Category: Adelaide
Review: The Sunshine Boys Sees Old Friends, Feuds & Great Comedy
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★★★★½ Willie Clark still gets Variety delivered. His nephew brings it around, and the old vaudevillian checks the obituaries. When the bookings stop coming, there is always the satisfaction of outliving the competition. It is a wonderfully sour detail in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, like the milk he’s forgotten…
Review: Commentary Asks Who Gets The Tell The Story When Everyone Is Watching
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★★★★★ Five windowpanes divide a large blue box. Tall screens shaped like smartphones stand on either side. The stage is empty, but Nick Atkinson’s voice is already filling it, delivering the director’s commentary for his film Low. Matilda Woodroffe’s set establishes the visual grammar of Ash Flanders’ Commentary: windows, mirrors,…
Review: State Opera Takes A Magical Journey Into The Woods
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★★★★★ A man stands before the red velvet curtain. Not the narrator, but Artistic Director Dane Lam himself. Presenting with casual charm, Lam offers three things to celebrate: last night marked the premiere of one of five new productions created in South Australia. Into The Woods features an entirely South Australian cast.…
Review: Hansel & Gretel Is A Dollhouse Nightmare With A Lullaby At Its Heart
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★★★★★ Fog drifts between towering pine trees on a circular green stage. Sunlight falls from the left. Then the platform begins to rotate, as though the world itself has started turning, and Jonathon Oxlade’s set delivers its first surprise: a weathered dollhouse flashes into view. Its front has been lifted…
Review: The Sound Inside Listens To The Stories We Tell Ourselves
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★★★★★ A woman stands beneath an illuminated streetlamp beside an empty park bench on Yale University’s campus. It is the middle of the night and she cannot sleep. Dressed in the yellows and browns of an academic, or possibly Velma from Scooby-Doo, Michelle Nightingale’s Bella Baird is alone but never…
Review: Anastasia Finds Its Way To Adelaide In Glorious Style
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★★★★★ In a musical about deposed and murdered royalty, Australian theatre supplies two living queens. Rhonda Burchmore and Nancye Hayes finally enter the same story in the second act, and Anastasia rises with them. Like the best fairy tales, their gifts have ignored the passing years. Anastasia the Musical grew…
Review: Logan St Uncovers The Forgotten Histories Beneath Adelaide’s Streets
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★★★★★ Before Logan St begins, its audience is asked to speak. Across a floor-to-ceiling screen, Uncle Lewis O’Brien and Aunty Lynette Crocker welcome us to Kaurna Yarta. Matt Byrne’s camera moves through the landscape, capturing burbling streams and smoke curling through Country. Together, the audience declares that we have not…
Review: Jesus Christ Superstar Rises To The Challenge
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★★★★☆ A guitarist stands in silhouette against a blood-red backdrop. Mark Lanigan-O’Keefe attacks Andrew Lloyd Webber’s opening riff, his shadow thrown across the stage as though Jimmy Page has wandered into Golgotha. The image captures the challenge facing Therry Theatre. Jesus Christ Superstar belongs to musical theatre, but it was…
Review: Don Giovanni Sees Opera Australia At Its Most Inventive
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★★★★½ A red petrol pump stands at stage left. It looks like scenery, a piece of period detail. Then you remember Chekhov: do not place a gun on stage unless somebody is going to use it. Opera Australia’s touring Don Giovanni does use the pump. By the end, it has…
Review: Uncle Vanya, Rebooted For The Doom Scrolling Age
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★★★★★ “Sit anywhere you like. Just don’t step on the dirt.” It is the first instruction audiences receive on entering the AC Arts Main Theatre. Three islands of red earth spread across the floor before the stage. Two more sit closer to the action. Behind them, trees sway across a…
Review: The Man Who Came To Dinner Is Christmas In July With Claws
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★★★★½ Peter Goers may be one of the few Adelaide performers who could walk on stage as Sheridan Whiteside and make the audience feel the casting joke before the first barb has fully landed. Following his successful return to the stage last year in Harvey, Goers now plays the acerbic…
Review: You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown Is About Nothing, & Everything
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★★★★★ There is something almost radical about how little happens in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Before Seinfeld, this was the musical about nothing. Nobody saves the world, nobody gets the girl. Nobody has a glitter-cannon self-realisation. Charlie Brown cannot fly a kite. He cannot kick a football. He…
Review: Postmodern Jukebox 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★★ Before Postmodern Jukebox’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival set, a voice from the crowd yelled out: “Willie!” It was not a random heckle. It was a greeting. Willie Jay Moore Jr had not yet been handed his big solo moment. He was behind the kit, holding down the show with the…
Review: Casey Donovan This Is Me 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★★ Casey Donovan became a household name when she won Australian Idol in 2004 as its youngest-ever champion. Now, twenty-two years later, she arrives for one night only to a packed Festival Theatre for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Despite its title, This Is Me – The Amy Winehouse Special is not about Winehouse. The…
Review: Tara Tiba OMID 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★☆ After seven years away from the stage, the Iranian-born, Perth-based singer Tara Tiba stood in the Banquet Room last night and offered the audience something that felt fragile, defiant and alive. OMID means hope, and for Tiba, hope is not a slogan; it is a survival tool. Tiba is…
Review: HOUSE OF ROT Grey Gardens 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★½ Anticipated by packed tables within the Space Theatre, another fabulous show, HOUSE OF ROT: Grey Gardens, joins Reuben Kaye’s ‘Delicious Revolution’ for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. A minimally lit stage, swathed in smoke, reveals a piano and five chairs. To each of the sides of the stage, wooden chairs…
Review: Lincoln Elliott Artefact 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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“Steal shit back” is a thesis statement and also the title-song battle cry of Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical), Lincoln Elliott’s ambitious emo-rock heist musical about colonial theft, cultural identity, self-determination and the punishing business of making new Australian work. Presented as a work-in-progress showing at Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Artefact…
Review: Baylie Carson Is Handsome(ish) 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★☆ Baylie Carson greets the audience before the show has even begun. They move through the Space Theatre in a blue cropped, sleeveless vest with red trim and black cargo pants. There is a bowl in hand. Inside are small slips of paper, like fortune cookies, waiting for permission. “You…
Review: Alfie Boe With Amy Manford 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★★ The stage for Alfie Boe’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival concert is dressed like a loading dock after soundcheck. Music cases are piled high, the wings are exposed, and the crew drifts in and out of view. It is a deliberate stripping back of theatre’s usual mystique. Not quite backstage, not…
Review: What’s The Buzz? 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★★ Adelaide did not get the full arena-sized production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Instead, it got something rarer. What’s The Buzz? was billed as an access-all-areas concert and conversation with the Australian cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, stripping back the spectacle to share songs, road stories and backstage secrets for…
Review: Dylan Adler Haus Of Dy-lan 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★☆ Dylan Adler arrives at the grand piano in a purple and white kimono. As a classically trained pianist, Adler has spent much of his life at the keyboard. But in Haus of Dy-lan, the piano isn’t just an instrument: it is confession box, launch pad, battle station, trauma archive and…
Review: Natalie Gamsu A Voice Like Shrapnel 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★★ Natalie Gamsu’s cabaret, A Voice Like Shrapnel, is a masterclass in storytelling. Offering a raw reflection on her life and hard-won journey towards self-acceptance, Gamsu delves deep into her past with grit and startling honesty. Co-written by Ash Flanders and director Stephen Niccolazzo – Green Room Award winner for Best Direction – the…
Review: Em Rusciano Addicted To Love 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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★★★★★ At the centre of Em Rusciano’s Addicted To Love sits a giant heart made of roses. Roses climb the microphone stands like ivy. Rusciano herself prowls the stage with a handheld rose microphone that droops, swings and flops with unmistakable phallic mischief. This is romance as shrine, battlefield, crime…
Review: Pretty Woman Finds Magic In Adelaide
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★★★★½ Bold, bright, and bubbly are words that come to mind describing the entirety of director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell’s Pretty Woman: The Musical, on now in Adelaide as part of its national tour. Retaining much of the original film’s 80s charm, this adaptation, presented in Australia by Jones Theatrical…
Review: Funny Girl Shines With The Star Quality Of Fanny Brice
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★★★★★ I will start simply. You must see this production. It is truly exceptional in every way. In the words of Fanny Brice, she is “the greatest star,” and this production shines with that star quality. Funny Girl is forever linked to the icon that is Barbra Streisand. Featuring some of…
Review: How To Succeed In Business Pulteney Grammar
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Pulteney Grammar School’s production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying opened at the Future Events Centre in Paradise with a spectacle before the curtain had even risen. The foyer was filled with branded snack cups, a videographer, and a balloon-festooned photo backdrop complete with props, setting the…
Review: The Almighty Sometimes Is A Brilliant Study Of Love & Despair
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★★★★★ In Eels’ Climbing To The Moon, Mark Oliver Everett sings of the self becoming blurred: where one person ends, and what others are making of them begins. It could almost be an unofficial epigraph for The Almighty Sometimes, presented by Independent Theatre. Kendall Feaver’s play lives inside that same…
Review: Art Arrives In Adelaide With Bite & Brilliance
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★★★★½ Friendship can survive distance. It can survive new jobs, new partners, fluctuating bank balances and the slow indignities of middle age. Whether it can survive a white painting is another question. Yasmina Reza’s ART, first staged in Paris in 1994, has now been translated into 30 languages and has…
Review: The Importance Of Being Earnest Is Wilde & Unbuttoned
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★★★★★ Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened on 14 February 1895. That same night, the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, attempted to storm the theatre and hurl a bouquet of rotten vegetables at the stage. He was turned away. Within months,…
Review: Once Upon A Mattress Bursts With Chaos & Fairytale Energy
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★★★★☆ There’s nothing a good fairytale musical comedy on a wintery evening can’t fix! Hills Musical Company are treating Adelaide to a spirited revival of Once Upon a Mattress this month. Here, the conventional Princess and the Pea fairy tale is gleefully tossed aside and reshaped into a playful parody that satirises traditional…
