The Cabaret Fringe Festival is an
open-access arts festival held annually in Adelaide, South Australia.
Cabaret Fringe Festival 2025 – 23 May to 1 June
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🖤 2025 PUBLIC STATEMENT: This Is Not a Rehearsal 🖤
Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival friends and friends – we never thought we’d say this, but here we are… clutching our pearls and pianos. It’s not quite curtains, but it’s dangerously close.
Cabaret Fringe Festival aka CabFringe, home of the bold, bizarre, and brilliant, is at serious risk of shutting down after the 2025 season. Not because the shows aren’t powerful. Not because the audiences aren’t coming. But because the funding has finished – and the bills don’t take standing ovations as payment.
For over two decades, Cabaret Fringe Festival has offered a platform for emerging artists, experimental performance, and voices too real for the main stage. We’ve weathered venue closures, leadership changes, global pandemics and the unpredictable economics of independent art-but this is our toughest act yet.
Here’s the short version:
The multiyear funding that has kept us afloat has ended. The generous bequests that carried us to this point have been used exactly as they were intended – to make the good stuff happen. And now, without new major investment, we simply can’t continue.
Despite sold-out shows, standing ovations, and enough sparkle to blind a small village, the behind-the-scenes bills are bigger than ever, and quite frankly, our bank account is starting to look like a fringe performer’s fridge – mostly empty, with a suspicious bottle of Prosecco in the back.
This festival exists because of the passion and legacy of the late Frank Ford AM, father of the Fringe and founder of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival who championed open-access performance platforms and acts cutting their teeth on courageous audiences. Born as the ‘enfante terrible’, a mischievous sibling to the mainstage festival, CabFringe has evolved through four incarnations over two decades-across beloved venues like the Weimar Room, La Bohème, and now spread across Adelaide’s best brick and mortar live performance venues and independent stages.
Thanks to visionary supporters like the late great Frank Ford AM, Sam Harvey, Greg Mackie OAM, AEDA, and the City of Adelaide, we’ve built something rare: a truly accessible festival for cabaret, by cabaret artists.
Let us be clear: we are not asking artists or community members to dig into empty pockets in a cost of living crisis. What we need now isn’t a whip-round or a bake sale-it’s serious investment. We’re calling on big donors, funding bodies, philanthropists, arts investors, sponsors, and anyone who believes in the cultural and social power of fringe performance to show up. To step in. To back the fringe – not just in word, but in deed.
Cabaret was born in the back rooms of Berlin and Paris – out of protest, play, politics, and possibility. This festival has carried and cultivated that fire in our most loved local live performance venues, not as a spectacle, but as a response. A challenge. A celebration of humanity in all its weird and wonderful forms. That spirit lives on in CabFringe. It’s a platform for voices that don’t fit neatly into mainstream funding models or polite conversations, or massive theatre stages. And it’s worth protecting. If we let that vanish, we lose something vital.
So yes, this is a rally cry:
💥 If you love what we do,
💥 If you’ve laughed, cried, gasped or been gloriously offended at a show,
💥 If you believe in storytelling that doesn’t ask for permission.
Now is the time to step up.
We’ve squeezed every cent, applied for every grant, and passed the hat more times than a burlesque glove. But without a new funding partner, serious sponsor, or bold philanthropic backer, the future of Cabaret Fringe is uncertain.
Here’s how you can help:
🎭 Share this message
🎭 Pass it on to funders, donors, arts organisations, that rich aunt who once said she “loved the arts.”
🎭 Talk loudly and proudly about why fringe festivals matter, and that cabaret isn’t just entertainment—it’s resistance, it’s storytelling with soul, it’s community with jokes and jazz hands.
This festival has always been by the people, for the people, and occasionally on top of the people (consensually, of course). Let’s keep it alive. Let’s not let “underfunded” be the final act.
We’re not done. But without real, sustained support—we might be.
CALL TO ACT: If you can help, email us now: info@cabaretfringefestival.com
We’re not done yet. But we need help to stay standing. And frankly? The world is dull enough already.
With guts, grit, and real talk,
– The Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival Team
#FringeIsOpenAccess #FundCabFringe #ThisIsNotARehearsal #SaveOurStories #KeepCabaretFringe
“The Cabaret Fringe breathes new life into small venues” In Daily | City Mag
“CabFringe continues to be a gritty, loving home for strange and spectacular voices in a truly grassroots open-access space, and thats worth fighting for.” Simone DiSisto, Producer
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What is Cabaret?
Cabaret is any artform, where each performance is an irreplicable experience, largely because of the connection between artist and audience where the breaking of the fourth wall, the intimate space, and the stories shared, mean the artist affects the audience, and vice versa.
We recognise that since its beginnings in France in the 1880s, the cabaret artform continues to evolve over time and is characterised differently in countries around the world. Over time, cabaret has included much overlap with other genres and performance styles from poetry, to comedy, burlesque, political satire, and many music styles.
Music is an integral element of modern-day cabaret, but is not essential throughout the entire performance. Similarly, cabaret is often performed in smaller spaces like bars, restaurants and intimate theatres, though this is not a specific prerequisite of the genre.
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What types of shows are invited to use our ArtFuel ticketing system?
Cabaret shows that take place in South Australia!
While we support and appreciate many art forms and performance styles, our organisation and ticketing platform is intended to be used by cabaret artists performing predominantly cabaret shows.
This is an open-access platform and festival so we trust that you will self-assess, and only register your event if you feel it meets our definition of cabaret (above).
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A brief history
Creating a Cabaret Fringe Festival was the vision of the late Frank Ford AM, father of the Fringe and founder of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Conceived in 2001 as the ‘enfante terrible’ precocious sibling of Frank’s Cabaret Festival, it was strongly supported by then Arts Minister, the much-loved Di Laidlaw. Intended by Frank as a non-curated open-access affordably priced experimental platform, where emerging talent could cut its teeth on courageous audiences in venues in Adelaide’s West End, It was initially assisted by Arts SA through the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust and presented alongside its main stage Cabaret Festival.
When the AFCT dropped the Cabaret Fringe Festival, Torsten Meyer picked it up and presented its second incarnation in 2003 at his delightfully seedy Weimar Room on Hindley Street.
Fast forward to 2008 when brothers Paul and Adam Boylon with Jay Robinson and Frank’s blessing staged the Cabaret Fringe Festival’s third incarnation. Initially staged at La Bohème cabaret bar the festival grew to include other venues around Adelaide increasing in popularity and size each year.
When La Bohème closed its doors in early 2019, the Boylon brothers teamed up with arts mover and shaker, Greg Mackie OAM to establish a great little board and so now Cabaret Fringe is in its fourth incarnation. A year later, Covid shut everything down – but now we’re back and we’re here to play! Joined by respected arts identities: former Exec Director of Arts SA, Alex Reid PSM; successful businessman, Mark de Raad from ArtFuel and I-Nex Corporation; cabaret singer and governance expert Alison Kimber, the board is rounded out by dancer-cum-accountancy services Principal, Lauren Thiel from The Real Thiel. Lauren produced the 2019 Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival with just six weeks lead-time and reprised the role in 2021.
In 2023, Simone DiSisto joined the team and is our current Producer.
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