It may be Virginia Gay’s first go-round as Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s artistic director, but it’s far from her first rodeo. ‘Oh, I’ve been a fan since long before I got this incredible job. I’ve done so many shows here. The winter festivals, and in particular the Cabaret Festival, are glorious: that feeling of it’s cold outside but inside it’s warm, it’s welcoming, it’s sparkling. It’s champagne and sass and mischief and sex, this feeling of the Festival Centre closing its arms around you and telling you “you don’t have to go home”’. It’s plain to see that Gay is thrilled to have landed the role, after earning her stripes across a varied career, including TV acting, playwriting, creating her own cabarets and a finalist spot on Dancing With The Stars.

‘I didn’t know there could be anything more exciting than performing,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know that standing in front of a whiteboard and thinking about the ways you could craft an evening for a whole group of disparate people and scratch a lot of itches and direct people’s attention, taking them from an incredible headliner into a perfect late-night, dirtier, scrappier show, could be so thrilling.’ Billed as the biggest cabaret festival in the world, it naturally comes with a glossy website; Gay’s video intros to each show make booking a delightful rabbit hole, while her carefully curated packages lead the audience through a suggested evening of three shows, one after the other. ‘That’s the point of a winter festival: you don’t want to go anywhere else, it’s cold and wet outside, let us give you everything you could possibly want here and let us take all the stress out of choosing!’

So what should audiences expect from this extravaganza? ‘There’s a high emphasis on incredible musical comedy and some scrappy fabulous upstarts; you know, what’s the next generation of cabaret doing?’ But there are plenty of legends to explore too: it’s pleasing to see Patti Lupone and Fascinating Aïda sitting alongside the likes of Mel & Sam. ‘What I want to do is see how broad we can make the church of cabaret, how elastic we can make the walls, how much can we include? So we’ve got these legends alongside things like Murder For Two, a whodunnit madcap two-hander. Bent Burlesque has circus elements, so you get incredible singing with bodies being extraordinary. It’s Fascinating Aïda’s 40th anniversary, 40 years of these incredible women being at the vanguard of satirical song, still selling out the Albert Hall in the UK. That’s impressive.’

We need stories more than ever; something about the way the best cabaret hides the stories in the sequins fascinates audiences. It’s a highly political art form, but as Gay says, ‘if you’re lectured, you get more shut-in in your views. The best cabaret tickles and delights, so you take the armour off and hear these stories that are perhaps outside your experience. It’s a way of opening doors through joy and sass.’

Gay’s enthusiasm for all the acts visiting Adelaide is so infectious that it seems unfair to ask her to name-check her dream line-up, almost like asking her to choose her favourite children. Instead, she responds: ‘I’ll tell you about my dream audience. They’re front-footed, curious and flexible. Don’t get me wrong, I love people who book ahead. But I’m excited by the possibility of being in a foyer and somebody going, “if you love this thing, you will love the next thing that’s happening in 20 minutes; get a drink and go there”’.

Gay continues: ‘Cabaret is such an immediate and intimate artform; feelings pour out into the foyer and there’s no distinction between performer and audience. That’s the thing that sets this festival apart, the way the audience is so much part of the vibe. The audience turn up in their glad rags, in their beautiful sequin coats over their thermals, they drink champagne like it’s water, and they’re still there at 3am sitting in a late-night bar, singing until their voices go hoarse. We’re a community in all our sparkling otherness. And it’s glorious.’

Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Adelaide Festival Centre, Kaurna Country, Friday 7–Saturday 22 June; Virginia Gay hosts The 2024 Variety Gala, Adelaide Festival Centre, Kaurna Country, Friday 7 June; main picture: Claudio Raschella.