Adelaide Festival Centre’s 2016 program

Kicking off the New Year will be Club Swizzle, a sassy show from the creators of La Soireé that offers a “melee of outrageous cabaret, air-defying acrobatics and infectious musical revelry’” according to the Adelaide Festival Centre program. Imitating the atmosphere of a speakeasy meshed with a circus, Club Swizzle is bound to be an extravagant and dynamic entertainment experience. Premiering in Australia for the first time in January is GHOST The Musical, based on the Oscar-winning film of the same name. Director Matthew Warchus (Matilda The Musical) and a leading international creative team will be bringing the renowned love story to Adelaide, accompanied by impressive special effects and featuring the iconic Righteous Brothers’ track, Unchained Melody. In association with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the Adelaide Festival Centre will present a spectacular homage to The Beatles in a celebration of the songs that captivated a generation. Vocalists Jack Jones, Ciarin Gribbin, Darren Percival and Jackson Thomas alongside a rock band and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra will perform thirty Beatles classics. 2016’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts will see an inventive exploration of the complexity of living ecosystems through dance in Habitus, created by Garry Stewart and presented by the Australian Dance Theatre. Also as a part of the Festival of the Arts, Zephyr Quartet’s Exquisite Corpse will bring a musical version of the Surrealist game to the stage, represented by a large-scale composition of musical fragments from composers around the world. Accompanied by live projected art created by Luku Kukuku and Jo Kerlogue, the performance is set to be “surreal, quirky, extreme, vital and surprisingly beautiful”, according to the Adelaide Festival Centre program. Other highlights in the 2016 program include a collaboration between The Brodsky Quartet and Katie Noonan, who will be performing specially commissioned works by Australian composers including Carl Vine, David Hirschfelder, Andrew Ford, Elena Kats Chernin, and more. The Australian Ballet will present an enchanting rendition of Swan Lake, while the Spare Puppets Theatre Company will bring Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s timeless classic The Little Prince to the stage. 2016 will also see exciting iterations of the well-loved Adelaide Cabaret Festival and Adelaide International Guitar Festival, featuring acts such as Tom Burlinson performing Frank Sinatra to the sounds of a big band and acclaimed jazz group Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio. A high point at the Festival Centre will be OzAsia Festival, which will be celebrating its 10th birthday in September. To mark the occasion, the Moon Lantern Festival will be revamped, contributing to what is set to be the biggest variant of OzAsia yet.  adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au