There’s something exciting about a production that combines cabaret, burlesque and circus, with dazzling physical feats, risqué humour, elaborate costumes and a touch of mischief. Making its first visit to Melbourne at the Melbourne Spiegel Haus, La Ronde features an international cast whose talents span aerials, acrobatics, comedy and music, promising plenty of surprises to keep audiences entertained and titillated.
It’s an absolute joy to watch Swedish comedian David Eriksson work his way through his bag of tricks. Dressed in a punk top, sparkling pink skirt and gumboots, he brings a rock ’n’ rollness to his routine, with a cheeky irreverence that makes him instantly likeable. His oral dexterity has to be seen to be believed, adding a deliciously suggestive edge to his performance.
Tim Ellis has been practising magic for over 40 years, and in that time he’s transformed part of his home into an intimate 32-seat performance space. His current offering, House of Games, has proved so popular that the 2026 season is sold out, with additional Sunday matinees added and an extended run scheduled well into 2027.
Drawing on his love of board games, the show uses well-known favourites as the starting point for a series of close-up tricks that will leave you questioning what you’ve just witnessed. Associated with childhood, family gatherings and friendly competition, these items are steeped in familiarity, but Ellis turns them into something unpredictable, with illusions that are all the more baffling for taking place right in front of us.
As I take my seat, I notice heart-shaped boxes on some chairs and plates of sausages under others. This is going to be an interesting evening, I tell myself. Then O’Brien and Barnes appear on stage, moving as one. Not because they’re completely in sync, but because they’re stuck inside a T-shirt designed to fit one person. They make their way off the stage and begin interacting with the crowd while standing literally cheek to cheek. I always feel like you’re in for a good time at a comedy show when one performer looks at another and they crack up laughing (as does the room), and Hotsy-Totsy sustains that feeling.
Barnes’ clowning is particularly effective, with expressive facial reactions and physicality that convey her growing frustration at having to celebrate her best friend’s birthday. O’Brien demonstrates excellent comedic timing and impressive choreography. Together, they have an easy chemistry and a shared instinct for physical comedy, playing off each other to turn even the most ridiculous situations into comic gold, including a cabaret sequence where they dance with chairs.
They’re the Bert and Ernie of the circus world. Meet Ched and Charles, thick as thieves and the very best of friends. Created by NICA graduates Gabriel Walker and Luca Trimboli, Ched & Charles is a family-friendly circus show about friendship and finding the whimsy in the mundane.
The show opens with an acrobatic act that the pair make seemingly light work of as they flip and lift each other into the air, poking fun at their height difference and using it to their advantage. Once introductions are out of the way, we move to a café, where Ched orders a delicious sandwich. What should be a standard transaction becomes a literal balancing act, with Charles preparing the order while balancing on a ladder. It’s a playful twist on an otherwise everyday task.
Your twenties are supposed to be some of the most defining years of your life. You go to university, get jobs, move out, make new friends and start figuring out what you want from life. In Like Young, writer and director Adeodatus McCormack brings four young people together over 24 hours as they deal with circumstances that could potentially change the course of their lives. The problem is that very little of it proves particularly engaging or ground-breaking.
The biggest issue stems from the writing, in that much of the drama occurs off stage and separately from the other characters. Oliver’s (Michael Crisafulli) uncle has died, leaving him $500,000 in the will while the rest of his family receives nothing. This feels like an uncommon problem to have and a strange one to put a 20 year old to experience, when it could just focus on processing the grief of losing his uncle.
Bella (Sabrina Rault) is caught up in complications over her ex-boyfriend, Luke (who never appears on stage), while Paris (Max Nunes-Cesaar) is also coming to terms with the death of a relative. These are significant events for the characters, but so much happens away from the group, that their problems barely become personal between them. We learn about what they are dealing with, but we don't get to see those experiences meaningfully affect their relationships with each other. For a play about people navigating their changing lives, they spend surprisingly little time actually connecting.
Being late to your own stand-up show is a comedian's nightmare, but for Blake Everett it is the premise of an entire show. Tight Five follows Blake as he bounds across Melbourne to The Motley Bauhaus, encountering a succession of strange characters and increasingly ridiculous obstacles along the way, all for the chance to deliver five minutes of stand-up. What starts as a simple race against the clock quickly becomes a playful mix of stand-up, theatre, and improvisation.
From the moment Blake wakes up, Tight Five is happy to break the fourth wall, with him acknowledging the audience as he works through his morning routine. It becomes even more meta when we realise the stand-up show he is late for is the very show we are watching. When he calls someone in the audience to discuss whether they can somehow pause the show so we don't know what is happening, the distinction between Blake's world and ours becomes deliberately blurred.
When was the last time someone read you a book? Not an audiobook, not a podcast, but someone actually sat beside you and read the words out loud? For most adults, probably a very long time ago, but there is something wonderfully indulgent about being read to, particularly when you are lying on a bed and someone else is doing all the work.
Dashiel Reads To You turns this simple idea into a 30-minute escape from the outside world. The small gallery at Smith & Gertrude has been transformed into a cosy reading space, complete with a bed, bookshelf and chair belonging to Dashiel’s grandmother. Visitors can choose a book from the bookshelf, which has a mix of fiction and non-fiction, including Wicked and a dictionary, or bring their own. I brought along Memorial by Bryan Washington, a book I started several months ago before forgetting about it and had it sitting on my bedside table since. I handed it to Dashiel, who read me the first two chapters.
That tension is where SLUGS gets much of its comedy. The pair are constantly aware that almost anything can be interpreted as a statement, especially when it comes to their bodies. A seemingly harmless song acquires a political reading, while an unexpected reference to guns or gender sends the show careening in another direction. Their response is to not address the issue at all, but instead throw something else at us. This gives the production an exciting and unpredictable rhythm. Just when you think you have worked out where a scene is heading, it can veer into puppetry, animation, music or some outrageous physical gag.
From the moment the audience settles in, it is clear this is not going to be your traditional service. The trio embrace the theatricality of worship, moving between song, dance, burlesque and comedy while playing with the rituals and language associated with the church. There is a knowing irreverence to it all, but the production is not simply about making fun of faith. Instead, it takes these traditions and gives them a very queer, very cabaret interpretation.
The show is divided into several chapters, including Communion, Temptation and Baptism. Each comes with a passage from the Book of Hysterium, offering the audience a subtle tease of what is about to come. That unpredictability is part of the appeal of Mass Hysteria. You never quite know what is coming next.
After years of entertaining children at birthday parties, Ava O’Brien and Peggie Barnes decided they deserved a different kind of audience. The New Zealand act have swapped balloon animals and face painting for a two-hander packed with clowning, puppetry, magic and whatever else they can throw at the stage. After premiering at the 2026 New Zealand Fringe Festival, Hotsy-Totsy now heads to Melbourne. We caught up with O’Brien and Barnes to talk about escaping the birthday-party circuit, turning their skills into a show for adults and why, sometimes, you just need to book yourself a better gig.
For O’Brien and Barnes, the appeal of creating a children's party for adults lay in the feelings of excitement and wonder of being completely swept up in the experience. "We felt the magic of a captivated audience and figured that adults love entertainment just as much as kids. When Elsa shows up at your 5th birthday and you're high on sugar, you are invincible," they tell me. "We wanted to capture that feeling in our own performances and bring adults into that silly magical world. It's got the thrill, energy and unbridled joy of a children’s party, but filled with much more adult humour. It's us playing ourselves, with our inner children onstage with us, and no one is putting the brakes on!"
Being told you’d be great in Miss Saigon might come across as a compliment, but for Kelly Lim Harris, it has happened enough times to inspire a song. In Yellow Fever, the WAAPA-trained performer turns her own experiences of fetishisation, tokenisation and being reduced to her ethnicity into an original cabaret about the realities of being an East Asian performer. Ahead of Yellow Fever's Melbourne Fringe Festival premiere, Lim Harris spoke to us about the stories behind the show, the contradictions of representation and finding her own voice through cabaret.
A group of boys crash-land on an island with no adults around, leaving them to establish their own rules, leadership and hierarchy. It doesn't take long for those structures to start falling apart. Steven Mitchell Wright's production of William Golding's Lord of the Flies follows the familiar story, from the struggle between Ralph and Jack to the growing fear of the beast and the group's descent into violence.
There are different expressions of masculinity at play here with Ralph and Jack become increasingly locked in a contest for authority, driven by competition, intimidation and the desire to command. Simon offers a more gentle alternative, while aggressive behaviour demonstrates how quickly strength and dominance become measures of status. Survival of the fittest is not simply practical, but something the boys perform for the group.
What do you do when you kill your director on opening night? If you’re the two actors at the centre of FU@K! I KILLED THE DIRECTOR, apparently, you carry on with the production. Blending clowning, mime, dance and a does of chaos, the new work from Alright? Production Company throws two desperate performers into the aftermath of a very unfortunate accident, as they attempt to keep their adaptation of Romeo & Juliet alive while facing the small matter of their dead director. Created by Nina Hopley, Alana Louise and Jason Schwab and performed by Louise and Schwab, the 50-minute farce promises an anarchic, physical and distinctly unpredictable Fringe experience.
The piece takes a pretty spectacular theatrical disaster and turns it into a celebration of play, silliness and letting go. "Two actors, Cherry and John, are about to debut their rendition of Romeo & Juliet. But moments before the curtain goes up, they accidentally kill their director. Covered in blood and reeling from the shock of the freak death, they then do their best to keep the performance alive in front of the audience. It gets absurd, messy and nonsensical, and there are even some real emotional gut punches," Schwab tells me.
How much is that weird little object you’ve been holding onto for years actually worth? The Valuer invites audiences to find out, bringing their knick-knacks to a Suprahuman Valuer for assessment. Created by Penelope Bartlau and Jason Lehane (of Barking Spider Creative), the immersive work plays with our ideas of value, ownership and attachment, asking whether we really want to keep the things we treasure once someone else puts a price on them.
In some ways, this is a sequel to Barking Spider Creative’s The Collector, which I attended last year. Both works explore the stories and worth we attach to everyday objects, but this time the experience is personalised. Rather than engaging with a room of curiosities with another participant, we have our own consultation with the assessor, creating something smaller in scope but no less playful or absorbing.
The visit begins with a brief chat with The Valuer’s familial, who fortunately manages to condense reams of paperwork and terms and conditions into a short interaction. We’re given an explanation of what to expect, without giving anything away. Once the formalities are done, we open the door and take a step inside.
Zombies have never been especially interested in following the rules, and neither has improvisation. Put the two together and you have a theatrical experiment where anything can happen, including who survives the night. A Completely Improvised Zombie Apocalypse takes the familiar conventions of the zombie genre and hands them over to a rotating cast of improvisers, with the audience helping determine where the story goes.
With humans being indispensable to any zombie production, it is only natural that this one has a large cast of victims. We managed to get hold of one of them, Bren Carruthers, while they are still human, and picked their brain on our obsession with zombies and what happens when you throw a group of improvisers into the apocalypse.
Given the challenge of surviving, let alone depicting, a zombie apocalypse, I was curious how Bren rates their own survival skills. "I’m only one member of a cast of nearly a dozen, but I don’t think any of us would be likely to survive!" they laugh. "But I think good zombie narratives aren’t about surviving, they’re about the attempt to survive, and what arises in the meantime. They’re a unique vessel for exploring parts of the human experience, society, and what happens when the normal rules no longer matter."
Jens Radda’s connection to church is more than a starting point for cabaret show Mass Hysteria. Having grown up attending a Seventh-day Adventist church, he knows the practices of worship first-hand, giving the show a personal perspective on what happens when those familiar forms are taken out of their traditional setting and placed inside a cabaret. We spoke with Radda about his religious upbringing, the appeal of ceremony and why a night at the theatre might not be so different from a Sunday service.
Radda’s time in the church brings both irony and affection to the religious rituals at the heart of Mass Hysteria and the way they are reimagined. "There’s definitely irony in it, but there’s also a lot of intrigue and affection," he tells me. "I grew up around this incredible theatre of ritual: hundreds of people singing together, ceremony, pageantry, symbolism…it’s pretty camp! Now I’m basically taking those ingredients and asking 'what happens if we put this in a NutriBullet and blend it with drag, cabaret and performance art?' It feels strangely full-circle."
In Beneath the Surface, four short Australian plays uncover the tensions, relationships and stories that sit beneath ordinary life. Presented by Edge of the Heart Productions, the plays vary in style, direction and genre, offering distinct perspectives on contemporary life.
Adèle Shelley’s Coffee in the Time of Coronavirus brings two neighbours together during Melbourne’s lockdown, with their relationship developing through conversations from their adjoining balconies. Shelley grounds the piece in recognisable reality, but gives it an unpredictable quality that leaves you wondering where an otherwise mundane conversation might lead. Carissa McPherson and Paul Canlan deliver lovely performances as the unlikely neighbours forced to become friends, discovering that their assumptions about each other conceal far more complicated personalities.