Cabaret Festival set for a golden Gay time

A popular TV actor and upcoming contestant on Dancing With The Stars will also direct the 2024 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

If actor Virginia Gay has seemed omnipresent at this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival, it’s because she is brushing up for her next role – as artistic director of the event’s 2024 program.

Gay was handed the baton by two of this year’s nine returning artistic directors, David Campbell and Julia Zemiro, at New York performer Mark Nadler’s late-night Hootenanny show on Saturday.

Newly appointed 2024 Adelaide Cabaret Festival artistic director Virginia Gay in the Dunstan Playhouse. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

“I want to reach back to what started cabaret,” Gay said.

“The simplicity of story turning into song, it’s so elastic and adaptable – but also I want to see the future of cabaret.

“I want to see incredible, new, young performers, people who are changing the game … how we can take the genre right to the edge of its possibility.”

The newly anointed artistic director loves live performance “with my entire heart”.

“You can know me from TV all you like, but you haven’t truly seen me until you see me on stage,” she said.

“The highly sexed, deeply ridiculous, irreverent Virginia Gay is the true Virginia Gay.”

Gay, 41, was actually born out of a love for the stage: Her parents met doing student theatre at Sydney University.

Her father continued to direct student shows, where a young Virginia would watch from the wings.

“I remember being backstage and feeling the electricity of watching somebody about to go on … I would have been about five.”

It’s been her “endeavour” to make a life out of acting ever since. In recent years, Gay helped bring movie musical Calamity Jane to the Australian stage, then wrote and performed her own gender-flipped version of the classic Cyrano de Bergerac.

Actor Virginia Gay, back row centre, with fellow contestants on the upcoming season of Channel 7’s Dancing With The Stars.

The former All Saints and Winners & Losers star is also returning to TV – this time as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars.

However, Gay said it’s too soon to tell whether she may be able to add dance routines to her repertoire of musical theatre and cabaret numbers.

“I’m a terrible dancer,” she confessed, laughing.

She also gave a hint about the sort of shows she would like to program at next year’s Cabaret Festival.

“I’m really excited about the idea of improvised musicals. When you get people at the top of their game making music out of nothing, I think that’s pretty extraordinary.

“It’s not all jokes … you can break an audience’s heart with a song that comes out of nowhere.”

This year’s event runs until June 24. adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au