Brush up on your variety TV-show quiz knowledge and get ready for this brand new, brilliant Australian musical
Presented by: Adelaide Cabaret Festival and Adelaide Festival Centre
Reviewed: 12 June, 2025
Will you remember where you were on the evening of Thursday 12th June, 2025 in the years to come? I will. PRIMETIME, a brand-new Australian musical, had its first public reading at the Cabaret Festival, and from what we saw in this seventy-five minute preview, this show has the makings of something big.
Over the years, the Adelaide Cabaret Festival has provided a launch pad for brand-new Australia written musicals. These include Eddie Perfect’s Shane Warne – The Musical, Gillian Cosgriff’s The Fig Tree and Yve Blake’s Fangirls. The Cabaret Festival allowed these new works to have a week of intensive workshop rehearsals with industry professionals to workshop, adapt, rewrite and then give a public performance of the new work.
This year, an incredible completely original work joins this highly impressive list of Australian musicals. PRIMETIME is written by the talented writing team, Millicent Sarre (music and lyrics) and Joseph Simons (book and lyrics). Audiences were treated to the first act of PRIMETIME plus a few highlights from the second act. With only a week of development, what was presented was highly impressive.
If the first reading on 12th June is anything to go by, PRIMETIME is well on the way to being the next big Australian musical. It is set in 2005; everyone’s favourite game show, Race Around the Clock!, has been on air for 40 years. With an anniversary episode fast approaching, former prize models are pulled together, but a long-buried scandal comes to light and they team up to bring the show down.
The script is well on the way to being a very tight and well-executed book. The humour is fast, puns are aplenty and there are some excellent plays-on-words and witty banter. There were moments where the script did feel stagnant, but only because these moments felt like they needed blocking – a lot of these moments should be ironed out with set, props and the ability to fully block the stage direction needed.
Sarre’s music, along with Sarre and Simons’ lyrics are the driving force of this new work. Musically, you can hear elements of other great Australian composers, such as Tim Minchin, Missy Higgins, Eddie Perfect and the great Kate Miller-Heidke. Each piece that we heard perfectly matched the traits of the character that was singing. It was really refreshing to hear such contrast in each piece.
For this special development reading of PRIMETIME Sarre and Simons had a stellar, all South-Australian cast. It featured Jelena Nicdao as Stacey, Rosie Hosking as Gloria, Dee Farnell as Kimberly, Michaela Burger as Pamela, Millicent Sarre as Michelle, Rod Schultz as Frank and the production’s stylist, Joseph Simons as multiple minor roles and the incredible Josh Van Konkelenberg on piano and musical supervision. Each of these fine performers perfectly captured the character’s nuances and vocally brought a lot of depth to each role.
This short, seventy-minute insight to this brilliant new show certainly has captured the minds and hearts of those that were there at the development read-through. Look up PRIMETIME on social media platforms and keep a keen eye out for what is in store next for this promising new Australian musical.
Reviewed by Ben Stefanoff
Photo credit: Claudio Raschella
Venue: Banquet Room, Adelaide Festival Centre
Season: ended
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