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Adelaide Fringe
Indigenous artist Mali Isabel has become the youngest ever winner of the Adelaide Fringe poster design competition with a rainbow-coloured magical landscape inspired by the CBD and its key locations.
Theatre
THE BUSINESS OF ART | The lessons of a lifetime spent working in arts institutions – from the Adelaide Fringe to Restless Dance Theatre – are helping Windmill Theatre Company associate director Sasha Zahra steer home the remount season of Amphibian this week, amid gut-wrenchingly relevant international tragedy.
Adelaide Fringe
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
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.
THE BUSINESS OF ART: Recently heritage listed and a darling of its community, the architecturally iconic Marion Cultural Centre has made an unexpected leap – building a far-reaching reputation as an arts venue on the back of three busy Fringe seasons.
THE BUSINESS OF ART | Adelaide artist Gill Hicks’ live show Still Alive (and Kicking) will this month be streamed for audiences on the other side of the globe, but her journey to the stage has been long and winding. From a creative childhood, via the trauma of the London bombings, Hicks is reconciling her activist and artistic drives with help from a debut Adelaide Fringe season.
Adelaide Fringe is using a new report analysing the event’s comparative and future economic impact to push for a significant rise in State Government funding – from $2.4 million to $4.4 million a year – to help it rebound from the impact of COVID-19.
Adelaide Fringe 2021 delivered $56.39 million in gross economic impact to the South Australian economy during this year’s festival, according to figures released today.
SA arts and culture news in brief: Adelaide Festival’s 2021 economic impact, the return of a gravity-defying performance at Her Maj, unique contemporary artworks up for auction, local arts sector lists its ‘big-picture’ priorities, the Ern Malley affair brought to life, and Ida Sophia carries the weight of regret.
Commentary
There is much to miss when the annual Fringe frenzy ends in Adelaide. The disappearance of star ratings is not one of them.
Adelaide Fringe
The 2021 Adelaide Fringe has sold a total of 632,667 tickets worth more than $16.4 million, with venues reporting a busy closing weekend and a string of sold-out shows.
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.
Ask a group of people to define what it means to be Australian and you’ll undoubtedly receive a wide range of responses. In Celebrating Australia, the CircoBats performers throw their energies into expressing identity through the joy of human movement. ★★★½
This delightfully thought-provoking, interactive show, conceived by Adelaide star of stage and screen Tilda Cobham-Hervey, is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. Or maybe a bit like something… But actually, no, nothing like it at all… ★★★★
With just five days of Fringe to go, here are some of the four and five-star shows our reviewers recommend – plus an extra special performance you won’t want to miss.
Singer, songwriter and actor Elaine Crombie puts her heart, soul and spirit on the stage in Janet’s Vagrant Love.
Adelaide Fringe
Touch, in all its forms, is essential to human connection. Gravity & Other Myths’ new Fringe show I Want to Touch You explores this idea in a warm-hearted and thought-provoking performance. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Jazz standards, folk-pop, a touch of rock, and an utterly transformed Kylie Minogue classic – singer Jo Lawry brought some serious class and versatility to her Fringe performances on the weekend. ★★★★
In-between stomping riffs and blistering blues licks, Nathan Cavaleri opened up with his Adelaide Fringe audience about childhood stardom and defeating the demons of a very dark period of his life to return to the stage. ★★★½
This intense monologue about first love and white privilege struggles to overcome a fundamental flaw in its conception. ★★½
Andi Snelling is a multi-talented, highly skilled performer who knows how to use theatricality – and roller skates – to explore what it is to be human. ★★★★★
Grit and dystopia replace glitz and glamour in this close-up and raw physical theatre act by Melbourne-based company After Dark. ★★★★
Johanna Allen and her crew take their audience on a journey to places exotic, funny and strange this entertaining Fringe show. ★★★★ ½
Love moves in mysterious ways in this two-woman show featuring plenty of silliness, handfuls of confetti and more than a few red noses. ★★★
Yasemin Sabuncu is chronically ill, but refuses to be chill about it in this defiant tale of survival and the power of Keanu Reeves. ★★★ ½
Tex Perkins is known for his Cruel Sea and Beasts of Bourbon catalogue, but a stunning Adelaide Fringe performance with ARIA-award-winning guitarist Matt Walker proves – once again – the musician is not a one-trick pony. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
This family-friendly show is a fusion of art and science in which audiences are guaranteed to learn new words while witnessing fun scientific experiments involving fireballs, explosions and a breakfast cereal blower. ★★★★
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. ★★★★
Audiences will most likely know Phil Stack as the bassist for Australian pop rock band Thirsty Merc, but he has stepped out from that success to command a stage of his own. ★★★★ ½
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. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
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
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
Adelaide Fringe
Cheeky, flamboyant and sexy-as-hell, Rouge will have you laughing, swooning and making plans to run away to the circus. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
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. ★★★★
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
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. ★★★
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
With the Adelaide summer festival season kicking into gear this week, we asked some of InReview’s contributing arts journalists and reviewers to share the Festival and Fringe shows they are most looking forward to – from visual arts to theatre, music and more.
The sea wall, described in this show, is a massive, unexpected chasm under the ocean, deceptively near the shore. In this tightly-scripted monologue, husband and father Alex (splendidly played by Renato Musolino) explores his own dark abyss after a freakish accident. ★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe will open on Friday with close to 900 events registered across 392 venues and few program changes expected despite the Victorian border closure.
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.
