Review: Em Rusciano Addicted To Love 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival

★★★★★

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 scene and revenge garden.

Rusciano enters in red. A glittering cabaret two-piece catches the stage light: sequinned bust, high-cut briefs, bare limbs, big hair and the confidence of someone who has worked very hard to become dangerous again. She calls it her forty-seven-year-old revenge body. She says she could crack walnuts on her arse.

Rusciano has emerged from a twenty-five-year marriage and has spent the past eighteen months dating. Addicted To Love is her field report from the wreckage. It is also a spectacular act of reclamation.

She opens with Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield, and the whole show keeps proving the point. Dating apps. Men holding fish. Perimenopausal mishaps. Older men who cannot get it up and cannot quite get up the motivation to find out whether it is medical. Young, shredded men who seem softer and kinder, until “I might want kids” becomes a conveniently sensitive exit strategy.

Rusciano does not merely tell stories. She detonates them. Most cabaret shows are songs with a bit of talking. Rusciano reverses the ratio. She is a singing comedian.

There may only be five or six full musical numbers across ninety minutes, but the space between them is filled with something wilder: AuDHD stream-of-consciousness, political rant, confession, audience work, sexual overshare, feminist lecture and stand-up meltdown.

Sometimes an idea seems to exit her mouth before even she has approved it. She doubles over laughing, drops to the floor. She needs a moment to recover from her own brain. Then she gets up and somehow finds the next punchline.

The humour aches in the gut because it keeps landing in the body before the mind catches up.

Behind her, the band wear red T-shirts carrying the show’s core instruction: CHOOSE ME. It is a riff on Choose Life, but it is also the thesis: choose me before the man. Choose me before the family system. Choose me before the old story where women disappear into care work, housework, emotional logistics and the endlessly polite maintenance of male comfort.

The band includes her father, which becomes one of the night’s richest running jokes. Whenever Rusciano veers into especially explicit territory, she refers to him, refuses to look at him, then somehow makes the discomfort even funnier.

Early in the show, she hunts for straight men in the audience and finds Alejandro. From then on, he becomes witness, foil, hostage and representative sample. Rusciano speaks to him throughout the show. Not cruelly. Not really. But directly.

That is part of what makes Addicted To Love feel bigger than post-divorce comedy. It becomes a conversation with men. Or perhaps an argument with them. A glittering, filthy, beautifully sung argument about why so many women are exhausted.

Women, she argues, have had to market themselves forever. They are Madison Avenue executives in pinstripes. Men, suddenly forced to compete now that women are no longer economically dependent on them, are in stained grey tracky dacks, clutching a roast chicken in a bag, begging for spare change.

She takes aim at the “Let Them” theory too. The idea might sound liberating in a podcast clip. But Rusciano asks the obvious question. If women keep “letting them,” when exactly do men learn responsibility?

This is the social question sitting under all the glitter. In an age of polarisation, the divide between men and women keeps widening. Politically, economically, romantically. The manosphere sells grievance back to boys and men as identity. Rusciano offers a counterforce: rage as clarity, comedy as survival, self-love as infrastructure.

The manosphere is no competition for the Emosphere.

Musically, she is still a powerhouse. Rusciano’s mash-up of Alanis Morissette’s You Outta Know and Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game is one of the night’s sharpest moments. There may be endless debate about who Morissette wrote her song about. There is no doubt who Rusciano has written this show about.

Her ex, Scott, hovers over the material like the unnamed antagonist in a pop revenge anthem.

Like Alanis, Rusciano is interested in power. Age. Desire. The stories women are sold, the stories women survive. The performance is a takedown, yes. But it is also an autopsy of a system where women are asked to hold the emotional load of families, while men describe caring for their own children as “babysitting.”

The messiness of the night is part of its joy. Rusciano drinks from a wine glass onstage, despite saying “the lesbians who run this centre” told her not to. Then she breaks the glass. The lesbian crew arrives. Naturally, they become part of the show.

There is also an iPad onstage for lyrics. Rusciano explains it through the combination of perimenopausal brain and ADHD. She does not need to apologise. It is a reasonable workplace adjustment.

More importantly, the brain that needs a prompt to remember lyrics is the same brain delivering ninety minutes of comic genius. That is not a weakness; that is the show’s engine.

Addicted To Love is not tidy; it is too alive for that. It sweats, swears, flirts, spirals, sings and occasionally lies down on the floor to collect itself.

By the end, the rose heart no longer feels decorative; it feels like a warning. Love is not soft here: it has thorns. It has memory. It has receipts.

Rusciano gives us a show powered by anger, revenge and the late discovery that being seen naked again can be motivational. But she also gives us something more generous: a furious invitation to stop making men the air in theirlungs.

Because when they leave, they still have to breathe. And, in Rusciano’s case, sing.

Em Rusciano: Addicted To Love runs to 7 June at the Dunstan Playhouse as part of the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

The show then embarks on a national tour. For additional city dates, check Em’s website.

Tickets are on sale now at the website.

Website: https://emrusciano.com/addicted-to-love/

Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/ and https://www.instagram.com/emrusciano/

Photo credits: Claudio Raschella