Arts Review
A Cracker Kransky Christmas
A Cracker Kransky Christmas
16th- 21st December, 2025
Dr Gemma Regan
The kooky Kransky Sisters return with vengeance in their macabre music-hall Christmas Celebration to stuff your stockings with their gruesome humour and creepy carols.
Returning with their sell-out national show, the multi-award-winning musical trio, the Kransky Sisters, present their annual show with A Cracker Kransky Christmas. The sombre musical sisters have left their home again this Christmas to visit the QPAC to share their unorthodox and unnerving Christmas festivities, including hanging the festive chillies.
Their ghoulish lifestyle arises from the characters’ sheltered existence and often gruesome experiences. Matriarch Mourne and Eve, the subservient sister, share sinister stories of Christmases past and their disturbing, yet incredibly amusing, childhood of poverty outside the country town of Esk.
They don’t often get out much from their creepy old rickety family house, which hides a lot of secrets since their mother left them in 1976, with the skeleton of a half-buried uncle and a multitude of pets who have been impaled, squashed and shredded over the years.
Mourne Kransky (Annie Lee) dominates her subservient younger siblings, Eve (Christine Johnston) and their tuba-playing, downtrodden half-sister Dawn (Carolyn Johns). She rules the roost, rarely allowing Eve and Dawn to speak. Eve harbours a passion to marry, to which Mourne comments that a husband is not a stocking stuffer! Eve often interjects with amusing titbits and eerily echoes many of her sister's phrases with unnerving humour.
The ladies celebrate Christmas in Kransky-style with twisted tales of their secluded lives and unusual intonations of famous songs, all played by Eve on an eclectic assortment of instruments, including a toilet brush, a musical saw, and keys. Dawn hums brilliantly on the tuba, and Mourne strums the guitar and plays the pots and pans with a washing-up brush.
Each song has a ghoulish Kransky twist using minor chords, disturbing lyrics and unusual pacing to present an eerie take on the usual pop songs and carols, including Bohemian Rhapsody, Toxic and The 12 Days of Christmas. There is even a ghostly tale replete with a ghastly Ghostbusters interpretation to have you shaking with fear and laughter.
Expect the usual audience participation as they grab an unsuspecting soul to be dressed Kransky-style in Westpac red bows for lascivious humiliation and to demonstrate their musical prowess.
A Cracker Kransky Christmas is an annual must-do Brisbane tradition with its fun-filled macabre music-hall show. I left with my jaw aching from laughing and humming their creepy Kransky twisted carols all the way home.