BRISBANE: The Boy from Oz is set to become the first Australian musical to hit the big time in the United States.
Soon to end its record run in Queensland after an extended Sydney season, the toe-tapping musical on the life and times of talented songwriter-performer, the late Peter Allen, will open in New York later this year, the show's excited producers have confirmed.
The Broadway debut in September of The Boy from the Bronx will include all the show's favourite hits, including Manhattan Saddler and I Still Call the Corner of Fifth and Thirty-Fourth Home.

MELBOURNE: The Premier, Jeff Kennett, has told State Parliament overnight that if Sydney's recent hail storm had hit the Victorian capital instead, it would have done much more damage than the reported $350 million inflicted on the 2000 Olympic host city.

SYDNEY: At the swearing in of his new ministry, re-elected Premier Bob Carr has thanked the people of New South Wales for finding him less unpopular than Opposition Leader Mrs Kerry Chikarovski.

BRISBANE: Sex workers in the city's seedy Fortitude Valley have turned the tables on police who mounted a huge anti-prostitution operation in the area earlier this month when they used undercover police women posing as hookers to net hundreds of would-be clients.
A group of male and female prostitutes has pretended to be police officers to gauge just how much corruption still exists in the "Moonlight State" in the post-Fitzgerald Inquiry era.
They shoved pillows under their shirts and blouses and cruised up and down Brunswick Street late at night in rented white Falcons, driving with their elbows sticking way out the car windows.
"We parked outside entertainment venues that we knew didn't have extended liquor licences and these people just came out and gave us large amounts of money in brown paper bags," one sex worker told The Bug. "It was all a bit of a joke really."