Halloweekend at The Butterfly Club

TBC HalloweekendHot on the heels of taking out the Best Venue Award at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe, The Butterfly Club is launching its own mini-festival, Halloweekend. This year, Melbourne’s home of cabaret, kitsch and cocktails has booked wall-to-wall cabaret, burlesque, comedy and theatre, underscored by a spooky new range of cocktails for the occasion.

For years, The Butterfly Club has been famous for throwing the wildest and spookiest of Halloween shindigs. To mark the generous addition of the unofficial Melbourne-Cup-Day-Super-Long-Weekend, they have programmed three jam-packed nights of entertainment, with costumes and cocktails aplenty.

For those wanting to get freaky from the get-go, check out Early Burly, wild burlesque revue guest-hosted by Anya Anastasia, featuring a multitude of ghoulish performers ready to dance on your grave. Stay through the night to see The Big Hoo-Haa become your worst nightmare (at your suggestion). End Friday on a terrifying high-note with Trevor Jones’ Freaky Fridays, an all inclusive cabaret piano-bar shriek-fest.

If you are looking for genuinely horrifying shock-theatre, on Saturday, look no further than The Laudanum Project’s one-off performance of The Grand Guignol Automaton – fresh from their exploits at the Castlemaine Gaol. For those wanting to recapture their childhood with a glass of wine in hand, Sunday will showcase the incomparable Natasha York in a special Zombiefied edition of Adult Fairy Party.

Across all three nights of the mini-festival you can also catch two of Australia’s finest cabaret songwriters in action: John Thorn emerges from the shadows in Background Boy and Michael Dalley will sing of terrors such as “S**t Art From The Mornington Peninsula” in Rituals of Art &  Hatred.

So get out your fake blood, don a Dracula cape and head down to The Butterfly Club for the spookiest weekend of your life.

Halloweekend
The Butterfly Club, 5 Carson Place, Melbourne
Performances: 30 October – 1 November 2015
Information and bookings: www.thebutterflyclub.com

Image: courtesy of The Butterfly Club