Cabaret is many things to many people. For some it’s inseparable from the Weimar Republic in Berlin – an era with increasingly discomforting parallels to our own. Others associate cabaret primarily with Broadway tunes and razzle dazzle, with melancholy torch songs and sultry jazz standards, or intimate, deeply personal storytelling interspersed with songs.
For Isobel Marmion, Executive Producer of Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the artform’s variety and versatility is a big part of its appeal.
‘I love that it’s so open,’ she says. ‘I also love that everyone has their own definition of cabaret, which underlines, really, that anything goes, anything can happen. You never quite know what you’re going to get – and that’s really, really thrilling.’
Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2026 – quick links
A ‘delicious revolution’
Running from 4 to 21 June, this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival has been programmed around the theme of ‘delicious revolution’ by Artistic Director Reuben Kaye, an acclaimed cabaret performer in his own right.
Promising to deliver ‘a festival that pushes your sensibilities to the limits’, Kaye says his program has ‘edge, sex, comedy, fantastic music and hilarious, nail-biting comedy’.
Kaye’s first bite of the festival cherry certainly promises variety. The program demonstrates the full range of cabaret, from showtunes (operatic tenor and Broadway star Alfie Boe alongside guest soprano Amy Manford) to burlesque (Bettie Bombshell’s A Night of Burlesque), jazz (legendary Australian jazz trumpeter Vince Jones), comedy (Melbourne’s anarchic performance collective Po Co Mo Co) and the French tradition of Piaf, Brel and others (Lou Blackwell & The French Set). There will also be a closing night party with Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, who Kaye has deliberately programmed to appeal to younger audiences.
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‘Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox is a gateway drug to cabaret for a lot of people,’ he says, ‘because it shows you how you can take a beloved pop song and put a vintage spin on it – how you can reconstitute the meaning of a song and give it a whole new life. That’s really rare.’
Here are five of the many shows programmed in this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival that have caught our eye.
Baylie Carson is Handsome(ish)
The annual Frank Ford Commission was created after a bequest from the late Frank Ford, the founding father of Adelaide Cabaret Festival and the inaugural Chair of Adelaide Fringe. It supports the creation of a new festival work by a South Australian cabaret artist or collective. Previous recipients have included Max Savage, Michelle Pearson, Joanne Hartstone and Victoria Falconer, whose production And Then You Go – The Vali Myers Project premiered at the 2022 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
The 2026 Frank Ford Commission was awarded to Baylie Carson, a local performer returning to Adelaide after international success in SIX the Musical and the stage productions of Mean Girls and Bring It On.
For Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Carson is creating and performing in Baylie Carson Is Handsome(ish), which Marmion describes as ‘an autobiographical cabaret about their own relationship as a non-binary person with the word “handsome” and how they’ve grown up always being described as “handsome” and their own story spanning out from that.’
Marmion adds: ‘Baylie has maintained a really strong relationship with South Australia. After leaving, they come back every single year; they’re really invested in the local cabaret and arts community. So it’s a real gift to be able to support them in this way. And the show is going to be so phenomenal. It’s being directed by Shanon D Whitelock, who’s won, I think, maybe about a million Green Room awards at this point in time, so the pair of them are going to put together something really, really beautiful and funny and interesting.’
Baylie Carson is Handsome(ish) is at the Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre from 11 to 12 June.
Homecoming: Class of Cabaret Graduates
Established by former Artistic Director David Campbell in 2010, the Class of Cabaret program enables young people in Years 10 and 11 to study cabaret as part of their South Australian Certificate of Education.
Over the course of a school semester, with help from mentors, teaching staff and the Adelaide Festival Centre, which hosts the program, the participating students create a new cabaret from scratch. Their work culminates in the annual Class of Cabaret performance at Adelaide Cabaret Festival, with this year’s showcase taking place on 20 June.
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‘It’s a big deal,’ Marmion says. ‘It was a big deal for me as an artist. I have a big background in development and early career opportunities, and it’s really important for Reuben [Kaye] as well. So it was really exciting for the two of us to work on ways that that could continue, but also other ways as well.
‘[As well as the main showcase], we’ve brought previous Class of Cabaret students back in a show called Homecoming this year, hosted by a local, Alex De Porteous. The line-up is really cool, and it’s going to be really wonderful to bring just a few of our babies back home to see what they’ve been up to.
‘Because, obviously, the students of Class of Cabaret have gone on to really interesting, really varied careers – a lot of them are really phenomenal cabaret artists, musical performers, actors, writers, all kinds of different things. So it’s going to be interesting to have a few of them back with us.’
Homecoming: Class of Cabaret Graduates is at the Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre from 18 to 19 June.
Lincoln Elliott: Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical)
As well as presenting the cream of cabaret nationally and internationally, Adelaide Cabaret Festival also provides artists with a valuable opportunity to present works in development to discerning cabaret and music theatre-loving audiences. Four such works in progress are showcased at this year’s festival, with the most intriguing being the new Australian musical Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical).
Created by Lincoln Elliot, a Dubbo-born and NIDA-trained artist of Wiradjuri heritage, Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical) follows a group of friends who intend to break into the British Museum to forcibly repatriate stolen items of cultural significance.
Kaye calls it ‘a truly unique Australian madcap story, told only as Australians can’. We like to think of it as Stuff the British Stole – with songs!
Lincoln Elliott’s Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical) plays the Banquet Room, Adelaide Festival Centre on 11 June.
Tara Tiba: Omid (Hope)
Iranian jazz singer Tara Tiba – ‘a phenomenal singer,’ according to Marmion – moved from Tehran to Perth in 2012 so she could record and release music and perform in public without breaking the law. Now an established Australian artist, she draws on the classical Persian tradition – as well as jazz, Latin and other musical idioms – for her songs, which include both original and covers.
Tiba’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival performance is named after her second solo album, Omid (Hope), released in 2019 and praised by The Australian’s Tony Hillier in a five-star review: ‘Unique is a greatly misused word in the lexicon of record reviewers, but the adjective most assuredly applies to Tara Tiba’s music and, specifically, to an outstanding sophomore album that explores the musical traditions shared by Iran and Cuba.’
Tara Tiba’s Omid (Hope) is at the Banquet Room, Adelaide Festival Centre on 14 June.
Ursula Yovich Sings Nina Simone
Burarra woman Ursula Yovich is a magnetic and powerful singer and actor, as anyone who saw her in Belvoir’s productions of The Sapphires (2005) and Barbara and the Camp Dogs (2017) will know.
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For Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Yovich is remounting her 2026 Sydney Festival celebration of the Black American activist, artist and legend Nina Simone.
Yovich has cautioned audiences against expecting a tribute show, telling Limelight in the lead-up to the 2026 Sydney Festival: ‘Simone’s voice is so incredibly unique. I don’t want to do a tribute act. This is me telling her story and mine. I see it as a conversation between two artists across time – big and little conversations and things that align with where I am in my life and where she was at different times in her life.’
Marmion says the festival team are ‘very excited’ to have Yovich in this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival, adding that it suits the festival’s theme to a tee.
‘Nina Simone [is] such a beautiful performer, singer, but quite political in lots of ways. And Ursula is also such a phenomenal, wonderful performer, really, just an absolute jewel in Australia’s crown.
‘Having Ursula perform Nina’s songs, and engaging with the broader politics, both for herself and as Nina did, it’s just really ticking all those “delicious revolution” boxes. And we’re really, really thrilled to have her.’
Ursula Yovich Sings Nina Simone is at the Banquet Room, Adelaide Festival Centre from 5 to 6 June.
