★★★★☆
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 an ARIA-nominated artist whose music draws from Persian classical tradition, jazz, Latin and contemporary forms. Born in Tehran, she grew up in a country where women have been prohibited from singing publicly since the 1979 revolution. She later moved to Perth, studied jazz at WAAPA, and built a career around a voice that carries both technical mastery and exile.
Her instrument is extraordinary. But OMID was most powerful when the voice came with the cost of using it.
Early in the show, after singing a joyous Arabic folk song translated into Persian, Tiba sat down. Her heart was racing. She told us she had been housebound with chronic fatigue syndrome after a case of mono. Her partner at the time and her housemate caught it too. They recovered, she did not.
Before the show, she said, even climbing the stairs backstage had left her needing to lie down on towels. Suddenly every note felt like labour and gift. Not in a sentimental way, but in a physical one. The audience could hear what it meant for her to be there.
Tiba praised the Adelaide Cabaret Festival staff for their care. She said the heart of the people at the Festival is what makes it what it is. In a cabaret season often built around polish, provocation and glitter, this felt like a different kind of glamour. The glamour of being helped back to the stage.
She joked that during COVID, when everyone else was housebound, she did not feel like she was missing out. Then the world opened again and she was still inside. That led into Winter Is Over, though she wryly corrected the thought. Her winter is over-ish..
Tiba’s storytelling was loose, funny and emotionally direct. At one point, she spilt water on stage. Pianist Josiah Padmanabham cleaned it up with a towel. Then Artistic Director Reuben Kaye appeared with a fresh bottle of water, whispered to her, and prompted her to tell the audience what the lyrics meant.
Tiba laughed. She preferred to tell her intense stories. Good. Because the stories mattered.
She spoke of being hospitalised with anxiety. At her lowest point, she realised she could no longer feel love for her mother or her dog. It was like death, she said. What is life without emotion?
Tiba’s singing answered it. Her voice gave emotion back to the room in great waves. It was not simply beautiful, it was restoring something.
There was a healthy Persian contingent in the audience, and you could feel the extra charge of recognition. This was not cultural display from a distance. It was shared memory, shared grief, shared release.
Tiba also spoke of war. For her, it has been war since the revolution. She reminded us that a crowd like ours, listening to music, mixing genders and drinking alcohol, would be treated as criminal in Iran. She paid tribute to protesters who, as she put it, died because they wanted a life like this.
A cabaret room can feel frivolous. This one did not. Or rather, its freedoms suddenly felt precious.
Tiba explained she was sharing her anxiety and chronic fatigue because she had learned about her own condition while watching a program on SBS. If speaking could help someone else recognise themselves, then silence would be the greater risk.
Musically, the night moved between Persian tradition, Latin warmth and jazz flexibility. Padmanabham was superb at the piano, putting his shoulders into the instrument and giving the songs both lift and ache. Saxophones added smoke and curve. Latin-tinged acoustic guitar gave the arrangements a warmer body.
One of the night’s strongest moments came with an Iranian version of José Feliciano’s Homeland. Tiba sang it with a force that seemed to reach beyond nostalgia. This was homeland as wound, memory and impossible pull.
She finished with Iran’s most famous love song. By then, the room had earned it. Yet the most goosebump-inducing passage may have been unplanned. Tiba explained that she is a classical Persian singer, and that much of what she was doing on stage would be considered unhinged by those standards.
Then, in tribute to her teacher, she sang a traditional song a cappella. No band, no ornament from outside the body. Just the voice. The room stilled.
Here was a singer returning to the root of the thing, honouring the master-student tradition that shaped her, while standing in a cabaret festival on the other side of the world.
As a long-awaited return, OMID did not always have the polish of a show that has been toured into shape. Some transitions were untidy. The balance between songs, translations and personal stories sometimes felt improvised in real time. But that also made the night feel precious.
This was not a frictionless cabaret package; it was a re-entry. A body negotiating its limits, a voice testing its old force. A woman from a country that forbade her public singing, standing before us and doing the forbidden thing anyway. The result was moving because it was not invincible.
Tiba did not perform hope as triumph. She performed it as something smaller and harder. Getting dressed. Climbing stairs. Sitting when the heart races. Singing anyway. Telling the truth in case someone else needs it.
OMID means hope. On this night, hope sounded like a voice returning after seven years of silence, still carrying winter in the lungs, but singing as though spring might be persuaded to stay.
Tara Tiba: OMID ran for one night only in the Banquet Room on 14 June as part of the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Tickets are on sale for all Cabaret Festival shows now at the website.
Website: https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/tara-tiba-omid
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/ and https://www.instagram.com/taratibamusic/
Photo credits: Claudio Raschella
