It's Fringe Season!
Listen up Sydneysiders! Sydney Fringe Festival, the city’s largest independent arts festival, has announced its 2022 program highlights, with tickets now on sale. Fringe returns in 2022 for its first physical edition in two years with its largest and longest program to date, how exciting! You can expect over 500 events and over 2000 artists across over 50 venues and 9 festival hubs from 16 August – 30 September 2022. Newly announced highlights include dynamic theatre productions, a massive Fringe Kids program at Darling Quarter, award winning acts from Australia and New Zealand for the Touring Hub, and an incredible program of locally made work by leading Sydney based independent theatre-makers and artists.
If you have not seen the multi-award-winning queer-pop-cabaret spectacular YUMMY, this year they are in partnership with Darlinghurst Theatre Company and will bring their vibrant show incorporating drag, dance, circus, and burlesque to the Eternity Playhouse from 30 August – 4 September. This wild new show celebrates and subverts cultural icons, legends, and superstars.
Titanic: The Movie, The Play, presented by Act React at Australian National Maritime Museum from 14 September – 2 October, will see an immersive, interactive comedy performance for all ages. Known for their pop culture-inspired performances and site-specific comedy homages such as Speed: The Movie, The Play, Act React’s latest production pays homage to the most epic romance of the 90's.
The Touring Hub at the Seymour Centre in Darlington presents Fringe’s curated selection of 13 award winning acts from Australia and New Zealand from 1 – 25 September. Highlights include Little Dove Theatre Art's ground-breaking and touching live art work, Six Women Standing In Front Of A White Wall, investigating the objectification of women and the effect of touch or no touch on a human being; multi-award winning artist, musician and comedian Selina Jenkins’ performance BOOBS, following her life changing decision to undergo a mastectomy, marrying humour and heartbreak with cleverly written songs and thought-provoking anecdotes; and celebrated British Australian actor and comedian Damien Warren-Smith, with his alter-ego Garry Starr.
For Made in Sydney, Fringe has teamed up with Young Henrys and the Seymour Centre to support an exciting program of work by leading Sydney-based independent theatre-makers and artists. The program includes playwright Katie Pollock’s hilarious and powerful one-woman play Rough Trade, a thrilling examination of the ways capitalism and the patriarchy fail us, based on the burgeoning local Facebook page Rough Trade. Also featured is Not Today, Ally Morgan’s one-woman smash-hit cabaret show, and Introducing Aunty Jude, a funny and heartfelt exploration of women that do things differently through a mix of live music, clowning and the absurd.
This year Fringe Kids will see an expanded program taking over the Darling Quarter from 24 September - 2 October over the school holidays. Presented at ARA Darling Quarter Theatre, the exciting line-up of circus performances, street theatre and games include Sydney’s first Monski Mouse's Baby Disco Dance Hall, an international hit show for under-fives of high-energy dance, retro hits and remixed nursery rhymes, and the award-winning children’s entertainment group The Beanies as seen on ABC TV Kids live on stage. Closing out the festival Sydney Fringe are teaming up with Box of Birds for a live mixed reality transglobal dance party, streamed between Sydney and Mexico. Taking place at Australian National Maritime Museum on 1 October, the party will feature some of Sydney’s best underground electronic musicians, live exchanges with dancers in both Sydney and Mexico, interactive audio-visual installations, and aerial performance artists.
Tickets are now on sale for these headline events here. The full Fringe Festival program will be announced on 1 August 2022.