‘Rebellious and irreverent and sexy’: Adelaide Cabaret Festival reveals 25th anniversary program
Adelaide Cabaret Festival has unveiled its 25th anniversary program, with artistic director Virigina Gay celebrating the festival’s history along with new additions including pop idol Jessica Mauboy.
A week out from launching her second Adelaide Cabaret Festival program, artistic director Virginia Gay is buzzing at the prospect of shepherding the festival through its 25th anniversary year.
“As somebody who still occasionally maintains that she’s 25 on casting forms, I think I’m the perfect person to celebrate,” the actor and director tells InReview.
Gay says the quarter century milestone means this year’s festival carries a higher than usual appreciation of its own legacy — and she isn’t the only regular back for more.
The June program features plenty of familiar faces, including Gay’s 2009-2011 predecessor and “Adelaide’s favourite son” David Campbell, soul sisters Vika and Linda Bull, a tribute to the great divas by Bernadette Robinson, singer turned author and broadcaster Clare Bowditch, and recent festival staple (and 2025 Fringe ambassador) Michelle Brasier. Reuben Kaye, who received an Adelaide Cabaret Festival Icon Award in 2024, will also be back.
But few acts embody the sense of legacy more than Australian trans icon Carlotta, who will return to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival with her new show The Party’s Over.
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Carlotta. Photo: Carlene / Supplied
“Carlotta has been an extraordinary political firebrand,” Gay says. “She hosted Les Girls in Kings Cross in the middle of the 60s and 70s, when King’s Cross was run by mobsters. This woman is fearless and phenomenal.
“She was at the very first Adelaide Cabaret Festival 25 years ago, and that she is still going as strong and as fabulous as ever 25 years later… that’s a pretty f***ing extraordinary legacy.”
While history is important, Gay has also included a range of new faces she says will explore the “cutting edge” of what cabaret can mean in 2025, from Tired Ass Showgirls, a celebration of friendship from Hedwig & the Angry Inch star Seann Miley Moore and Brendan de la Hay, to the Australian premiere of British-American comedian Demi Adejuyigbe.
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Adejuyigbe’s one-man show Demi Adejuyigbe is Going to Do One (1) Backflip recently won Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe, which Gay managed to catch in its original UK run — just.
Demi Adejuyigbe. Photo: Andrew Max Levy / Supplied
“[I] couldn’t get a ticket in Edinburgh, I had to wait for him to transfer down to London to see the show,” Gay says. “Changed my flights in London to see the show, and I got about three minutes in, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, perfect’.”
This year’s lineup also includes first-time Cabaret Festival appearances from pop star Jessica Mauboy, who will retrace her musical life story at Her Majesty’s Theatre on June 14, and Jacob Collier, the Grammy-winning jazz prodigy and viral star who will bring his signature, infectious blend of live improvisation and audience participation to Adelaide across two nights.
Despite the glut of big names and steady hands across the program, Gay says a frisson of experimentation and evolution remains central to the festival. Audiences can expect premieres of new works including the Frank Ford Commission The Smart Girl’s Guide to Breaking Up, Emilie Zoey Baker and Michael Nolan’s “celebration of holy mate-rimony” Marry Your Friends, and Primetime, an in-development showing of a new musical from Adelaide’s Millicent Sarre and Joseph Simons.
“I think cabaret always evolves, but it usually comes from this state of triumph, through a little secret back room.
Jessica Mauboy. Photo: Peter Brew / Supplied
“It has this sense of, ‘We’re a little bit away from the from the from the big rooms’, but that means that we can do things [that are] much more extraordinary and rebellious and irreverent and sexy and mischievous and wild.
“And I think we’re always riding the wave, that cabaret as an art form has always been riding ever since, God, it evolved in the back rooms of Berlin.”
Adelaide Cabaret Festival runs from June 5 – 21 2025