Second generation Samoan-Italian Australian Chanella Macri stars as Josie Alibrandi in the stage adaptation of Looking For Alibrandi.
Writer Vidya Rajan and director Stephen Nicolazzo adapted the work from Melina Marchetta’s best-selling novel, published in 1992. The novel was famously turned into a critically acclaimed film in 2000, starring Pia Miranda as Josie and Kick Gurry as Josie’s sort-of-boyfriend Jacob Coote.
The stage production premiered at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in July 2022. It rebooted earlier this year with Brink Productions taking it on a national tour, and it’s coming to Geelong Arts Centre from Wednesday 20 to Saturday 23 August.
Macri has been with the production since the beginning. “It was a few years before we premiered for the first season in Melbourne at Malthouse,” she says.
Looking For Alibrandi
- The Story House, Geelong Arts Centre, 50 Little Malop Street
- Wednesday 20 August to Saturday 23 August 2025
- Evening sessions 7:30pm, Saturday matinee 1:00pm
- Tickets here
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
Macri had previously worked with Nicolazzo on a production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer at Red Stitch Theatre. The director was adamant from the get-go that Macri should play Josie in their updated version of Looking For Alibrandi.
“He had a really particular idea about what he wanted to do with diversity and showing how the nature of immigration has changed across time in Australia,” Macri says.
Much like Vanessa Amorosi, AFL and Roy and HG, Looking For Alibrandi is little known internationally but absolutely adored at home. Australians’ fascination with the text goes deep – the novel is part of high school curricula around the country, while the film has been named “Australia’s best teen movie.”
Due to its revered status, Macri had reservations about playing Josie. “I was really quite sceptical about doing it because of how beloved the character is, particularly the Pia Miranda version of her in the film,” she says.
In both the novel and film, the Alibrandis are a working-class Italian-Australian family. Josie gets a scholarship to attend the all-girls private school, St Martha’s, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where she’s exposed to xenophobia and class-based discrimination.
As a second-generation Samoan-Italian Australian, Macri can relate, but her mixed-race background and physical dissimilarity to Miranda made her reluctant to take on the role. “I’m quite tall and I’m also quite big and I’ve always been that way,” Macri says. “So I was just very sceptical about Josie looking like me essentially.”
However, Macri knew she could trust Nicolazzo’s vision, and she was also keen to get involved in fleshing out the adaptation. “I came on board and we developed it,” she says. “Myself and Jennifer Vuletic and Lucia Mastrantone, who played the grandmother and the mother [in leg one of the tour], a lot of our actual voices have been a part of the writing of the work.”
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Looking For Alibrandi is not just a coming of age tale, but an examination of how various minorities are othered by mainstream Australian society. “That experience of growing up and being different and not knowing how to fly under the radar and sit in the majority is so familiar to me,” Macri says.
Though, while she identified with the themes of discrimination and othering, Macri points out that as a teen, she was fundamentally unlike Josie.
“I was, and still am, quite a serious little gal, and Josie is just so exuberant and she has this zeal for life that I find pretty inspiring, actually,” she says. “Like, even when things are difficult or bad or tricky, she has so much energy and passion and she feels everything in this big way.”
The production has been on tour over the last few months, travelling to Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse, Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre and HOTA on the Gold Coast. After Geelong, they’ll head to Hobart and regional South Australia. Wherever they go, the audience reactions are overwhelmingly positive, says Macri.
“Performing it is a really interesting and quite affirming experience because the audience really engage with the story. There’s a really special difference about Josie looking so different from what they expect or what they’ve seen portrayed before. It feels like it belongs to the world, but it feels like an expansion of that [world].”
More than three decades after it was first published, people of all stripes continue to connect with Looking For Alibrandi on a personal level. This quality leads dozens of audience members to come up and speak to Macri after each performance.
“They really want to share their experience with the story because it has this rich and quite long history now in Australia,” she says. “It’s a very Australian story and there’s this real sense of ownership of it by the Australians that come and see it – immigrants and Anglo-Australians likewise.”
Looking For Alibrandi is playing at Geelong Arts Centre from 20-23 August. Get tickets here. Presented by Brink Productions
This article was made in partnership with Geelong Arts Centre.
