Eddie Perfect’s Shane Warne – The Musical, Gillian Cosgriff’s The Fig Tree and Yve Blake’s Fangirls all share something very special. They had their first development and public performance right here in Adelaide at the beloved Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
This year, an incredible new, completely original work joins this highly impressive list of Australian musicals. Primetime is written by the talented writing team, Millicent Sarre and Joseph Simons.
Millicent Sarre is a cabaret artist, composer and lyricist, musical theatre performer, and vocal coach, brought up and working on Kaurna Land. She is a passionate advocate for women, gender equity, and progressive social change, themes which are prominent in her artistic output. She has toured her original cabaret works Australia-wide; her most recent solo show Millicent Sarre is Opinionated won ‘Best Cabaret’ of the Adelaide Fringe 2023, with the album of original songs from the show released in February 2023. Her cabaret Bisexual Intellectuals, a collaboration with Jemma Allen and Rosie Russell, premiered with an award-winning season at Adelaide Fringe 2024, and saw them win ‘Outstanding Newcomer’ of Melbourne Fringe 2024. Millicent is currently a mentor of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s Class of Cabaret program.
Joseph Simons is a writer, director and choreographer working in music theatre, contemporary dance, opera, theatre and ballet. As a performer, he has toured throughout the USA, Asia, UK and Australia with companies including The Production Company, West Australian Ballet, Opera Australia, Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc., Queensland Ballet, Force Majeure, Victorian Opera, Jack Productions and The Australian Ballet. He has performed in development casts for Australian Dance Theatre and DV8 Physical Theatre, London. As an actor, Joseph played Tom in the original London cast of Spider Love by Mick Goldstein and created the role of Malcolm in the world premiere cast of The Death Of Kings by Colette F Keen.
Millicent and Joseph have teamed up to write Primetime. It’s 2005. Everyone’s favourite (fictional) game show Race Against The Clock! has been on air for 40 years. As the anniversary episode draws closer, the former prize models are unceremoniously thrown together, but a long-buried rigging scandal might be just the thing to encourage them to step out of the shadows.
Millicent and Joseph spoke to Glam Adelaide about Primetime and shared where the concept behind the show came from.
JOSEPH:
“Primetime is about a television game show where the prize models of the last 40 years are all being brought together for a reunion episode with the one male host who has been the host for the last 40 years. The idea came about because it felt like a great opportunity for us to comedically address some issues about ageism, and misogyny.”
MILLICENT:
“We decided that we wanted to write together first, before we decided what we were going to write. We started collaborating just over a year ago now and were talking about the fact that we both wanted to write a musical. Joseph is very established and has a lot of experience as a playwright. I am very confident and have done a lot of work with my original composition and original songwriting, but we didn’t have the skills that the other person had, so we realised that our skill sets were really complementary to writing a musical together. So we made the creative team first and then turned our attention to what we wanted to write about.”
Unlike a lot of the newer musicals based on movies or books, Primetime is a completely original concept and story.
MILLICENT:
“There is definitely the trend at the moment to create shows around an existing book or film, which I don’t want to buck because I completely understand why you do it. But it is so common at the moment that the big musical theatre works that we see are adaptations and I suppose we wanted to do something a little bit different and write a completely original story.”
Joseph shared with us how both he and Millicent worked together in creating the work.
“This show was very much made with the two of us in the room together and a lot of conversation. Once we decided that we wanted to do a new fictional story, of course then we have to create a new fictional story. That took quite a few months of really talking through possibilities of playing the ‘what-if’ game and eventually landing on a plot and an ensemble of characters who we think the audience could engage with and tell an exciting new story.”
Millicent and Joseph have assembled an incredible cast of South Australian performers to be a part of this development of Primetime. The cast includes: Jelena Nicdao, Rosie Hosking, Dee Farnell, Michaela Burger and Rod Schultz.
MILLICENT:
“We have been really blessed by the calibre of artists who are excited about the work and want to be involved. That’s been a big vote of confidence for the work itself and for us as a new writing duo, to have artists who have so much experience in artistry lend their voices to the work. It’s been so exciting working with them in the lead-up to this development and hearing their interpretations, hearing their fresh perspectives and their incredible voices singing this new material.”
JOSEPH:
“What the Adelaide Cabaret Festival offers each year to one new musical in development is a week of development time with a cast and finishing in a public showing. So on the 12th of June people who have tickets can come and see the fruits of our labour after a week of development. We are so thrilled to have this particular group of people join us in the room and to help us explore and experiment with this material that is truly South Australian made. We love that the group is a group of incredibly talented South Australian artists and we are very proud to have them in the room.”
We asked Millicent and Joseph how important it is that opportunities exist for new Australian works to have these development programs, like what the Cabaret Festival offers.
MILLICENT:
“I truly cannot overstate how important these opportunities are. We are so enormously fortunate to have this opportunity and not enough opportunities like this exist within Australia. I really think that the Cabaret Festival needs to be applauded and get recognition for it, because having a development opportunity for new Australian musical theatre is so critical and we need so many more of these opportunities in our country. When you’re writing a two-act full-length musical theatre piece, you need to go through so many different levels of development and stages to even get a first draft. What we’re going to present in the Cabaret Festival is a 70-minute showing, which will probably be less than half of our ultimate show. The fact that we get to do this and have this first development in a festival that is so widely respected is really thrilling.
JOSEPH:
“I think that every musical that everyone loves has been through a very long and strenuous process with multiple stages. Music theatre takes a long time to write and it requires a lot of different milestones along the way. No musical gets written first draft and then suddenly appears on stage in full set, costumes, lights and sold out audience. Every musical that you’ve ever heard of has been through a very long development process before it becomes the fabulous show that everyone loves. So the fact the Adelaide Cabaret Festival is able to offer new musicals their very first opportunity to step on stage and try out some of their songs, some of their scenes, and in our case a brand new story with brand new characters, is very exciting. This will be the first time that audiences get to peek into this new world.”
MILLICENT:
“I think the elephant in the room also is that musical theatre is expensive, especially when you are at this stage of development. It’s about adequately remunerating the professionals who you are engaging in the room with. So the fact that, through the very generous bequests, the Cabaret Festival is able to offer this funding is imperative in the life of your work.”
Millicent is also a mentor, alongside Mark Oates, for the 2025 Class of Cabaret. The Class of Cabaret offers sixteen school students the opportunity to embark on an extraordinary journey: creating, rehearsing, and performing their own original cabaret. This feel-good showcase is one of the most beloved events of the festival. You’ll be entertained, inspired, and wonder why you never got to do anything this cool in school.
MILLICENT:
“It’s so critical in the artistic landscape of South Australia. There aren’t any comparable programs in South Australia, or even outside of South Australia – it’s quite a unique setup. The thing that I love about Class of Cabaret is that being a strong performer, whether that is in the cabaret genre or, as is true of a lot of the applicants that we have, in more of a musical theatre setting, is of course a really important skill to have. But the skill set that we teach to a Class of Cabaret is so much more about the creation of original work and about the creativity and the creative process itself, not necessarily just about performance. I do genuinely believe, as an independent artist in 2025, that being able to create your own work is a cornerstone of having a long and successful career in the arts. The fact that we are able to coach these brilliant young people in making new, original work that is meaningful and that can be a vehicle for social change and commentary – I feel so, so lucky to be a part of it. I really can’t overstate how important I think it’s been.
“The other thing that I really value about Class of Cabaret as a program is that it’s free – students do not have to have any sort of financial means to be able to participate. That evens out the playing field because so much access to upskilling in the performing arts is financially inaccessible for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or whose families just don’t have the financial means to splash out on dance classes and acting classes. So the fact that this opportunity is provided to people regardless of their background is just a really small but important step in making sure that the people that we see on stage and the voices that are represented in our artistic landscape are diverse ones.”
Primetime
Banquet Room, Adelaide Festival Centre
Thursday 12 June at 6.30pm
https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/primetime
Class of Cabaret
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
Saturday 21 June at 2pm and 5pm
Please note: Both scheduled performances feature different students in the program.
The first group of 8 students will perform at 2pm, and the second group of 8 students will perform at 5pm.
https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/class-of-cabaret-2025
Photo credit: Kieran Humphreys
