Featuring over 400 events spanning theatre, music, comedy, dance, visual art, circus and cabaret, this September, the 2024 Sydney Fringe Festival will showcase over 1,800 performers across four precincts and 12 festival hubs. With so much on offer, Australian Arts Review takes a look at 12 events worth checking out:
27 Club
Spiegeltent Festival Garden: continues to 29 September
The biggest music show of the Adelaide Fringe this year is finally coming to Sydney for the first time! Rock the night away with a high-octane music extravaganza 27 Club LIVE at the Sydney Spiegeltent – that’ll leave you praying to the rock gods for more. Witness electrifying music and lore from legendary artists Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix, performed by many of Australia’s top rock icons including Sarah McLeod (The Superjesus), Kevin Mitchell (Jebediah), Carla Lippis (Mondo Psycho), Dusty Lee Stephensen (Wanderers), Justin Burford (End of Fashion, Rock of Ages), Virginia Lillye (The Voice) and Bek Jensen. Join them for the first time in Sydney as they salute the fated members of the 27 Club with music’s greatest set list ever!
Dead To Me – A Comedy Tour
Village Green Festival Garden – Box Office: 13 & 14 September
Join comedian and confirmed bachelor Matt Bell for a walking ghost tour through Sydney’s storied streets and fabled haunts where you will encounter terrifying tales inspired by single life. Get the gory details about the horrors of running into exes in the street, being literally ghosted, and having dates miraculously return from the dead. Hunt down old flames, visit historic sites of abandoned romances and bask in the conspiratorial glow of a love life in jeopardy. And if the ghost stories aren’t scary enough, a 32-year-old desperately single gay man will be! 2024 Melbourne Comedy Festival – Golden Gibbo Award Nominee.
Definitely NOT A Hungry Game: A Parody Musical
Off Broadway Hub – Turner Theatre: 3 – 8 September
Co-created by Freya Moore and Robbie Alexander, Definitely Not A Hungry Game is the love child of a Starkid fan, an HG lover and two twenty-somethings who are chronically online. Showcasing 18 original songs within two hours of absurdity, hilarity and drama, the parody musical is based on the series of a similar (but – for legal reasons – not the same) name. Katniss is the main character, Peeta is irrelevant. Gale is a bogan. Prim is poorly named. Her mum is an alcoholic. And Rue is just in a silly goofy mood! Will they sing about their feelings? You bet your ass they will! Will Katniss make it through the games – you’ll have to come and watch to find out!
Delusions and Grandeur
Touring Hub – New Theatre: 24 – 28 September
In a classical cello recital meets performance art clown show, Karen Hall skilfully walks the line between artistry and insanity. Featuring Suite Number One in G Major by JS Bach and personal comedic pieces crafted in Idiot classes, Karen fuses in a healthy dose of pathos as she tackles identity, expectations, and success through the eyes of a fool. Karen boasts a diverse resume having graced the stages of Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl to behind the scenes work in studio sessions for everything from indie singer/songwriter albums to work on soundtracks for Emmy-nominated shows. Karen most visibly spent four seasons on camera as the Cellist on the TV show, Glee, and performs regularly with various symphony orchestras throughout the Los Angeles area.
Drink Rum with Expats
Touring Hub – New Theatre: 17 – 21 September
Anarchic performance legends’ (TimeOut London) Sh!t Theatre return to Sydney with their multi award-winning show, Drink Rum with Expats. Celebrating their final year as Europeans, island-monkeys Becca & Louise (aka Sh!t Theatre), got invited to the European Capital of Culture in Malta. They went to drink rum with Brits abroad but found a lot more than they expected. From one small island in the sea to another small island in the sea, Sh!t Theatre found mystery and murder in the fight to be European. Expect free rum, crowd surfing, sea shanties and a live dog in this rollicking and riotous exploration of immigration and home.
Fountain Lakes in Lockdown: A Drag Parody Play
Playhouse – Sydney Opera House: 17 – 22 September
What did Australia’s foxiest morons get up to during the pandemic? It’s August 2021. Kath is up to pussy’s bow in sour dough. Kim’s been asked to work from home (though that happened before the pandemic). Sharon has had a severe reaction to all the hand sanitiser. Relive the uniquely Australian pandemic experience through the eyes of these uniquely Australian characters hilariously parodied by Art Simone (RuPaul’s Drag Race Downunder, Have You Been Paying Attention?), Thomas Jaspers (Granny Bingo, The Gays Are Revolting), Leasa Mann (Club Broadway, Thank Mollie’s It’s Friday) and Scott Brennan (skitHOUSE, Comedy Inc., Neighbours).
Friday Ritual
Barangaroo: 13, 20 & 27 September
Accompanied by the harmonious melodies of a community choir, witness the magic of manufacturing and the creativity of construction as we release the workweek to the wind. Friday Ritual connects the creative industry with the public. Simple, scalable structures – designed to dance with the wind – will be sculpted by artist Matthew Aberline, with the Beautiful and Useful Studio, during the day and released in a moment of ritual on Friday afternoons, as the precinct transitions from business to pleasure. Matthew will set up his equipment, crafting the structures in the foyer of International Tower 3 in Barangaroo inviting members of the public to contribute to the creative process or to simply marvel at it as an onlooker. Join us at dusk as these delightful creations parade through the precinct, arriving at Waterman’s Cove, where they will be set up and displayed to the sounds of local choirs.
MONSTER
Queer Hub – Qtopia Sydney: 24 – 28 September
Drag artist. Transgender man. High school teacher. Florian Wild is the MONSTER! Cash in your cis guilt for the evening, and come worship at the altar of this Melbourne cabaret star! Wild delivers a punchy hour of powerhouse vocals and quickfire standup, diving into the depths of the monster within us all. The evening’s sermon addresses serious social quandaries such as: Did VeggieTales make me gay? , Should sleep paralysis demons unionize? and Is it faith, or just sparkling fundamentalism? Between outrageous antics, Wild seeks to tear up the definition of what it means to be a monster, and thoroughly stomp all over it with a sparkly heel. With a stellar selection of pop and jazz songs accompanied by FRANKLY, a heaping of drag debauchery, and razor sharp wit, MONSTER is quintessential cabaret that will have you screaming: more! more! more!
Otto & Astrid – The Stage Tour
Village Green Festival Garden – North Tent: 4 – 15 September
Berlin’s Prince and Princess of Art Rock and Europop, Otto & Astrid – Die Roten Punkte, thunder through a blisteringly hilarious set of songs from (almost) all of their albums. The utterly dysfunctional siblings are a lipstick smeared sonic collision between The B-52s, The Pixies, Kraftwerk and early Ramones. This multi award-winning duo have played everywhere from Soho Theatre London, Joe’s Pub – New York, The Roxy – Los Angeles, and opened for Amanda Palmer in Europe, USA, and Australia. One of the most irreverently side-splitting gigs you are ever likely to see, with ridiculously infectious songs, Otto & Astrid are truly one of a kind.
Plenty of Fish in the Sea
Touring Hub – New Theatre: 17 – 21 September
A darkly humorous and physically adventurous contemporary fable about finding the perfect catch, Plenty of Fish in the Sea is an absurd fantasy for all ages! A castaway is saved from the surging seas. Conversation is sparse and in his temporary lodgings he comes face to face with a startling kind of hook-up culture. A fantastical and absurdist fable that begins as a story of rescue and becomes an unsettling dissection of dreams and desire. Have you ever grappled with dating apps? This theatrical world wildly spins a different kind of net that has us caught – hook, line, and sinker! After winning the hearts of audiences at Adelaide Fringe, the award winning physical theatre company Clockfire Theatre Co return to Sydney Fringe direct from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Soweto Gospel Choir – HOPE
Spiegeltent Festival Garden: 3 – 25 September
Hope is an all-new concert by the Grammy®-winning Soweto Gospel Choir – celebrating songs and anthems from the Freedom movement of Nelson Mandela’s South Africa, back to the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King’s 1950’s America. Hope opens with a rousing program of South African freedom songs, before the repertoire echoes down through time to the USA, with beautiful renditions of the protest music of the Civil Rights Movement, including works by legendary artists James Brown, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder and the one-and-only Aretha Franklin.
Voices of Joan
PACT Centre for Emerging Artists: 3 – 14 September
In an intimate solo performance, Janie Gibson searches for Joan’s voice in fragments of words throughout history; words spoken at her trial, translated in textbooks, imagined in poetry and illuminated in drama. What is revealed is an ancient story about gender, truth and power with startling reverberations today. With direction by Anu Almagro (Song Of the Goat Theatre), Gibson transforms into the multitudinous voices of Joan: from the teenage warrior, to the fervent revolutionary, to the bishop that tried her. Using wit, humour and multiple on stage costume changes Gibson rallies the crowd from behind her megaphone and invites the audience to build Joan’s pyre with her. With a wireless radio as her ‘time machine’ she tunes into echoes of Joan’s story throughout history in search of a road map for resistance in our uncertain times.
The 2024 Sydney Fringe Festival runs 1 – 30 September. For more information and full program, visit: www.sydneyfringe.com for details.
Images: Drink Rum with Expats – photo by Bronwen Sharp / art direction by Doug Kerr | Karen Hall – photo by Jeremy David Creative | Friday Ritual (supplied) | Plenty of Fish in the Sea – photo by Geoff Magee