Community, celebration and stars: Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2024

Artistic Director Virgina Gay describes the tone of her inaugural Adelaide Cabaret Festival and enthuses about some of the program highlights.
A white woman with short blonde hair poses dramatically before a gold lame screen. Her hands are behind her head, her face is turned to the right, and she is singing or screaming with joy. She wears a white shirt under a black suit, and her midriff and a hint of her black bra are visible.

‘Sex, sass, queerness, community and celebration … that’s the vibe that I think best encapsulates my particular take on cabaret,’ says Virginia Gay, Artistic Director of the 2024 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

Gay, an award-winning Australian writer, actor and television personality whose career has embraced everything from an acclaimed production of Calamity Jane and Melbourne Theatre Company’s Cyrano, to television drama All Saints and light entertainment program Dancing with the Stars, as well as cabaret both in Australia and overseas, fell in love with cabaret as an art form when she was 14.

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Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in 2020. In 2021 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association. Most recently, Richard received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Follow him on Twitter: @richardthewatts