Featuring over 460 events spanning theatre, music, comedy, dance, visual art, circus and cabaret, this September, the 2025 Sydney Fringe Festival will showcase over 2,900 performers across four precincts and 12 festival hubs. With so much on offer, Australian Arts Review takes a look at 15 events worth checking out:
24 Hours in Kings Cross
Sean & Dolly’s: 10 – 20 September
One iconic suburb, two storytellers, 24 hours. Alex McClintock (photographer) and Mike Williams (audio documentarian) join forces to celebrate the grit and glamour of Sydney’s infamous red-light district. Captured over one summer day, this slide night on steroids features live narration, recorded interviews, music, and photo projections. Don’t miss this irreverent and unpredictable tribute to the characters who give Kings Cross its edge and make it the place where Sydney lets its hair down.
Camp Culture
Entertainment Quarter- The Bunker: 29 September – 5 October
Camp Culture is a fun, fabulous circus adventure led by Faboriginal superstar Dale Woodbridge Brown. With laughs, flips, and big camp energy, it’s all about being bold, proud, and you! Can the Kumbayas, throw on Queen B and spark more than just the fire. This is your roll call for Camp Culture – An interactive circus show for campers of any age. But this is no gammin summer camp – it’s serving up equal parts skill and sass.
Definitely NOT A Hungry Game: A Parody Musical
Eternity Playhouse: 16 – 20 September
The hilarious, 5-star parody musical based on the series of a similar (but legally not the same) name returns to Sydney Fringe by popular demand. Definitely Not A Hungry Game: A Parody Musical is a parody musical based on the Suzanne Collins series. Returning to Sydney after a successful run at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, this show is full to the brim with the story and characters you know and love, mixed with pop culture references that only the most chronically online people will understand.
Dorothy In Oz
Marrickville Town Hall: 3 – 20 September
Leave the city behind and step into the magical world of Dorothy in Oz: The Immersive Cocktail Adventure, where you become part of the action! This unforgettable experience combines the whimsy and wonder of L. Frank Baum’s beloved classic book series with the excitement of interactive storytelling, live performance, cocktails, and delightfully surprising stage magic. From the brilliant mind of A.K. Wregg – creator of the international smash hit The Alice: An Immersive Cocktail Adventure, The Wizard’s Den, and The Art of Murder, comes an adventure where you’re not just a spectator, but a key player in an entirely new Oz story!
Elixir Revived
Entertainment Quarter – The Vault: continues to 12 October
From the creators of GODS and RAILED bring you a wild, post-apocalyptic circus comedy packed with jaw-dropping stunts, irreverent humour, and world-class acrobatics. Sexy, bold and unmissable. Four eccentric scientists attempt to create the Elixir of life, and a forced to test the concoctions on themselves. Chaos and Mayhem breaks loose in the Laboratory, and what follows is a fast-paced, laugh-out-loud spectacle packed with gravity-defying acrobatics, physical comedy, and more than a touch of cheek.
Gia Ophelia
Erskineville Town Hall: 2 – 6 September
Struggling with infertility and a stalled acting career, Gia wants to play Ophelia one last time. A darkly comic one-woman show skewering sexism and ageism in the arts. Gia played Ophelia once when she was younger and fresh on the scene. And now she’s older, and wiser, and ready to give Ophelia one last crack. But she’s not the same youthful Gia she once was. Conflicted by the trials of motherhood, infertility and her youth passing her by, Gia must ask herself where her priorities lie and what it truly means to be a mother and an artist. Gia Ophelia is a darkly comic one-woman show skewering sexism and ageism in the performing arts, created by two exciting young female theatremakers (Jo Bradley and Grace Wilson) specifically for Sydney Fringe.
Kate Bush Unmoored
Eternity Playhouse: 9 – 13 September
Eklektika reimagines the haunting music of Kate Bush in exquisite choral music and an immersive multi-media journey through ethereal landscapes, half-remembered dreams, and barely conscious longings of the soul. The haunting music of Kate Bush is reimagined in exquisite choral and instrumental arrangements and ethereal soundscapes by award winning film and theatre composer, Judy Stubbs. Performed by renowned 12 voice ensemble, Eklektika, strings and percussion, Kate Bush Unmoored features specially created graphics, video and physical theatre, taking the audience on a dreamlike journey through 12 of Bush’s most iconic songs.
Mass Effect
New Theatre: 17 – 20 September
Mass Effect is an award-winning, high-intensity performance by HIMHERANDIT Productions. Together, the cast push their physical limits, deal with exhaustion, motivation, and group dynamics. Spatial patterns carve out complex running formations and team collaboration becomes key, as they push to the limits of their physical thresholds, moving beyond exhaustion. Members of the local community join the stage in the end of the performance. Pumping up the energy to offer that last push to keep going, filling the theatre with an energetic pulse and a total Mass Effect. A tremendous spectacle that fills the room with vitality and joy.
Monski Mouse’s Baby Disco Dance Hall
Entertainment Quarter – The Vault: 6 September – 12 October
Why toddle when you can dance? Join DJ Monski Mouse and her dancers for this multi award-nominated, epic session of bopping, bonkers, beautiful fun. Expect high-energy smiling to retro beats and thumping nursery rhymes. Get your disco-dancing booties on!
Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left Of Us
New Theatre: 17 – 27 September
Sh!t Theatre are back. And they’re totally fine! Join them for some folk music and a tale of true crime, because we’re doing ok?! Actually all things considered, we’re OK. Feeling alright. Thriving, even? That’s a bit far, but we have learnt some folk songs. We got into folk recently and it’s been really helpful. Come and sing some folk songs with us! A swift 60 minutes of classic folk followed by a trip to the pub and a sing-a-round. Because we need a drink, don’t we? But we’re doing OK.
Sabra
The Bondi Junction Theatre: 18 – 27 September
Sabra is a compelling one-woman play that delves into the complex emotional landscape of migration, identity, and family. Written and performed by Netta Yashchin and directed by Asnat Zibil, the production brings to life the story of Zhenia, a recent immigrant to Israel from the USSR in the 1970s. A mother of three, Zhenia shares her inner world with humour, honesty, and vivid authenticity, navigating hardship, hope, and her evolving relationship with her teenage daughter, Fania. Based on Yashchin’s own experiences, Sabra draws from her childhood memories of migrating from Lithuania to Israel at the age of eight. The play offers a poignant reflection on the universal migrant experience, giving voice to the often-unspoken emotional complexities faced by those who leave one home to find another.
Soup Friends
Erskineville Town Hall: 16 – 20 September
Pummel Squad bring back the legendary work that brought them together as a company: Soup Friends. A reckless experiment with theatre form in the tradition of Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess, this show turns the gaze back on the company and the messy, ugly, ludicrous pursuit that is making theatre with your friends. Two friends set out to make a show, but can’t get out of each other’s way and do it. A third crashes the process on a mission of their own. As the gags, disruptions, subversions and sabotages compete for stage time, the absurd game of competition and cruelty takes on a life of its own. A formal experiment in the dramaturgy of interruption, Soup Friends is a restless act of anti-theatre unravelling every difficult and ugly part of making theatre.
Triptych
Eternity Playhouse: 2 – 6 September
After a sold-out tour across Australia, Europe, and South America, witness the triumphant return of Triptych to Sydney Fringe. Three unique repertoire pieces investigate various poetic possibilities, universal rhythms and cycles performed by Major’s company of dancers. This is a captivating evening of dance, of connection between internal and external worlds – of non-duality – all set within a whirling maelstrom of movement, sound and light. Triptych cements Major’s reputation as one of the most innovative and emotionally resonant choreographers working in Australia.
Twenty Million Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
New Theatre: 10 – 13 September
Drawing inspiration from Jules Verne’s novel and the tradition of adventure fiction, performer-puppeteers Harry McGee and Cooper Donald McDonald bring this original story to life through light, paper, pipe cleaners, cellophane, a synth and live illustration. Armed with a couple of paperclips and stencils, McGee and McDonald layer the story’s elements on top of each other to create the city, the sea, the machine and the moon, with songs and live composition by Yanto Shortis. A lo-fi act of theatre magic, Twenty Million Thousand Leagues Under the Sea invites audiences on an imaginative and heart warming journey around the world, to the bottom of the ocean, up to the moon and back again.
When Night Comes
Union Bond Store (The Rocks): continues to 27 September
A bespoke, multi-sensory and distinctly intoxicating performance experience, The Society invites you to attend When Night Comes – a hedonistic night out, where visions and sounds, smells and textures, tastes and feelings are conjured. When Night Comes is an immersive performance for small groups that blends theatre and cocktails in a singular experience. Encounter tantalising provocations, empyreal characters and an alluring bacchanalian world, in search of amusements, treats, tipples and secrets. Fortify your spirits and step inside . . . After all, every adventure requires a first step.
The 2025 Sydney Fringe Festival runs 1 – 30 September. For more information and full program, visit: www.sydneyfringe.com for details.
Images: Mass Effect – courtesy of HIMHERANDIT Productions (supplied) | Dorothy in Oz (supplied) | Kate Bush Unmoored (supplied) | Sh!t Theatre presents Or What’s Left Of Us (supplied) | Triptych by Lewis Major (supplied)