Adelaide Cabaret Festival artistic director, Virginia Gay, has unveiled her 2025 program and it’s jam packed with another dazzling display of cabaret goodness.
It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Adelaide Cabaret Festival – the world’s largest cabaret festival and Australia’s favourite winter festival – is turning 25 and, in a birthday celebration like no other, audiences are invited to join the party and ‘bling it on’, with a contemporary, star-studded lineup announced today, 2nd April. Adelaide Cabaret Festival runs from the 5th to the 21st of June, and will showcase world-class singers and storytellers through 77 performances over 12 nights, which will include 11 world premieres, 11 Australian exclusives and 9 Adelaide premieres by international artists from the USA and UK, plus some of Australia’s best contemporary cabaret acts.
Audiences are invited to delight in cabaret and community with a special 25th anniversary bash – the sold-out 2025 Variety Gala at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
Virginia Gay spoke to Glam Adelaide in the lead up to this year’s program launch. For the 2024 program, Virginia had focused on what Cabaret is at its simplest form — stories into songs. She shared with us what her focus was going into curating this year’s Cabaret Festival program.
“This year I wanted to honour two things. One, this feeling that, in cabaret more than any other art form, there’s no separation between the audience and performer. There’s just this sense of porous nature. There’s no fourth wall; performers are looking directly at you and they’re usually not behind a character. It’s a direct and immediate connection and it pours off the edge of the stage, into the auditorium, through our bodies and then out into the foyers afterwards – it’s almost musically immersive. So I wanted to honour that with artists like Jacob Collier, who uses us as his instrument, with shows like Marry Your Friends with Emilie Zoey Baker and Michael Nolan, Clare Bowditch’s Random Creative Adventure, and Gillian Cosgriff’s There is Nothing Like a Game. The sense that the audience is as much a part of this experience as the performer, and that we are all artists and can make it together – I just love that feeling.
“The other thing that I really, really love and that I wanted to shine a light on is the level of charisma that comes off a cabaret performer. The way that you cannot tear your eyes off this person. And so when I’m looking at shows like Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going To Do One (1) Backflip, or Frankie McNair and the Burton Brothers, they have the kind of charisma where you would follow them into a cult, a fire, or the woods. I think that’s also true of Rizo, of Ruben Kaye as well – It’s that kind of incandescent energy.”
Headlining the Cabaret Festival is seven-time GRAMMY Award-winning musician, composer, and producer Jacob Collier in an Australian exclusive for Adelaide Cabaret Festival on June 7 and 8, with limited tickets available. Jacob’s incredible live performances will be filled with improvisation, audience participation and never-before-heard arrangements, all delivered with Jacob’s incredible joyous spirit and palpable energy.
“I’m out-of-my-mind proud of the team and so excited for our festival. I’ve been talking about Jacob Collier as a headline since before I got this job. I will tell you that what we have here at the Festival Centre is a team of incredibly hard-working people who you probably won’t see, but who are making this festival and have made this festival. Over the last twenty five years of the festival, all of the people who continue to work at the Festival Centre for the Cabaret Festival have been working out these networks of relationships across the globe. And keeping those relationships open has been an extraordinary education for myself. It is an extraordinary collection of a beautiful team who is working super hard all the time, often in several time zones, to land these incredible international stars.”
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Cabaret Festival, and so we asked Virginia: How important is the Cabaret Festival for the arts, not only here in Adelaide, but also on a world scale?
“I have exclusively been to Adelaide for the Cabaret Festival for a huge chunk of my life, and as a result of this beautiful job, I’ve been in Adelaide a lot more. I’ve seen the way that Adelaide responds to the Fringe and to the Adelaide Festival and Mad March. What is so exciting about our Cabaret Festival is that Adelaide’s enthusiasm doesn’t dull in the winter months. It’s just colder, it’s just more difficult to get out of the house, right? So what we can do as a festival in this state is create a wonderful warm community. To be able to provide that to Adelaide in the depths of winter is so thrilling. It makes me feel that we have a very valuable and authentic connection with our audience.
“Globally, this is extraordinary. We technically have this tiny little footprint in the Australian arts scene here at the Festival Centre. But the work that my predecessors and that team has done over 25 years means that I can be on the other side of the planet talking to somebody who I have just met and they can go, ‘Adelaide Cabaret Festival? I’ve heard that it is absolutely extraordinary. Where do we sign?’ That is phenomenal. We’re the largest and most prestigious cabaret festival in the world and I love that we are doing that global cutting-edge work here in Adelaide when it could be Berlin or New York – It’s here in Adelaide.”
The 2025 program will also include superstar and Australian music royalty Jessica Mauboy, who will make her Adelaide Cabaret Festival debut with the world premiere of her show, The Story of Me. This promises to be an intimate and unforgettable evening of music and stories on Saturday June 14.
Theatrical tour de force, Bernadette Robinson’s Adelaide premiere show DIVAS sees Bernadette transform into musical icons showcasing the vocal stylings and stories of Piaf, Winehouse, Bassey, Streisand, Garland, Cyrus and Callas on June 13.
One of Australia’s most beloved performers and former Adelaide Cabaret Festival Artistic Director David Campbell brings his unmatched vocal energy to his show Good Lovin’ & More on June 20.
Adelaide Cabaret Festival Icon, award winner of 2024 and international cabaret star Reuben Kaye returns bigger, better and bolder (if that’s possible) with his hit show enGORGEd XXL on June 21.
The Dunstan Playhouse will also feature a huge lineup of shows including Davin and the Vagabonds, Michelle Brasier in Average Bear, Bobby Fox with Mr Entertainment, Australian music legends Vika and Linda Bull, Jess Hitchcock, Fanny Lumsden, Alicia Keith and the Festival Statesman Chorus.
It wouldn’t be a 25th anniversary celebration without one of the original Adelaide Cabaret Festival performers from the very first festival – living legend Carlotta. Australia’s favourite showgirl brings her show The Party’s Over to Dunstan Playhouse on June 8.
In an in-development showcase commissioned by the festival, writers and performers Millicent Sarre (Class of Cabaret alumni) and Joseph Simons will present a new Australian musical, PRIMETIME, on June 12. We spoke to Virginia about the importance of giving these new Australian works a platform, such as the Cabaret Festival, to be aired to the public in a workshop format?
“It’s absolutely vital – it’s vital to the artists and it’s deeply thrilling to the audience. When you write a new piece of Australian theatre or Australian musical theatre, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to test that work in front of an audience because of the size of the market in Australia. If you are lucky enough to get in with a main stage company or with an incredible commercial producer you often will have three previews, or if you’re lucky, five, to get the show ready to open and maybe you might have had one development before that. That is doing Australian creatives a disservice. When we look at Broadway, there are on-ramps to Broadway. They go off-Broadway, before then they go off-off-Broadway. There are opportunities to do out-of-town tryouts before you bring this to your big cultural market. The same exists at the West End. So how can we, as a dearly beloved arts institution, offer something that is not only exciting to an audience, but you get direct, real-time feedback from an audience. There’s a sense of involving an audience and bringing an audience along with us, which is phenomenal. But to an artist, to show your work in a safe and loving environment, but to let it be seen and to let it blossom under eyes, under lights, with actors, with incredible actors, with beautiful musicians, that’s how you learn what works, and especially with a comedy. You cannot tell what is funny until you put it in front of an audience.”
The 2025 program also features many affordable performances and programs.
“It’s really important to us that we don’t ever want the arts, or this festival, to be exclusionary. We want to be able to say, ‘This place is for you! Come, come sit.’ So we’ve got a lot of free events this year, we’ve got a lot of events where the ticket prices are capped and we have got $30 tickets for people who are under 30 so you can access those. It’s so important to me and that is reflected in the programming. There are lots of delicious flavours in the tapas spread of this program. ‘Oh, that’s a very spicy chorizo!’ And then over here: ‘That is a very creamy piece of fried cheese – yes I want that the most!’ We want the most variety and the most possibility for people to say, ‘Oh, I do like that flavour’. So come and try our tapas, which is the Cabaret Festival.”
Cabaret stalwart Dr Trevor Jones will again delight at the Quartet Bar by Corryton Burge from June 6 to 21 with Piano Man and his always popular Show Tunes Trevia on June 8 and 12. Plus the much loved and always fabulous LGBTIQ+ Elders Dance Club returns to Artspace on Sunday June 15.
An unmissable peek behind the cabaret curtain, 10 Years Photographing Adelaide Cabaret Festival is an exhibition showcasing the incredible portrait photos taken by Claudio Raschella. The exhibition runs from June 6 through to August 31 at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
The Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2025 sparkles from 5-21 June at Adelaide Festival Centre and Her Majesty’s Theatre.
“The world’s pretty tough and pretty scary at the moment, and if you could possibly come and have a hug and feel elated and filled with possibility and connection with other people, if that is something that we could offer, then I want to offer as much of that as possible – I want to offer an abundance of that. Come sparkle and hold each other’s hands while we look at these incredible artists exploding with talent and joy and hope.”
More glitter, more sequins, more sparkle…bling it on!
The 25th anniversary program will be live on the Cabaret Festival website from 9am Wednesday April 2, with tickets on sale from 12pm.
Visit www.adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au for all program details and to purchase your tickets.
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