★★★★☆
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 occasional springboard.
Adler is an American comedian, writer, musician and performer who has written for The Late Late Show with James Corden. He is also a classically trained pianist known for blending songs, storytelling and physical comedy. Before arriving at Adelaide Cabaret Festival, his solo show Haus of Dy-lan played Netflix Is A Joke Festival in 2024 and Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2025.
That blend is the show’s great pleasure. Adler is not a triple threat, he is a pile-up of threats. Comedy. Singing. Dance. Classical piano. Acrobatics. Musical theatre. He even throws in a casual backflip, almost as if remembering halfway through that he can.
The show begins with a childhood wound dressed as a showbiz origin story. Adler recalls dressing as Disney’s Mulan in fifth grade, playing piano, getting laughs and not knowing whether the other children were laughing with him or at him. He did not yet know what gay meant. But he knew the boys were using it against him. He also knew he wanted to be a star.
Haus of Dy-lan is a glittery, restless comedy about being made visible before you understand the terms of the gaze.
Adler is half Japanese and half Jewish. He uses that dual inheritance to explore what it means to never quite belong to one world entirely. The show moves through racial prejudice, sexuality, family expectation and the specific loneliness of being a child who becomes a punchline before becoming himself.
The central thread is bullying. Not as a moral lesson or solemn trauma mining. More as a mark left under the skin.
Bullies often grow out of their behaviour. The bullied have to grow around it.
Adler knows this. He also knows how quickly pain curdles into a joke, and how jokes can become survival tactics. Some of the sharpest material sits right on that edge. He jokes that suicide is part of his culture, invoking Shōgun, kamikaze pilots and the revelation that his grandfather signed up as a kamikaze pilot at fourteen. Adler thought he was a teenage emo. His grandfather, he suggests, had him beaten.
It is dark, but it is also very Adler: historically specific, emotionally risky and delivered before the audience can decide whether to flinch.
His musical range is equally slippery. He strikes a pose for the Haus of Dy-lan theme with a touch of Madonna’s Vogue. He delivers a country-and-western piano ballad about touring the Deep South to try to open hearts before the US election.
Adler plays mournful classical piano in minor keys. He drops into emo Twenty One Pilots territory. He sings from a musical he has written about soccer, then sheepishly realises he has assumed Australians call it football after recently touring Edinburgh.
The joke is small, the pattern is revealing. His show is so densely packed with cultural codes that some land more cleanly than others.
There are American references that do not fully translate. Queer in-jokes and Grindr gags delight half the room while leaving others a beat behind. There are culturally niche punchlines that feel written for New York, Los Angeles or Edinburgh rather than Adelaide.
But this is also part of the show’s identity. Haus of Dy-lan is not trying to flatten Adler into a universal cabaret product. It is intensely specific. Sometimes that specificity sparkles. Sometimes it narrows the room.
One of the funniest running jokes comes from the title itself. Adler explains that someone once assumed Dylan was not pronounced the usual way because he is Asian. The gag has shades of Key & Peele’s substitute teacher sketch, where ordinary names are violently misread through someone else’s cultural confidence. Here, it becomes a neat symbol of Adler’s whole argument. People keep mispronouncing him before they meet him.
Adler’s mother becomes another recurring character. Her attitude to having twin gay sons runs through the show, with the lights flicking green when Adler impersonates her. Red lighting reveals flashes of Adler’s inner angst. But these are flickers. Most of the time, the pain is masked by speed, wit and musical excess.
That speed is thrilling. Adler is constantly moving. He darts from piano to pose to story to song to aside. He shifts character, he interrupts himself. And he loops back to earlier gags with pleasing precision.
For a debut solo show, the structure is stronger than it first appears. Early references return. Throwaway details become callbacks. By the final song, Adler draws together the show’s Disney, family, bullying, identity and showbiz threads with impressive craft.
That also explains why the show may be hard to adapt for every audience. Its references are load-bearing; they are not decorative. Change too many of them and the architecture could wobble.
The show could perhaps use a touch more air. Some sequences rush past before they have fully landed. A few jokes need either more local framing or less reliance on assumed cultural knowledge. But the force of Adler’s talent is undeniable.
The bullies may have grown up. But Dylan Adler got the stage.
Dylan Adler: Haus of Dy-lan runs to 7 June at the Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
It then runs in Melbourne on 9 June before touring internationally.
Tickets are on sale now at the website.
Website: https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/dylan-adler-haus-of-dy-lan
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/ and https://www.instagram.com/dylanadler_/
Photo credits: Claudio Raschella
