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
Tracy Crisp takes storytelling to new heights with this poignant solo performance about the way we imbue treasured objects with our memories and the heartbreaking power they wield to help us grieve and, ultimately, heal. ★★★★★
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.
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. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
We’re told to bring an object to this art exhibition, which ostensibly looks like a room full of junk assembled around an ATM but sees us leave feeling richer than when did before entering. ★★★★½
Adelaide Fringe
There’s nothing quite as funny as quality humour coming from a straight face, and Adelaide’s own Sam Simmons has it nailed. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Johanna Allen and her crew take their audience on a journey to places exotic, funny and strange this entertaining Fringe show. ★★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
Love moves in mysterious ways in this two-woman show featuring plenty of silliness, handfuls of confetti and more than a few red noses. ★★★
Adelaide Fringe
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
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. ★★★★
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. ★★★★★
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
Adelaide Fringe
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
Adelaide Fringe
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
Fans of Nick Cave, get ready to trade in the piano for some ukuleles as Come Sail Your Ships… Again hits the Grace Emily. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
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
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
Scomo’s Sunday Service, in the tradition of a university revue, is raw, scatological political satire and lots of fun. ★★★★
Dom Chambers comes up trumps with a polished performance featuring card tricks and stories about his adolescent obsession with his deck. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Arj Barker Comes Clean is the dark, provocative and hilarious inspirational speech you didn’t know you needed. ★★★★
Adelaide Fringe
Mary Angley is supreme in this work of surreal fan fiction, conspiracy theories, biting satire and powerpoint. ★★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe
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.
Adelaide Fringe
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. ★★★★★
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
Hidden in a dark, sprawling basement on Angas Street are four rooms that challenge the senses to imagine the startling possibilities of what the future may plate up. ★★★★★
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
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.
Adelaide Fringe
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
RCC open-air hybrid performance-training space The Stables has been created by Gravity & Other Myths to give Fringe-goers a rare look at the behind-the-scenes ‘grind and sweat’ that physical artists of all kinds thrive on.
Adelaide Fringe
Dream Boat: Party on the Popeye has been given the okay from SA Health to host boozing and grooving simultaneously while floating down Karrawirra Parri River Torrens.
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.
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.
From a free-range childhood spent planting trees and roller-skating around Whyalla, Adelaide Fringe’s Heather Croall has gone on to spend her life immersed in the world of film, festivals and art.
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
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.
Adelaide Fringe
Festival fans can start planning their ‘Mad March’ calendar in earnest from today, with the Garden of Unearthly Delights revealing its full line-up and the printed 2021 Adelaide Fringe guide also now available.
