The best things to do in Sydney this August

Cherry blossom season will land in Sydney this winter, and with it, Auburn's beloved Cherry Blossom Festival, one of the most Instagrammable events on the NSW calendar. Running from August 16-24 2025 in the Auburn Botanic Gardens, this pink-hued festival is all about celebrating Japanese traditions, music, pop culture and food, with visitors able to wander through fields of fluffy pink sakura blossoms in a traditional Japanese garden.As always, this year’s program is brimming with food, activities, workshops, live music, dance and taiko drumming performances. Take a self-guided stroll beneath the blossoms, catch a mesmerising dance, music or floral arrangement demonstration, then head to the ‘Zen Zone’ and take some deep breaths by the billabong. If you’re keen to get creative, you can join one of the many workshops on offer – with the opportunity to learn everything from origami to the art of manga drawing.The Japanese Food Village will be back in full swing, serving up creative traditional Japanese delights and creative Japanese-fusion treats – arrive hungry.Tickets cost $16.60 per adult and $8.95 for kids, and residents of Cumberland City Council can visit for free. To secure a spot, you’ll need to book – you can register and buy tickets here. Want more flower power? Check out our list of the best public gardens you can visit in Sydney. RECOMMENDED:These are the best things to do in Sydney this winter. And here’s what’s on in Sydney this weekend.

Mark your calendars: Orange Region Fire Festival is returning this winter, with a focus on showcasing local creatives on every level. Artists, musicians, authors and performers are joining winemakers, chefs and venue hosts to form an exciting series of collaborations and festival events over the 10-day program — all just a short winter's road trip away from Sydney.  Food highlights of the festival include The Alchemy of Earth, Fire, Food and Wine in Molong which brings together a ceramicist, a chef, and a winemaker (August 2); magical Ember Feast at the Orchard (August 3), where fire-cooked fare meets live music; a hands-on Jam and Marmalade Making Class with Jasmin (August 7); the Festa del Fuoco (August 7-10), serving up a flamed Italian menu; a premium long lunch at Ross Hill at The Peacock Room (August 9), complete with a hearty, seasonal menu; and After Hours: Food Over Fire (August 9), where the Nashdale Lane team up with The Union Bank’s executive chef Dom Aboud for flame-licked dishes. Wine not your thing? Check out the Wassail Winter Cider Festival (August 2). It's not just about food and drink, with a rich line-up of cultural and creative events to keep your days just as full as your plates. Try your hand at silver jewellery making, join a cooking class, catch a short film screening followed by a Q&A or get hands-on at a ceramics workshop. Plus, cosy up to plenty of campfire-style live music throughout the ten days.  Sounds inviting? Make sure you're there when...

You’ve been to wine tastings, cheese tastings, perhaps olive oil tastings, but now it’s time to tease the palate with something a little sweeter. The Italian gelato gods behind Venchi 1878 are hosting dark chocolate tasting evenings this winter – but strap in for a whole lot more than just good choccy.  The one-hour experience at Venchi’s flagship Australian store in The Galeries walks guests through nine different dark chocolates, unpacking layers you’ve probably never imagined before, while chowing down on your favourite treat. Each bite will be paired with little gourmet delights like dried fruits and nuts.  The fun doesn’t stop there. Enjoy a glass of prosecco, and when you’re finishing up, look forward to a scoop of Venchi’s wildly well-known gelato. The cherry on top is a bag full of goodies that you’ll get to take home with you.  All of these premium goods would usually set you back $90, but the tasting session will only cost you $30. Spaces are super limited for these evening sessions – on July 29 and 30, and August 5 and 6. Secure a spot here. If you’ve got nut allergies, a dairy intolerance or other food sensitivities, you might be best sitting this one out. All ticket sales are final and cannot be refunded or transferred to another event date.

August isn’t always the easiest month in the Harbour City, so to inject a little light to one of Sydney’s darker months, Barangaroo is bringing a heap of wellness-inspired activities to the waterside precinct for four nourishing weeks. ‘Barangaroo You Wellness Month’ will run from Friday, August 1 until Sunday, August 31, with a line-up of free activities centred around health, movement and mindfulness ranging from sound baths to HYROX-style training sessions. Plus, they're giving away 20 free Scandi-style sauna sessions. Keen? Read on.One of the key pillars of Barangaroo’s wellness month program is ‘Wellness on the Water’. For the month of August, Sydney’s sauna on wheels Cedar and Salt will be in residence at Marrinawi Cove, so you can book in for an icy swim in the harbour followed by a Scandi-style sweat session. Don’t have the cash to splash? Barangaroo will be giving away 30 free sauna sessions – you’ll need to sign up to their newsletter and be online when free sessions go live at 9am on Wednesday, July 23. If you miss out on scoring a free sauna session, you can still score a free coffee if you head down to Marrinawi for a dip between 7am and 11am on Friday, August 1.  Other highlights of the program include weekly yoga sessions every Wednesday lunchtime led by Jacqui Jarrett, a proud Dharawal and Gumbaynggirr woman, elder and a traditional owner of the Sydney Basin, weekly talks (also on Wednesday lunchtimes) from experts in the wellness space including founder of...

The Willoughby Symphony Orchestra brings a taste of Hollywood to town with A Night at the Oscars, featuring music from blockbuster films including Spiderman, Saving Private Ryan and more.  The star of the show will be one of Germany’s finest violinists, Rosa Donata Milton, who returns to The Concourse Concert Hall following her spellbinding performances of Korngold’s Violin Concerto in 2023. She’ll join the Willoughby Symphony Choir under the baton of acclaimed conductor Dr Nicholas Milton AM, as they perform selections from Academy Award-winning soundtracks.  The incredible concert will open with a tribute to the acclaimed film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, before continuing on a cinematic journey through some of the silver screen's most illustrious soundtracks that just might move you to tears. The full line-up includes Spiderman, Forrest Gump, Hook, Schindler’s List, Angels and Demons, Ladies in Lavender, The Mission, Saving Private Ryan and Amistad.  You can experience the glamour of Hollywood’s night of nights complete with a red carpet and photowall, where you can snap a pic with your very own Oscar – just don’t forget to dress up for the occasion.  Snag your tickets to performances on Saturday, August 16 at 7pm or Sunday, August 17 at 2pm. Prices range from $45 to $99. Get yours here. 

Australia’s most popular arts event is back in action for 2025, with the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes bringing a fresh batch of painterly expressions to the walls of the Art Gallery of NSW from May 10 to August 17.  They call it “the face that stops the nation”, and the Archibald Prize has indeed been courting controversy and conversation for more than a century now. This popular portrait prize is always filled with famous faces, with artists from all over Australia (and also New Zealand) capturing the spirit of the times through paintings that capture the likeness of the personalities that define their communities. Julie Fragar is the winner of the 2025 Archibald Prize – she won over the judges with a stunning portrait of fellow artist Justene Williams (read more). RECOMMENDED: A beginner's guide to the Archibald Prize. The winner of the 2025 Packing Room Prize was announced a week earlier, with the Packing Room Pickers (a.k.a. the Art Gallery staff who receive, unpack and hang the entries) selecting Abdul Abdullah's striking painting of fellow finalist Jason Phu as their favourite Archibald portrait this year (read more here). Meanwhile, the Wynne Prize awards the best landscape painting of Australian scenery or figurative sculpture, and the Sulman is awarded to the best genre painting, subject painting or mural project. (Find out more about the 2025 winners over here.) The annual finalists exhibition is a real must-see, with each prize attracting diverse entries...

As I’m on my way to Sydney's Capitol Theatre for the new Australian production of The Book of Mormon, my friend tells me it’s the very first musical a lot of people see. Created by South Park duo Trey Parker and Matt Stone (with Robert Lopez), the show’s reputation for extremely irreverent jabs at religion draws a non-traditional theatre crowd. What I now realise my friend didn’t mean was, “it’s often the first musical kids see”. When I say the musical is extremely irreverent, I mean it. The humour is crass, verging on grotesque (some things I wouldn’t dare repeat). So it’s probably questionable that I’ve brought along my 13-year-old son with me. That said, he loves it.  Some of the humour is classic teen boy (i.e. a regular exclamation from one of the Ugandan characters that he has “maggots in my scrotum”). Very South Park. My son laughs loudly with the rest of the audience – and when the jokes go too far, he cringes, glancing around with a “should I be laughing at this?” look. Although the shock value is high, it’s nice seeing a Gen Alpha-ite who’s been raised on Youtube and other screen-based entertainment bopping along in his seat to the song and dance of a stage show.    What’s the premise of The Book of Mormon? The Book of Mormon tells the story of two young Mormon missionaries sent to a small village in Uganda. Although the story centres on Mormonism, Parker and Stone have been known to refer to the show as an “atheist’s love letter to religion” – a wink and a jab...

Ed's Note: Hailed by Rolling Stone as “the best rock musical ever”, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is on now at Sydney’s Carriageworks (you can buy tickets over here). Time Out critic Guy Webster reviewed the production last month when it was on at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre. Read on for his five-star review... ***** Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That’s Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006. You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York’s punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called “the music of gay bashers”, and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell’s life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask’s work with the SqueezeBox band. It’s the closest I’ve come to calling a musical ‘punk’ without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago. This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place....

In musical theatre circles, Cats is the show that everyone loves to hate, dismissing it as “weird” and “uncool”. So let me begin this review by stating that I love Cats. I listened to the cast recording over and over as a child, I met my best friend on a Cats mailing list (remember those?) when I was sixteen, and there's probably still some old Cats fanfiction floating around out there that I wrote in my teens. This much maligned show doesn't deserve the hate it gets.  When Cats was first performed in the early 1980s, it was hailed as groundbreaking, bridging the gap between concept musicals and mega musicals in a way no show had done before. It won both Olivier and Tony awards for best musical, and ran for decades on the West End and Broadway. These days, it’s viewed more as a “guilty pleasure” – the show you secretly enjoy but are supposed to pretend you don’t, lest you be seen as uncultured. But why? Concept musicals based around a theme rather than a traditional narrative have existed since the 1950s, with notable examples including Cabaret, Hair and Company. Dance-heavy musicals are also not a unique concept. Cats isn't even the only show to combine these two elements. But while shows like A Chorus Line and Pippin are hailed as iconic, Cats – which is essentially A Chorus Line with tails – is not shown the same love.  Cats may not be too heavy on the plot, but it’s a show for people who love the little details Much of the criticism surrounding Cats comes from wanting...

I have reviewed many shows at the Sydney Opera House, and never – never – before have I been so utterly flabbergasted at the lack of scrutiny and professionalism upheld by a creative team in the running of a production.  For starters, the immense buzz in the the Drama Theatre’s foyer was squashed before the audience had even entered the stalls, as a sign informed us that Hollywood star Tom Cruise would in fact not be appearing at this performance of The Murder at Haversham Manor. This was swiftly followed by the show’s operator, Trevor (Edmund (Eds) Eramiha), wandering up and down the aisles, followed in tow by the stage manager Annie (Olivia Charalambous) as they asked us, the audience, if we had seen a lost dog, Winston, who it appeared was to be a character in the show. Completely unprofessional! After this was resolved, the director of the The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society greeted us all, ensuring that this production would not follow the mishaps in their previous works, and that they finally have funding and a script that suits their society. It would not be another low budget production (such as their summer season of James, where is your Peach?) and that they do have a full cast, as to avoid a repeat of the debacle of their most recent musical, Cat. The cracks that began to appear even before the curtain lifted on The Murder at Haversham Manor only continued to widen as the show played on, the whole evening building up into a fiasco of disastrous heights – and,...