After wowing audiences with their Adelaide Festival spectacular The Pulse, local company Gravity & Other Myths has announced a surprise ‘renegade’ Fringe season of another new show featuring eight acrobats and a five-piece jazz band.
Adelaide Fringe
With mimosas, whip-cracking, a twerk-off, drag, burlesque and an acrobatic routine on a beer keg, Smashed is an hour of frivolity, flirtation and adults-only fun in the Spiegeltent – all before lunch. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Hughman could be the happiest place in the world right now. With unbridled joy, Hugh Sheridan raises the bar, lifts spirits and serves up unadulterated fun. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Cabaret duo Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley draw on their own life experiences in an irreverent, award-winning Fringe show that seeks to debunk some of the myths about people with Asperger’s syndrome – including that they’re not funny.
Adelaide Fringe
Former Adelaide Fringe chair turned producer David Minear is set to present an open-air, all-Adelaide tribute to Bruce Springsteen – complete with rock musicians and a 15-piece classical orchestra.
Adelaide Fringe
Inspired by the drag brunch phenomenon in New York and London, Smashed is a daylight Fringe experience that is definitely for adults only.
Adelaide Fringe
Andi Snelling tells how the greatest ‘accident’ of her life turned her world upside down and inspired a Fringe show that blends storytelling, clowning and roller skates.
Adelaide Fringe
A satirical Fringe show by The Chaser’s Charles Firth and The Shovel’s James Schloeffel will take you on a trip through wild COVID conspiracy theories and show you how to make your own Pete Evans BioCharger.
Adelaide Fringe
Set against the horrors of the anti-gay purges in Chechnya, Patrick Livesey’s Adelaide Fringe show asks difficult questions about the responsibilities we feel for people we’ve never met.
Prinnie Stevens’ show recognises talented women of colour who communicated their suffering through song. In her own soulful way, she harnesses their blues music to present a powerful sampler of personal stories and larger themes. ★★★★ ½
Be open to being challenged, be open to having the conversation. Bred creates a safe space between audience and performers where ideas and emotions are unpacked and connections are made. ★★★ ½
Bum-rubbing, squid genitals and doll-decapitation; it sounds like the recipe for a very niche sex tape but is in fact the list of ingredients for a heart-warming solo show with a charming, child-like quality. ★★★★
Lost in Translation is a raucous, strangely artistic show featuring scripts from well-known early 2000s films that have been run through an online translator – not just once, but at least a dozen times. ★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
Rachel Rayner, Science Explainer, fuses physics with theatre and comedy in a glittering journey beyond the edges of the visible spectrum. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Drenched in jokes delivered at breakneck speed and peppered with philosophical pondering, this ABC journalist turned comedian’s unconventional genesis story is worth a listen. ★★★ ½
An all-female comedy gala featuring fresh stand-up material from some of the nation’s best comedians provides an hour of sheer fun. ★★★★ ½
Adventure Rooms Adelaide plunges players into a nightmarish world inspired by everything horror with the terrifyingly fun new escape room The Abandoned Cabin. ★★★★★
Petit Circus invites young Fringe-goers and their families to step into a kitchen for an evening of chaos, fun and laughter with the new food-inspired circus show Bon Appetit. ★★★
History rubs shoulders with ghost stories in this unnervingly atmospheric tour of one of Adelaide’s oldest and most macabre structures. ★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
Scomo’s Sunday Service, in the tradition of a university revue, is raw, scatological political satire and lots of fun. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Dom Chambers comes up trumps with a polished performance featuring card tricks and stories about his adolescent obsession with his deck. ★★★★
Mary Angley is supreme in this work of surreal fan fiction, conspiracy theories, biting satire and powerpoint. ★★★★ ½
Smart, fun and delightfully brash, comedic couple in life and business Anne Edmonds and Lloyd Langford bring their contrasting flavours of stand-up from the confines of Melbourne’s lockdown to the stage. ★★★ ½
With powerhouse vocals, sexy dance moves and more sequins than an entire season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, this disco inferno will make you itch to shake your groove thing. ★★★★
Fun, cheeky and not as risqué as their show title indicates, these magicians bring genuine charm to magic tricks you may have seen before but which are nonetheless impressive. ★★★ ½
Improvisational genius Ross Noble takes his crowd on a rollercoaster ride of side-splitting eclectic anecdotes that are so insanely haphazard he has just as much fun not knowing where things are going as his audience does. ★★★★
London-based company Agent November Escape Rooms brings the excitement of escape rooms into your home with two adventures that plunge players into the thrilling world of spies and espionage.
The danceable rhythm of Willie Brown’s ‘Ragged and Dirty’ was a great way for Cal Williams Jr’s trio to usher in a delightful performance of Mississippi blues songs. They hooked the full audience right there and kept them hooked. ★★★★★
Get comfortable, loosen your inhibitions and open up to Club Briefs International for a ride through debaucherous drag, gasp-worthy circus acts and sleek cabaret – with a carousel of costume changes, no less. ★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
To freeze or not to freeze: is that the question? It’s hard to know how Erin Fowler ultimately feels about motherhood in this hybrid physical performance. ★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Lobethal, Encounter Bay, the Burnside Village Shopping Centre – no stone goes unturned as Peter Goers takes to the stage with an ode to South Australia. ★★★ ½
Artivist Dan Acher literally paints the sky in this stunning, automated version of aurora borealis which is being presented over the lake in Gluttony. ★★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe organisers say the festival’s ‘magic vibe’ will be very much alive as it opens today with 21,000 performances across 31 days and nights. One casualty of border restrictions, however, is cabaret singer Ali McGregor’s season of shows.
Why the COVID-19 hiatus was a gift for Fringe veteran Michael Simic.
A young Australian man visiting Moscow hooks up with a Russian tourist guide but it emerges that each has his own secrets and agenda, as playwright Angus Cameron’s wryly engaging thriller takes us through a labyrinth of misrepresentation. ★★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
After infant Tom pushed a little girl because he didn’t want to be hugged, “he became That Boy”, his mother recalls, “and I became That Mother.” Martha Lott powerfully describes the lonely challenges of parenting a turbulent child when everyone else has given up. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Two friends are cast in a school production of The Comedy of Errors. One is Greg Fleet, the other Ian Darling. One took the high road, the other the low. Forty years later they ponder where life has taken them – and which road was which. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Comedian, singer and TV personality Paul McDermott returns to Adelaide Fringe with two new shows – one of which sees him dive into the artform he’s spent years mocking.
Adelaide Fringe
This double bill of plays from SA creators aims to lift up Australia’s ‘lucky country’ veneer to reveal the complex, often dark, mess writhing beneath.
Adelaide Fringe launches its 2021 program today, with tickets going on sale for almost 800 events across 285 venues – including open-air shows, light displays, laneway activations and drive-in performances.
Adelaide’s Holden Street Theatres is expanding its site and increasing its arts offering with the launch of a new venture: The Holden Street Theatres’ Arts Park.
The Garden of Unearthly Delights has unveiled its first round of shows for the 2021 Adelaide Fringe, including artists such as The Umbilical Brothers, Tripod, Kate Ceberano, Katie Noonan, Sam Simmons and Tommy Little.
A new West End hub will be established at the historic Queen’s Theatre during next year’s Adelaide Fringe, with more than 25 music, cabaret and comedy shows planned.
