18 September 2026
Every so often, a new musical arrives that reminds you exactly why the form can be so thrilling. Fun Home, Spring Awakening and Kimberley Akimbo come immediately to mind as three of the most original. Now coming down the MT freeway we have Thelma & Louise, a fierce, funny and exhilarating reinvention of the Oscar-winning film, and it ranks among the most exciting movie-to-stage musicals of the decade.
Thelma & Louise carries particular memories for me. Thirty five years ago, as a national film critic, I reviewed the original movie on its initial release and interviewed then little-known Brad Pitt, playing a cowboy hitchhiker fresh from guest starring as Randy, Charlotte’s toy boy lover, in Dallas, and just before Thelma & Louise sent his Hollywood stock soaring. Even then, it was obvious that the film was something special – and that Pitt for one was going places. More than three decades later, seeing that groundbreaking story reborn as a musical feels both nostalgic and thrillingly new.
Callie Khouri, who wrote the original screenplay, has not simply dropped her beloved road movie scene for scene on stage at the Young Vic. She has rediscovered its rebellious heart for a new generation. The result is not a dutiful replica but a musical with its own pulse, theatrical language and irresistible sense of danger.
The story remains gloriously familiar. Louise invites her friend Thelma on an impulsive weekend away, but one terrifying encounter at a roadside bar sends them racing towards a freedom they never knew they needed. What begins as an escape becomes an awakening – and ultimately an act of defiance against a world determined to control them.
As Louise, Rachel Tucker is simply magnificent. Tough, wary and emotionally armoured, she gradually reveals the fear and vulnerability beneath Louise’s formidable exterior. Tucker has one of the greatest musical-theatre voices, but it is the way she uses it that is so impressive: every note feels rooted in character, carrying years of disappointment, fury and fiercely guarded hope.
Amy Lennox is equally sensational as Thelma. She charts her transformation from nervously submissive housewife to fearless outlaw with tremendous warmth, wit and emotional truth. Her comic timing is delicious, her exuberance infectious, and when she unleashes that extraordinary voice, the effect is electrifying.
Together, Lennox and Tucker are pure dynamite. Their chemistry is immediate and completely believable – funny, tender, fractious and ultimately unbreakable. This is not simply a musical about two women on the run; it is a great love story about friendship. The most powerful moments come when Thelma and Louise look at one another and realise that, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they have been truly seen.
Neko Case’s superb score gives the production its pounding heart. Rooted in country, rock and Americana, the music possesses grit, melancholy and a raw, open-road freedom. These are not songs dropped into a famous screenplay for convenience; they rise naturally from the characters, expressing everything the women have spent their lives being forbidden to say. The score can be raucous and exhilarating, then suddenly intimate enough to break your heart.
Trip Cullman’s terrific direction embraces the fact that this is theatre rather than cinema. The production does not attempt to reproduce Ridley Scott’s film frame by frame. Instead, it finds bold theatrical equivalents for speed, distance and the vastness of the American landscape. There is one simply brilliant purge of staging in which the ensemble, moving as one, tosses what looks like sand across a sticky, carpeted floor of a roadside bar. In an instant, we are transported to a desert road in the middle of the great American back lands. It is a stroke of directorial genius: a modest, almost primitive theatrical gesture that conjures an entire continent.
Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s set is rich and detailed (they also designed and won Tony and Olivier Awards for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), combined with Natasha Chivers’s evocative lighting and Gareth Owen’s muscular sound combine to create a world that seems to move even when the actors are standing still.
The choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber is visceral, restless and brilliantly alive. The ensemble surges through the production like the landscape itself – part community, part threat and part Greek chorus. There is a constant sense of momentum, as though the entire evening is racing towards a destination we know cannot be avoided.
The supporting company is excellent. Jordan Luke Gage brings charisma and humour to JD (the role played on the big screen by Brad Pitt), Trevor Dion Nicholas gives detective Hal genuine humanity, and Samuel Edwards, Alex Gibson-Giorgio, Letitia Hector and Tamlyn Henderson each create vivid characters without ever distracting from the women at the centre of the story.
What makes the musical work so beautifully is that it never loses sight of the darkness beneath the exhilaration. Thelma and Louise are not searching for death; they are discovering life. Their tragedy is that the world offers them so few ways to hold on to it. More than three decades after the film’s release, its anger about violence, power and the restrictions placed upon women feels painfully undiminished.
And yet this is not a solemn evening. It is wild, sexy, frequently hilarious and bursting with the reckless joy of two women finally taking possession of their own lives. The audience is swept along on their journey, cheering every act of rebellion while dreading the road ahead.
The final sequence is breathtaking. We know where they are going, but the musical finds something unexpectedly transcendent in their last choice. It is devastating, defiant and strangely uplifting – a leap not into defeat, but into legend.
Thelma & Louise is a triumph: bold, bruising and gloriously alive. Rachel Tucker and Amy Lennox give two phenomenal performances in a production that honours the film while confidently becoming its own thrilling piece of theatre.
Start the car. Turn up the music. Thelma and Louise are back – and this time they are raising the roof.
