“Cabaret, I think, is the art form that most effectively honours the feeling that we are all in the room together,” Virginia Gay, Artistic Director of the 2025 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, says emphatically.
“There’s so little separation between performer and audience in cabaret, and the most exciting cabaret for me really just smashes through whatever little remnant of fourth wall that there is. When I think about Reuben [Kaye], when I think about Rizo [both of whom are programmed in this year’s Festival], I think about these people who are fearless with a crowd, who go out, who sit on audiences’ laps, sometimes put their head in audiences’ laps.
“You get this incredible, intimate, authentic connection with a performer – with a star. You get to engage with their charisma in a very immediate, uninterrupted way. And there’s something gloriously transformational about the shift that happens when you are deeply accessible like that as an audience. It comes up through you, the music, the fearlessness, and then it sort of pours into the foyer afterwards… Everybody is just living – sparkling and glittering through this art that has been brought up the stage, up through them, and it continues to course through them like electricity,” she continues, barely drawing breath.
“So it’s that. That’s why I love cabaret, and it’s why I love this festival, the Adelaide Cabaret Festival – and its audience – so much,” Gay says passionately.
Jump to:
Exclusives and highlights
The 2025 Adelaide Cabaret Festival – the festival’s 25th edition – is Gay’s second bite of the cherry as Artistic Director; the actor, writer and effervescent television personality previously programmed the Festival in 2024.
Highlights of the 2025 Festival include seven-time Grammy Award-winning British musician, composer and producer Jacob Collier in an exclusive Australian appearance; and another Australian exclusive with Davina and the Vagabonds direct from New Orleans, in Adelaide for two nights only.
“Davina is a returning star, real toe-tapping stuff, real booty shaking and sequin-shaking stuff, some really hot New Orleans sounds, which is going to be f***ing phenomenal… And Jacob Collier is awesome – he’s usually touring with, a 10- or 15-piece band of multi-instruments but here, it is him, his instruments, and us. That is an extraordinary access point and that’s an extraordinary way to hear and to meet an incredible talent,” Gay tells ArtsHub.
Australian highlights
Australian music royalty, the ARIA and AACTA Award-winning Jessica Mauboy, makes her Adelaide Cabaret Festival debut with the world premiere of her intimate evening of music and stories, The Story of Me; theatrical force of nature Bernadette Robinson (Songs for Nobodies, Pennsylvania Avenue) stages the Adelaide premiere of DIVAS, in which she embodies the vocal stylings and stories of Piaf, Winehouse, Bassey, Streisand, Garland, Cyrus and Callas; and another Australian legend, Carlotta – who performed at the very first Adelaide Cabaret Festival in 2002 – returns with The Party’s Over for one night only.
“Carlotta is phenomenal. She is 81 and as fabulous as ever. She’s so funny on stage. She’s so scathing. It is so brilliant. And so charismatic… and one of the ways that she cut her teeth was hosting Les Girls in the 60s and 70s in Kings Cross, at a time when Kings Cross was run by mobsters, and the idea that she was saying ‘Shut up’ to the mobsters when they talked back during her show? Brilliant.”
Another Festival highlight encourages audience members to celebrate platonic love, in Emilie Zoey Baker and Michael Nolan’s Marry Your Friends.
“Honouring that sense of [cabaret having] no distinction between performer and audience, no separation … this incredible show is taking the feeling of, ‘your friends are the family that you choose’. We get a lot of celebration of romantic love in pop culture, but what about the other kinds of love that are actually sometimes more lasting and deeper and with people who have seen you in and out of several romantic relationships – your friends?
“Let’s honour that connection. Let’s celebrate it. So, Marry Your Friends is an optionally interactive show. You can come and simply watch, or you can come and you can [and marry] one of your friends. There will be a live band who will play the song of your friendship as you walk down the aisle, there will be celebrity celebrants who will help you celebrate this love – you can either write your vows beforehand, you can do it on the fly, you can do as much preparation or as little as you like – or, as I said, you could simply sit and watch this joy explosion, this love explosion.
“And if you do get married, before you walk back down the aisle you get a marriage certificate, and we all, collectively, swear you are friends for life in holy matrimony. And then we’re going to celebrate. It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. And it’s sort of experiential. I think that’s really important too. You can’t get this sensation on a computer screen. You can’t get this sensation watching a TV series. You can only get this sensation live, with people exploding with love like this. It’s wonderful,” says Gay.
Old favourites return and new stars shine
Gay is also excited about the return of Adelaide Cabaret Festival favourites such as Class of Cabaret, now in its 16th year; the return of former Artistic Director David Campbell with his latest show, Good Lovin’ & More; and especially by Festival Late Nights, a different show each week hosted by a different artist, including Adelaide’s own Victoria Falconer, musical comedian Gillian Cosgriff, and Gay herself on the final weekend when she hosts the 25th Birthday Party.
“Those Festival Late Nights, they’re my favourite taste of the Festival, because they really honour the chaos, that feeling of a back room in a club where you’re [thinking] ‘I didn’t even know this existed. What is going on here?’ which is where cabaret had its roots… So the Late Nights are the feeling of being just on the edge of, ‘This is wild, but I still feel safe, but this is wild!’ That’s what I think Festival Late Nights do the best,” Gay explains.
“And Class of Cabaret is the only show in the Festival that is guaranteed to make me cry. It will make me piss tears, actually, but happy tears – because it is these 16 and 17-year-olds who have worked so hard to create their own cabaret. And they are doing five minutes of it for you, for an audience and, yes, lots of that audience is made up of friends and family. But for the first time this year, we’re having Class of Cabaret in the Dunstan Playhouse, because it always sells out.
“So we’re putting it in a bigger space and you get to come and see the stars of tomorrow before they’ve been far. You get to come and see these big hearts being so brave and so vulnerable and talking with such authenticity about their experiences and finding their voices and telling their own jokes. I find it so exciting.
“And that’s [former Artistic Directors] David Campbell and Lisa Campbell’s innovation, and that is on the state’s curriculum! Those kids get marked – a mark that counts towards their final year exams – on the making of a cabaret here as part of the Festival. I just think that is such impressive work from my predecessors. They’ve worked so hard to make that happen.
“And I just love that we can offer that to students in South Australia – because it’s not just Adelaide, it’s students all the way through South Australia. We have bursaries. That means that students from rural areas come in. This is not exclusive. This art form is, in fact, one of the cheapest and most successful art forms that you can start making, and that is so exciting to be able to pass that on, to open that door to the next generation,” Gay concludes.
Adelaide Cabaret Festival runs from 5-21 June 2025. Visit the festival website for show dates and details.
