimulate the viewer's senses, eliciting a physical response that lingers long after the encounter. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Time Out Sy

Those of us who were born during or after the early ’90s often forget that it hasn’t been that long since women were given the right to bank accounts and the means to cultivate our independence. Just twenty years prior, the options for women to get ahead were often limited to the opportunities that a man (or rather, a husband) could provide her. It is this premise that pervades Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s fairly vacuous one-woman, one-act song cycle, Tell Me On A Sunday. With a modern-day lens, it is quickly apparent that this is a man’s point of view of a woman of the ’70s – but for young women today, perhaps this production from Hayes Theatre Company and Michelle Guthrie Presents is also a reminder of how far we have come. Initially, the show that is now Tell Me On A Sunday was paired with a ballet and debuted on the West End in 1982 as a show titled “Song and Dance”. The performance made Marti Webb a household name, and the adaptation for Broadway earned her successor Bernadette Peters her first Tony Award. This formula suggests that much of the show’s success teeters on the charisma and vocal proficiency of the sole lead performer. Although often touted as perhaps Lloyd Webber’s best work musically, the show has retained the DNA of an unfinished, discarded manuscript that even an other-worldly talent cannot entirely overcome. This isn’t Hamilton’s New York where you can “be a new man”, or the “centre of the universe” described in Rent. Erin Clare (9 to 5, A Little