Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox is on tour with their brand-new show, The Future is Vintage, taking them to cities across the world, including the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in a one-night-only performance.
Joining the highly acclaimed troupe of singers, dancers and instrumentalists putting their signature time-twisting spin on retro hits is Demi Remick. A NYC-based tap dancer, choreographer, and burlesque artist, Demi has travelled the world as the tap soloist with Postmodern Jukebox.
The Scoop sat down with Demi ahead of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival season to talk all things tap, retro and Postmodern Jukebox. Read the full interview below.
You’ve toured with Postmodern Jukebox for nearly eight years as its tap dance soloist, performing in more than a thousand shows. What keeps the material alive for you night after night?
This is actually my 9th year with the band, crazy right?! What’s really special about Postmodern Jukebox is Scott allows us to incorporate a lot of individual expression and creativity in the videos and onstage. We continue to collaborate on new tap dance medley arrangements, which helps keep the live show feeling fresh for the performers and the audiences.
However, a fun fact about the Postmodern Jukebox tap dancers is we all tend to improvise a lot of our solos onstage. Meaning we make it up on the spot! I like to create a structure for my solos and improvise the rest so it’s challenging, exciting, and new for myself and the band every night.
Postmodern Jukebox is built on reimagining modern pop through vintage forms like swing and jazz. As a tap dancer, how do you find your place inside that musical time machine?
In the heyday of jazz music, nearly every big band had a tap dancer! Tap dancers have been everywhere alongside jazz music. The Nicholas Brothers starred in Hollywood movie musicals, The Miller Brothers & Lois were vaudeville stars, and hoofers like Bunny Briggs tap danced alongside Duke Ellington and his Orchestra!
Tap dance has always been a sibling right alongside jazz music. I feel so at home improvising with a jazz trio all the way to a big band. Tap dance arrangements help feature the tap dance so the audience has an easier time hearing all the details through musical breaks.
Tap is both dance and percussion. When you’re performing with a band like Postmodern Jukebox, do you think of yourself more as a dancer or a musician?
Tap dance is music and movement. Both are equally important. As a tap dancer, I am responsible to join the band as an instrument and entertain the audience with my personal style. My sound is in all of our musicians’ in-ears and I want to complement their playing even when I’m being featured in my solos!
Postmodern Jukebox stages range in size from intimate to massive, so it is important to physically perform for the back row. I want my energy to be felt in the back of every auditorium. All tap dancers are different, but style and musicality are equally important to me in properly representing myself and the form of tap dance.
You’ve performed everywhere from the Sydney Opera House and Royal Albert Hall to Radio City Music Hall. What does a great cabaret audience give back to you that changes the performance in the moment?
Performing all around the world allows me to fine tune the ability to read an audience quickly. Sometimes an audience gives a lot of energy and sometimes an audience requires a little bit more of a welcoming stage presence to feel comfortable to contribute! It’s exciting to navigate different types of cultures and people and how they enjoy our show.
Sometimes, after the first number in our show, we say backstage, “Wow! This is an amazing crowd tonight!” Which generally means, the audience is really focused, receptive, and loud!! The more energy the audience gives us the more we give back!!
Your work moves between tap, choreography, burlesque, jazz, nostalgia and old Hollywood glamour. How do you balance technical virtuosity with showgirl charisma and theatrical storytelling?
At the core of being a tap dancer is the technique and history of those who came before us. Often audience members at our shows say this is the first time they’ve ever seen tap dance live before. If that is the case, I want them to see the best version of the form! I want them to see clean technique, historical references, my individual style, and an Olympic energy! Tap dance is naturally nostalgic but I like to give it my own modern twist.
Postmodern Jukebox often makes contemporary songs feel as though they’ve been pulled from another era. Are there songs where the tap vocabulary immediately reveals something new about the music?
A lot of the ragtime up-tempo Postmodern Jukebox songs are the best to tap dance to. Some of my favourites over the years include, Thriller, Bad Romance, Call Me Maybe, Umbrella, and Material Girl.
Often in these up-tempo swinging tunes, my vocabulary is time step based! Time steps are the perfect way to tap dance alongside a singer without overtaking or distracting from the vocals. Then when the “tap breaks” happen, often called “stop time” I can really dive into 16th notes and 16th note triplet-based rhythms that are faster and showcase me a bit more.
Adelaide Cabaret Festival has a reputation for artists who can bring skill, wit, intimacy and surprise into the same room. What are you hoping Adelaide audiences feel when they see you perform?
Our show is exactly that! Every performer, musician, and sound engineer is extremely talented in their own right. You also never know with Postmodern Jukebox which line up of performers you’ll get.
Every Postmodern Jukebox show you go to will be different. I can tell how excited our audience gets when our host announces each performer. There are plenty of surprises in our production from new arrangements to new performers. The show is also filled with plenty of comedic easter eggs for Postmodern Jukebox fans and vintage lovers!
Demi Remick appears in Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox on 21 June at the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival as part of a major Australia and New Zealand tour.
Book tickets to the show here.
Website: https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/scott-bradlees-postmodern-jukebox
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/ and https://www.instagram.com/pmjofficial/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/demi_remi/
Images supplied.
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