Adelaide Cabaret Festival: Virginia Gay’s inspiration behind 2024 show line-up
New Adelaide Cabaret Festival artistic director Virginia Gay injects her own very big personality and passion into a program that aims to take cabaret back to its roots.
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Ebullient, animated and larger-than-life in personality as well as stature, Virginia Gay was quite literally born for the stage and, more specifically, her latest role as artistic director of
the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Audiences who may be more familiar with her more dramatic TV roles as a businesswoman Frances James on Winners & Losers and nursing unit manager Gabrielle Jaeger on All Saints will be in for a surprise when they meet “the real me”, Gay promises.
“It’s not really a ‘persona’; it is actually me,” she says. “I have a feeling that’s why I’m here, because I love live performance with all my heart. You can know me from television all you like, but you haven’t truly seen me until you’ve seen me on stage.
“I’ve had three solo cabaret shows and obviously I’ve guested in a thousand – which is where you really, truly learn. The highly sexed, deeply ridiculous, irreverent Virginia Gay is the true Virginia Gay.”
The 42-year-old’s parents even fell in love while performing in student theatre.
“They met doing a production of the medieval mystery plays at Sydney University; my mother was playing the Angel Gabriel and my father was playing Shepherd No.3, I think,” Gay says.
Her father had trained as a light baritone singer and continued to direct student theatre.
“I remember being backstage and feeling the electricity … I would have been five, and I was basically there because it was free babysitting,” she says.
Gay recalls being captivated by the idea that you could “make a whole life out of this”.
“That has been my endeavour ever since.”
Gay’s 2024 Cabaret Festival program bearsthe fruits of a relentless year of travel to and from Adelaide and around the world, seeking out acts and combining the curatorial role with her own acting schedule.
This included a stint on reality show Dancing with the Stars, where she made the finals.
“It has transformed my relationship with my body,” says the nearly 1.8m-tall actor, who had previously wrestled with learning short dance routines for shows.
“My body was capable of so much more, and it found such joy in movement, which I don’t think I have ever felt before.”
Gay was living out of a suitcase so much over the past year that she even ended up buying a hotel-style fold-out luggage rack for her Sydney home.
“Honestly, I think I’ve never invested in anything smarter,” she says.
“I haven’t slept longer than four nights in one bed since before Christmas. I am living the most extraordinary dream version of my life – this is bigger than I could ever have anticipated.”
International attractions in Gay’s debut cabaret program include Lisa Simone’s big
band tribute to her mother, the revered US singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, as well as returning Broadway and screen icon Patti LuPone and New York country vocalist Amber Martin.
UK cabaret trio Fascinating Aida will also bring their 40th Anniversary Show and unique brand of outrageous musical comedy to the Dunstan Playhouse for three performances.
“They are so spectacular,” Gay says. “What an opportunity to put the spotlight on women in their 60s and say that these women are still the most incredible satirical songwriters around.”
There are also female musical comedy duos in UK singing sisters Flo & Joan and Melbourne’s Mel & Sam.
“I love that it’s somewhere that femaleness and queerness and gender fluidity can feel safe and flourish, because cabaret started as a form of protest and secret irreverence and mischief and wit, at a time when that was being removed from the world,” she says.
As well as Simone’s show, the program includes a tribute to Bette Midler by Australian singer Catherine Alcorn, and a tribute to the late Olivia Newton-John by a cavalcade of performers, including former artistic director David Campbell with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in Hopelessly Devoted.
Gay aims for her program to take cabaret back to its roots of “story turning into song”, but to also look to the future with young performers who are pushing its boundaries. “I want to see how elastic cabaret can be … how we can take the genre right to the edge of its possibility and how we can play with it,” she says.
Programming the festival was not just about selecting cabaret and musical comedy acts, but piecing them together like a jigsaw.
“You get to craft whole evenings for people,” Gay says.
“I thought you could never get a high bigger than performing, but it’s just one tiny note in a whole experience of making a show or making a festival.
“It’s even bigger than designing a menu … it’s creating the whole restaurant. What type of chairs do people want to sit in? What kind of napkins? What’s the music that’s playing as they enter? What’s on the walls? It’s everything.”
Those who come to see a headline act will hopefully be enticed to stick around for “something that is a little more late night and dangerous”.
“I actually call them the ‘Late-Night Chaos Shows’ but I didn’t get that name past marketing,” Gay laughs.
“They are the last flavour of cabaret in your mouth before you go to bed.”
New York singer-pianist Mark Nadler has become a festival regular with his Hootenanny show, which will occupy the late slot for the opening weekend.
He’s followed by Adelaide’s own Victoria Falconer with her mix of songs, circus and burlesque in The Parlour on the middle weekend, and the outrageous Reuben Kaye with songs of finality and farewell in The End on, naturally enough, the closing weekend. Late shows are priced at just $39, with limited $30 tickets for under-30s also available for other shows.
“You never know who you’re gonna get, you never know what you’re gonna see,” Gay says. “The late night has also been my favourite show as a performer, because you get to throw something wild and beautiful at the audience.”
Falconer is also co-artistic director at the Hayes Theatre in Sydney, where Gay developed her stripped-back version of the musical Calamity Jane in 2016.
“Calamity Jane was super informed by the experience of cabaret and variety, because there was no separation between the audience and the performer … I was stealing people’s drinks,” Gay says. “Everything that I learnt from being a cabaret performer, I used in that show.”
Another hit show from the Hayes, the musical comedy Murder for Two – which combines its mystery plot with four hands on one piano – is among highlights of Gay’s program.
“I really, really hope that our audiences also feel that this is joyful and mischievous and seductive and magnetic, in the way that I would love them to feel,” she says. ■
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