Adelaide arts news: New WOMADelaide 2025 acts include Yemi Alade, Protoje & The Indiggnation and Digable Planets

A Grammy-nominated afropop queen with over 17 million Instagram followers and an Australian actress will make their WOMADelaide debut next year.

Grammy Award-winning ‘Queen of Afrobeats’ Yemi Alade will perform at Womadelaide 2025. Picture: Supplied.

Global afropop queen Yemi Alade will bring her unique beats to next year’s WOMADelaide music festival.

The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, who has over 17 million followers on Instagram, is among a host of new artists who have been added to the 2025 event.

The Nigerian superstar will be joined by reggae icons Protoje & The Indiggnation, and 90s hip-hop trio Digable Planets at the four-day festival, which will be held on March 7-10 in Botanic Park.

Australian actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey will also make her WOMADelaide debut, with her interactive installation, Dear Stranger, among the event’s roving, off-stage performances.

Alade – who will be making her first appearance in Adelaide – has garnered a huge following worldwide, with more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Yemi Alade will perform at Womadelaide 2025. Pics: Supplied.

Yemi Alade will perform at Womadelaide 2025. Pics: Supplied.

Nominated for Best African music performance at next year’s Grammy awards, Alade also featured on Beyonce’s soundtrack album to The Lion King movie.

Other acts announced for WOMADelaide include UK folk singer-songwriter Bess Atwell, Togo’s Nana Benz du Togo, London duo Joe Henwood and drummer Tash Keary, and the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir.

They join previously announced performers PJ Harvey, Palestinian band 47SOUL, acclaimed German pianist and composer Nils Frahm, and Portuguese singer Mariza.

Harvey will headline the music festival’s opening night, performing songs from the Grammy-nominated studio album I Inside the Old Year Dying, along with tracks from her extensive back catalogue.

47SOUL will also be among the performers, a year after they were uninvited from the 2024 event due to the “climate of community protests, division and uncertainty” taking place around the country following the Middle East conflict.

At the time, the electronic dance group said the decision “hit them hard”, describing the organisers’ reasoning as “deeply problematic and disheartening”.

The band advocates for peace in the Middle East and has used social media to call for a ceasefire to hostilities and an end to what it calls the “genocide”.

On October 8 – the day after the anniversary of Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel – they shared an Instagram post with their almost 100,000 followers, calling for a “Free Palestine”.

“Stop the war on Gaza and Lebanon. Think about what it’s like for those who have no choice but to live it,” the post said. “Free Palestine. Hands off Lebanon.”

Harvey will be joined by her full-band for the March 7 opening night show, which is part of a six-date Australian tour.

A makeover for a Dickens’ classic

Review: Jack Maggs

Dunstan Playhouse

November 19 to 30

Expectations are raised and met, to great effect, in London-based Adelaide playwright Samuel Adamson’s striking world premiere Jack Maggs, which adapts Australian author Peter Carey’s alternate take on a Charles Dickens classic.

Ahunim Abebe and Mark Saturno in Jack Maggs by State Theatre Company of SA. Picture: Matt Byrne

Former State Theatre Company artistic director Geordie Brookman makes a spectacular return from his European base to helm this production, his experience shining through in its fusion of vintage theatrical traditions and contemporary innovation.

It feels like an authentic 1837 London period piece, while also commenting on that period’s traits – and those of its authors both real and reimagined – from the outside perspectives of the Australian convict Maggs and of a modern audience.

Adamson and Brookman achieve this through a blend of “poor theatre” conventions, vaudevillian showmanship, Brechtian kabarett and a Penny Dreadful play within a play, all brought vividly to life on an ingenious set of tattered rags, ropes and canvases – with patchwork costumes to match – designed by Ailsa Paterson.

Mark Saturno and James Smith in Jack Maggs by State Theatre Company of SA. Picture: Matt Byrne

From the moment he emerges from the shadows, Mark Saturno is magnificent as the returned convict Maggs, his powerful physique and deep rumble of a voice exuding equal measures of menace and mystery as he seeks out his long lost “son”.

An encounter with budding author Tobias Oates – a not-so-thinly veiled parody of Dickens himself, played with much aplomb as a charlatan showpony by James Smith – leads to an uneasy alliance.

As Oates mines Maggs’ memories through mesmerism for the plot of his next novel, so Maggs manipulates a colourful cast of supporting characters to his own ends.

Holding all this together is Ahunim Abebe in her second successive major State Theatre role as the housemaid Mercy, who positions herself as the playwright and Puck-like narrator of this tale.

Sassy and spirited, Abebe brings a playful sense of the impish sprite to the lowly servant Mercy, slipping into the role of emcee as needed, her omnipresence setting the scene for a final twist.

Nathan O’Keefe is in his element as the fawning grocer turned pretentious arts patron Percy Buckle, while Dale March, Rachel Burke, Jelena Nicdao and Jacqy Phillips – the latter unfazed despite having one arm in a sling – juggle a sparkling succession of often comical character roles.

Together, they routinely break into short bursts of convict song to reveal elements of Jack Maggs’ shady past.

Nigel Levings’ lighting gradually illuminates the hidden delights of Paterson’s deceptively simple set, just as Carey – via Adamson’s brilliantly crafted script – sheds a different light on the events of Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Patrick McDonald