The 2025 Sydney festival is promising to be the most accessible in years, both physically and fiscally, with free events, heavily discounted tickets and a brand new metro line connecting audiences to the festival’s key hub at Walsh Bay.

Tickets went on sale on Wednesday for the arts festival, which will be staged throughout January, and $49 early bird tickets are on offer until 2 December or sold out.

In her fourth and final year as the festival’s artistic director, Olivia Ansell said the cost of living crisis was a key factor in the programming and ticketing.

“We wanted to make sure that people could choose multiple events and engage in all aspects of the festival, as opposed to having to feel like they’ve got to choose one event or the other,” she said.

“As an international arts festival we want to make sure that access and inclusion, being able to experience culture and thought provoking work that can change the way you think and feel is a constant in our 49th year, without it being a huge strain on the wallet.”

The program features more than 50 free events including 12 nights of free live music among the 130 shows on offer, which include 22 World Premieres and 24 Australian exclusives. Here are five highlights:

Siegfried & Roy: The Unauthorised Opera

The festival is promising to “take the o out of opera” with this chamber production tracing the lives of two young Bavarian boys who grew up in war torn Germany and went on to become one of Las Vegas’s most extravagant signature acts.

The story of magicians Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn is co-written by New York trained composer-librettist Luke Di Somma and director Constantine Costi, who brought Puccini’s Il Tabarro to the festival in 2024.

There is the possibility that Australian tenor Kanen Breen as Roy and Australian baritone Christopher Tonkin as Siegfried will be upstaged by their co-star: Mantacore, a singing white tiger brought to life through puppetry.

A Model Murder

One of Sydney’s most salacious murder trials of the 1950s is the subject of playwright Melanie Tait’s (The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race) new work. Billed as “Chicago meets Witness for the Prosecution”, A Model Murder is the true story of page-three girl Shirley Beiger, who shot her two-timing lover in the face at point blank outside Chequers nightclub in 1954. How she managed to get away with it will be revealed in this immersive courtroom drama that will be staged in the very location when Beiger went on trial – the Darlinghurst courthouse.

The case that scandalised Sydney at the time, and other tales from Sydney’s underworld and the high profile trials that played out in the Darlinghurst courthouse, will also be discussed by 10-time Walkley award winning investigative journalist Kate McClymont in conversation with Ansell at the State Library of NSW on 12 January.

Antigone in the Amazon

Among the festival’s international offerings is the final work in the Swiss director Milo Rau’s political Europe trilogy.

Traumatic world events such as the Rwandan genocide, the second Congo war and the reign of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu are among those given the Rau treatment since he founded his International Institute of Political Murder more than a decade ago, producing work that, according to the Atlantic, is “tasteless, anarchic – and thrilling”.

Art meets activism in Antigone in the Amazon, in which Rau repositions the ancient Greek tragedy into the 1996 Eldorado do Carajás massacre, Brazil’s deadly battle over land rights. The production has been touring Europe and will open the Sydney festival on 4 January.

As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement

In a similar vein, the Toronto-based political First Nations theatre-maker Cliff Cardinal repositions Shakespeare in the framework of Canadian colonialism in As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement.

The 90 minute work is written and performed by Cardinal, an Indigenous artist of Cree and Lakota heritage, and will challenge and provoke Australian audiences about a ritual many have come to accept as part of any show’s opening: the welcome to Country.

This production earned rave reviews and won the Canadian Governor General’s literary award for drama in 2023.

Dark Noon

Sydney town hall’s conversion into an immersive theatre space has become something of a recent tradition at the Sydney festival: last year it became a beach and next year it will be converted into a scene from America’s wild west.

The Danish director Tue Biering’s Dark Noon subverts the bloody birth of a nation and earned a five star review from the Guardian when it played the Edinburgh festival in 2023, where it was praised as “an extraordinary outsider vision of American history.”

Dark Noon features a South African cast creating, in the words of the production’s co-director and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, a parallel world using the wild west narrative as a creative device to tell a South African story.

The festival will also feature the work of two artists in residence.

Digital works by visual artist Telly Tuita will light up the festival’s “Thirsty Mile” party hub, and creative artist Jacob Nash has curated the First Nations-led Blak Out program that will feature multiple events of song, ceremony and installation.

• The Sydney festival runs from 4 January to 26 January 2025.