‘Gateway drug into cabaret’: Reuben Kaye promises hedonism and healing at 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival
From the viral hits of Post Modern Jukebox to a Jesus Christ Superstar tribute, artistic director Reuben Kaye unveils his Adelaide Cabaret Festival slate.
When Reuben Kaye is invited to give young performers a crash-course in cabaret, he often frames it as a necessity – a matter of survival in an industry that can leave you “at the mercy of the audition”.
“Not all of your work is going to come from straight theatre and musical theatre – you are going to be left waiting,” Kaye tells InReview.
“Making your own work is the best way to form a sense of agency and control in your career, but also develop yourself as an artist.”
Kaye knows from experience, having journeyed from the outer Fringes to one of cabaret’s biggest platforms: artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Returning to Adelaide to preview his plans for the 2026 festival, Kaye promises to deliver a “delicious revolution”.
“I’ve got a very firm view of what my brand of cabaret is, and what I think cabaret as an artform has as its drawcard but also its responsibility,” he explains. “So the theme for this year reflects that the hedonism of cabaret, but also the strident political activism of cabaret – and the fact that cabaret, maybe more than all the artforms, wears on its sleeve its urge to repair.”
"Cabaret, maybe more than all the artforms, wears on its sleeve its urge to repair."
One of the more mainstream acts he’s booked is Post Modern Jukebox – the YouTube-famous collective that has racked up hundreds of millions of views with everything from Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ reimagined as a gravelly ballad to a flapper-friendly, 1920s-inspired take on Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’.
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“For me, they are many young kids’ gateway drug into cabaret,” Kaye explains. “It might be a Taylor Swift fan who’s as vanilla as bread and butter, who will get on YouTube and see a cover of a Taylor Swift song in ragtime with a burlesque dancer. And they go, ‘What is this? What is this world?’ And suddenly they’re in a YouTube spiral of burlesque and cabaret –and they’re hooked, right?”
Kaye has also programmed one of his own ‘gateway’ moments with Monsieur Camembert – a group he first discovered around the age of eight.
“My Mum used to take me to Camberwell Market as a kid, a massive car boot sale,” Kaye recalls. “One day I was walking through and on one of the corners was a guy on an accordion, a guy with a trumpet, a guy with a violin, a guy with a guitar, all in trilbies playing and singing. It was my first time hearing gypsy jazz, and I bought a CD for $5.”
Kaye says Monsieur Camembert, who will play their Leonard Cohen tribute Cohen Noir on June 19, are “a real example of this European artform being viewed through an Australian lens, this uniquely tilted Australian lens”.
Kaye has come a long way from that eight-year-old in the market, and his program includes many of the household names he now counts as peers, including Em Rusciano, Casey Donovan, Jay Laga’aia, Ursula Yovich, Sarah McLeod and previously announced British musical star Alfie Boe.
In addition to headlining the annual Variety Gala on June 4 and his own shows – The Kaye Hole, The Gutter, Happy Ending – Kaye will also reunite with his castmates from the 2025 Australian revival of Jesus Christ Superstar for the one-night-only What’s the Buzz? on June 6. While the production never made it to Adelaide, Kaye says the cast – which “became like a family” on the tour – will perform key cuts songs from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
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Kaye’s co-star Mahalia Barnes will also perform a solo show born out of the Superstar run – where Kaye concedes he conditioned Barnes into becoming a Bette Midler fan.
“When we were backstage at Jesus Christ Superstar Mahalia and I had a lot of time together – because as Mary Magdalene and Herod, we had fuck all to do,” he says. “So we played music, we listened to songs, and she’d never heard the soundtrack to The Rose.”
Barnes will perform the soundtrack from the 1979 Janis Joplin biopic, as well as some additional Joplin cuts.
Other festival firsts include the Australia debuts of American performers Dylan Adler and David Mills; a new collaboration between Paul Capsis and Adam Noviello dubbed House of Rot: Grey Gardens; this year’s Frank Ford Commission, Baylie Carson is Handsome(ish); Libby O’Donovan and Michaela Burger’s celebration of the short-statured; and a new show from Melbourne’s PO PO MO CO.
“It’s very 2026,” Kaye says of PO PO MO CO. “It’s subverting the things we know about comedy, but it could be in a New York basement in the ‘90s, or San Francisco, or 1920s Berlin.”
Another intriguing addition is a work-in-progress showing of Lincoln Elliott’s Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical), which explores questions of decolonisation facing museums around the world.
“It treats a subject which most people are tense about, and clam up about, as a rock and roll farce,” Key says. “It’s stridently contemporary, Australian, very funny musical theatre.”
Also on the bill is Lime Cordiale, the indie rock siblings who are also headlining their own sustainability-themed festival in South Australia on April 18. Their Cabaret Festival slot will see them backed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, with Kaye noting how the group’s “irreverence and chaos” aligns with his ethos for the festival.
“If you try and define cabaret, or look for reasoning, I think you’re on a path to nowhere, because it’s about the spirit of the artform,” Kaye reflects.
It ties back to his other day-one lesson when giving his cabaret crash course:
“What I think cabaret is doesn’t really fucking matter – because it’s about what you think your version of cabaret is.”
Adelaide Cabaret Festival runs from June 4 – 21
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