Curiosity is a spark. Melbourne Fringe Festival is where it catches alight. This year, Melbourne Fringe Festival is challenging Melbournians to Turn Towards the Heat when the Festival returns from 29 September to 18 October 2026. With a program of 500+ exciting, boundary-pushing arts events, Australian Arts Review takes a look at sixteen events worth checking out:
Adore Händel’s Birthday Party: Little Black Book Vol. 3
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Archive Room: 7 – 18 October
Adore Händel is celebrating their 269th birthday – and you simply must not miss the festivities. Spanning centuries of ill-advised romances, electric chemistry, and the occasional catastrophic misjudgement, Adore has lived, loved, and documented it all in their legendary Little Black Book. Volume Three was to be the centrepiece of this evening’s festivities – a glittering collection of the most scandalous tales yet. There is, however, a slight complication… Join Adore and their long-suffering assistant Peter for the most chaotic, glamorous, and surprisingly moving birthday party you’ll ever attend – complete with operatic vocals, baroque camp, and a burning question.
Am I Who? X 2
Festival Hub: Meat Market – Craft Room: 6 – 10 October
A show for anyone who’s ever felt too foreign in one room and not foreign enough in another. One performer, countless places, countless versions of her, depending on who’s asking. Tehran, Melbourne, the immigration office, the kebab shop, her boss’s hand (the molester), the family WhatsApp screen (‘I’m fine’). Through sharp comic self-observation and deeply unnecessary levels of oversharing, she moves through loneliness disguised as charisma, freedom that doesn’t always feel free, and the strange emotional shapeshifting required to constantly fit in anywhere, everywhere, somewhere? Part confession, part performance, part very public emotional unravelling, Am I Who? x 2, written & performed by Sahra Davoudi and directed by Margaret Mills, explores what happens when survival becomes second nature – when performing yourself starts to feel safer than being yourself.
Be Noble Or Die!
Wheat, Wine & Whisky: 13 – 18 October
The world ended, but do you have the knowledge, skill and humanity to rebuild it? Be Noble Or Die! is an apocalyptic game show where you can lead your team to a eutopia. As your skills on animal facts, philosophical dilemmas and Lou Bega lyrics are put to the test; your true values start to shine. Gaining points in areas like Brains, Taste, Culture and Guts you will find where your strengths truly lie. Be Noble Entertainment (Ben Noble) leads in creating thousands of connections and skill-based events, hosted by world class artists nationally. Be Noble Or Die! Is the amalgamation of the games we do best, just in time for the end. Will you shape a new way of living, or will you doom us all?
Big Diva Energy
Victorian Pride Centre – Theatrette: 14 – 17 October
Fresh from the prestigious Dobell Foundation Cabaret Award which saw him unleash ceiling-shattering vocals and high octane tap for smash-hit Finucane & Smith’s Dance Palace, diva, comedian, crooner and belter Will Skarpona is ready to launch his Big Diva Energy in his very first solo show. If Shirley Bassey and Liza Minnelli gave birth to a bold, brassy twink, Skarpona would come tap dancing out of that womb. Big Diva Energy is an unapologetically camp, delightfully authentic musical cabaret – a memoir of a 21-year-old self-proclaimed diva from Wollongong, featuring iconic hits from Madonna, Tina Turner, Chappell Roan and more. Expect belt-it-to-the-back-row vocals, unhinged confessions, and more sequins than a Real Housewives reunion. With Direction by Maude Davey, Musical Direction by James Frampton, and Skarpona commanding the microphone, this show is the intimate spectacular you’ve been waiting for.
Campervan: An Ozploitation Horror Musical
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Common Rooms: 7 – 11 October
Campervan is a brand new horror comedy musical created by Geraldine Quinn. A group of friends drive back to a remote holiday spot to complete the passion project they started in the 1990s: a camcorder slasher film that was violently (appropriate) and mysteriously (intriguing) cut short by tragedy. But they are increasingly challenged – and increasingly disappear – raising questions about friendship, betrayal – and whether they will ever finish Campervan. Melbourne cabaret indie stalwart Geraldine Quinn (Spicks & Specks, Ground Up, The Project) invades the music theatre space with the world debut of her original Ozploitation horror comedy musical Campervan.
EXHIBIT
La Mama Courthouse: 30 September – 4 October
Step right up. Come take a look. Try not to stare. Exhibit is part performance, part beautifully strange encounter – where humans become the display, and the audience can’t help but be implicated. It unfolds like a living gallery: shifting, surprising, and slightly off-centre, where every moment invites you to question what you’re seeing – and why. Two women – often mistaken for one another – lean into the chaos of being seen, mis-seen, and often underestimated. With greying hair and zero interest in behaving, their vitality is louder, wiser, and impossible to ignore. Created and performed by Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd, this bold physical theatre work collides dance and comedy. With razor-sharp humour and disarming vulnerability, Exhibit pokes at the awkward, the absurd, and the deeply human need to belong. It lives in that deliciously uncomfortable space where laughter bubbles up at exactly the wrong moment – and suddenly feels very right.
Mass Hysteria
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – ETU Ballroom: 30 September – 4 October
The cult cabaret service spectacle Melbourne has been praying for. Fresh from a raved-about, five-star Adelaide Fringe season that had audiences screaming hallelujah, Mass Hysteria is the cult cabaret spectacle Melbourne has been praying for. From the creators of Madame Martha’s Parisian Cabaret (Winner of Best Cabaret, Melbourne Fringe 2024) comes a brand-new glitter-drenched unholy communion led by three of Melbourne’s most iconic artists: Iva Rosebud, Skank Sinatra & Meg Hickey. Part church, part electro-cabaret, part ritual spectacular, Mass Hysteria is turning the ETU Ballroom into a euphoric congregation of camp, chaos and collective worship that demands total surrender.
MILF and Cookies
Classic Southside: 3 – 11 October | Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Archive Room: 14 – 15 October
Baked Fresh. Served Hot. This October, Marilyn Leder serves up MILF and Cookies – a comedy and song smackdown of marriage, divorce, dating a narcissist and smashing through the comedy boys’ club. The much anticipated follow up to her smash-hit comedy, The MILF Next Door, Marilyn is back dating as a 50-something Jewish mamma. After surviving divorce and dalliances with younger men, Marilyn dated a narcissist, turned to artificial intelligence for relationship advice – ChatGPT love bombed her and made her dump him. She turns the trauma into a tight set, a few killer songs and a fearless take-down of the comedy boys’ club – now she’s got the mic, a great pair of lungs, and the last word. Heartbroken, harassed and hilariously underestimated, Marilyn finds her voice in the chaos. With dramaturgy by multi-award winning Geraldine Quinn (Spicks and Specks, RocKwiz, The Passion of Saint Nicholas, BROAD), in MILF and Cookies, Marilyn is raw, fearless and funny as hell.
QFWFQ
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Meeting Room: 30 September – 4 October
A surrealist solo show which neither begins nor ends. Winner Best Solo Show at 2025 Hollywood Fringe. You are reading about QFWFQ, fresh off its run at the Edinburgh and Sydney Fringes. Winner of Best Solo Show and the Sydney Fringe Exchange Award at the 2025 Hollywood Fringe, with an additional four nominations including BroadwayWorld LA for Best Solo Show. A surrealist labyrinth that stretches time and space. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, this razor-sharp, absurdly funny and deeply personal show breaks all genres and has no fourth wall. Join Gregory Nussen as they rummage through the power and peril of storytelling, growing up Jewish and queer, the genocide in Gaza, and the art that saves your life. QFWFQ neither begins, nor ends. How does it come together? I can’t explain, but it does. Directed by Hannah Pilkes.
Rhomboid
fortyfivedownstairs: 1 – 11 October
A hilarious and heartwarming new play by Eric Jiang about navigating friendship, relationships and love as a queer Asian-Australian. Xavier meets Sebastian in high school. They instantly hit it off, but it doesn’t take long for things to get complicated. Moving through university and into the real world, they miss each other, find new partners, have chaotic encounters, and make their own way. For Xavier, the allure of a promising future smashes into a murky reality – especially as a queer Asian-Australian. As he fumbles through relationships and unusual friendships, Xavier continues to orbit Sebastian, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar, infuriating him and craving him in equal measure as they gradually figure out what they mean to each other. Margot Morales (And She Would Stand Like This, Antipodes Theatre) directs the Melbourne premiere of this funny and touching play by Eric Jiang (Lacuna, Griffin Theatre) about the unexpected forms love takes.
Stories from the Waiting Room – Lived Experience of Disability Rights
Digital Fringe: 29 September – 18 October
A powerful theatrical production that invites audiences to explore disability rights through a deeply personal and authentic lens. Co-designed and performed by people with disability, the show challenges stereotypes and conventional practices in disability support by sharing lived experiences on stage. Through storytelling and performance and even a musical number, My Story fosters empathy, understanding, and reflection encouraging critical thinking about inclusion, rights, and representation. With a script by Megan Riedl and directed by Carmen Maddison, Stories from the Waiting Room is accompanied by a compelling sound score by Sound Designer Ciaran Frame.
The Enormous Radio
The Substation: 30 September – 18 October
Chamber Made’s The Enormous Radio is a new large-scale immersive audio experience by artists Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott with collaborators. A ring of old radios replete with glowing dials, crackling speakers and twitchy antennas fill The Substation Main Space. This strange hive has been hacked, revived and repurposed to operate as an interconnected machine-medium capable of seeking, receiving, translating and transmitting uncanny messages from the animal world. Drawing on Australian wildlife field-recordings, spatialised composition, translation software, and techno-spiritualism, the installation conjures haunted transmissions that speculate on the possibility of interspecies communication. As acoustic ecologists make breakthroughs in deciphering animal languages, this work asks: what if we could tune into the non-human, the endangered, and the wild? What might they say? In the time of human-made climate emergency, The Enormous Radio stokes our longing to connect and tune into the unknown and the wild.
The Ex Files: A Comedy True Crime Tour
Departs corner Swanston & Collins Streets, Melbourne: 2 – 10 October
Award winning comedian Matt Bell returns to the streets of Melbourne with his hilarious and scandalous new comedy true crime walking tour. Melbourne has a dark secret. A crime has been committed – and gay comedian Matt Bell knows where the bodies are buried. Join Matt as he unravels one of the city’s most shocking true* crimes – a tale of desire, obsession and dating men gone horribly wrong. How does he know all this? The killer left one loose end… (*) If asked by a lawyer, definitely not true!
The Village Square
The Motley Wherehaus – The Cavern: 12 – 18 October
There is a town high in hazy mountain air where birds steal dreams from sleeping residents, where machinery parts are made of vegetables, where music and language swim together in the river, and where the townsfolk live out lives of joy and sorrow. Welcome back to The Village Square. With a new cycle of whimsical stories and compositions, the acclaimed collaboration returns, bringing together the captivating, madcap narration of Richard Piper and the creative chemistry of cellist Zoe Knighton and guitarist Robbie Melville. Together, the trio roam through contemporary folk tales filled with humour, longing, and beauty. The Village Square is a dreamy, intimate place suspended somewhere between myth, memory, and music. Following its sold-out Melbourne Fringe debut, this new season invites audiences back into a world where the unusual feels ordinary, and the ordinary becomes enchanting.
Twinky Twinky Little Star
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Music Room: 30 September – 4 October
What began as Zak Vasiliou’s first-ever solo show at the 2025 Adelaide Fringe has since become an award-winning success story. Twinky Twinky Little Star has earned multiple accolades, including one of Adelaide Fringe’s most sought after awards. Twinky Twinky Little Star is a witty comedy where Zak shares all the signs he was going to grow up to be gay, and how his parents missed every single one of them. The show also explores the gay community, particularly the twink category. As well as being a comedian, Zak is first and foremost a musical theatre performer, and the show was born from a desire to take ownership of his creativity.
Waterloo
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Solidarity Hall: 7 – 18 October
Award-winning performer Bron Batten wrestles with love and war in an explosive interrogation of her ill-fated affair with a conservative military official. A bittersweet romance crossed with an action blockbuster, Waterloo explores what happens when a lefty, Greens voting, almost vegan theatre artist dates a right-wing, cigar smoking, Margaret Thatcher-loving Tory soldier. Waterloo exposes our human fascination with destruction, whether it be emotional, material, personal or political. Waterloo examines the ideological distance between right and left and troubles at the deep-seated moral dilemmas of human behaviour. It is a playful, disturbing and political contemporary performance which invites the audience to examine their own ideological beliefs around war, politics and the military. It asks the viewer to engage with the possibility of enacting violence and what extreme they could be capable of, given half a chance. At turns hilarious, heart-wrenching and poignant, Waterloo is an unmissable modern morality tale from the creators of the world-wide sell-out show Onstage Dating.
The 2026 Melbourne Fringe Festival takes place from 29 September to 18 October. For more information and full program, visit: www.melbournefringe.com.au for details.
Melbourne Fringe Festival will also hold an Encore season in Ballarat from 22 – 25 October, featuring regional-exclusive events alongside a selection of popular shows from the 2026 metro Melbourne season.
Images: Adore Händel – photo by Bri Hammond | Am I Who? X 2 – photo by Matthew Doherty | Ben Noble – photo by Noah Martin | Will Skarpona – photo by Nick Simpson-Deeks | Campervan – photo by Bec Petraitis | art direction by Geraldine Quinn | Leisa Prowd and Emma J. Hawkins – photo by Darren Gill | Mass Hysteria – photo by Georgia Moloney | Marilyn Leder (supplied) | Gregory Nussen – photo by Sonya Katerina | Rhomboid – photo by George Jefford – edit by Anna Piper Scott | Stories from the Waiting Room – photo by Matthew Gleeson | The Enormous Radio – photo by Sarah Walker | Matt Bell (supplied) | Zoe Knighton, Robbie Melville and Richard Piper – photo by Agatha Yim | Zak Vasiliou – photo by Nick Robertson (NickMickPics) | Bron Batten – photo by Theresa Harrison Photography