Following a record-breaking, traffic-stopping, absolutely joyous festival in 2024, Melt Festival returns in 2025 to crank the fabulous factor up to eleven.
From Swarovski-studded cabaret icons to river flotillas, sweaty dance floors and hilariously gay PowerPoint nights, Brisbane’s annual festival of Queer arts and culture promises to be a city-wide celebration of internationally acclaimed artists, homegrown icons, sexy premieres and boundary-pushing brilliance. Here’s just a taste of what’s in store for Melt’s 2025 edition!
Get ready for the cultural climax of the year as fearless, sharp-witted and fabulous cabaret superstar, Reuben Kaye, unleashes the Queensland premiere of enGORGEd for Melt Festival 2025 at QPAC. Featuring Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra and musical direction by Shanon D Whitelock, this is Kaye’s most lavish, loud and liberated show yet.
Making its Melt debut, Ben Graetz’s (aka Miss Ellaneous) Miss First Nation drag pageant will catwalk into Brisbane, celebrating Blak excellence, creativity and culture with the most glamourous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander queens in the country. After state heats around the country, the grand finale will take centre stage at Melt, where the nation’s fiercest will battle it out for the crown. Expect jaw-dropping performances, powerful storytelling and cultural pride.
What does it mean to be “Australian” in 2025? New musical The Lucky Country tackles that question with wit, warmth and a touch of musical rebellion. Directed by Sonya Suares with music and lyrics by Vidya Makan, this genre-defying work confronts Australia’s cultural contradictions with honesty, heart and a rocking score. Get ready for a sharply observed, joyously unapologetic production that leaves no myth unexamined.
Iconic star of stage and screen Bernadette Peters returns for her first Australian performance in over a decade and a major cultural moment for theatre and music lovers alike! An Evening with Bernadette Peters will hit the Brisbane Convention Centre on Friday 24 October. Expect a glorious night of songs and stories from Peters’ incredible career, accompanied by Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra. Get your tickets HERE.
Last year Melt called on Australia’s LGBTQIA+ community and allies to get nude and 5500 people answered that call for Spencer Tunick’s monumental installation on the Story Bridge. This year Melt is asking you to get vocal! Round out your Melt experience with 1000 Voices, a major choral event uniting queer and ally choirs and solo singers in one monumental moment of song, spirit and solidarity – a love letter to community, courage and collective harmony. Goosebumps guaranteed.
Melt 2025 continues to push the envelope, bringing together explosive nightlife, emotionally resonant theatre and thought-provoking visual art. Hole-Mania 2.0 promises an unhinged, high-energy Queer wrestle-party at The Tivoli, hosted by Queer dance party icon Shandy and drag menace Gogo Bumhole. Meanwhile, horror meets high drag in Scream Queen at the Princess Theatre, a blood-curdling drag spectacular starring a killer lineup of global drag royalty including Naomi Smalls, Yvie Oddly, and Drag Race UK winner Kyran Thrax.
In theatre, the program cuts deep with works that reckon with identity, belonging and colonisation. Jordan Shea’s award-winning Malacañang Made Us at Queensland Theatre explores the Filipino-Australian diaspora with epic scale and emotional grit. Whitefella Yella Tree at La Boite Theatre is a luminous love story between two Aboriginal boys on the brink of invasion, a poetic and heartbreaking reflection on land and first love, while Gerwyn Davies new work Shimmer brings stunning, identity-focused photographic portraits to the Museum of Brisbane, made in collaboration with trans and gender-diverse young people at Open Doors Youth Service.
MELT 2025
Brisbane/Magandjin: 22 October – 9 November
TICKETS ON SALE FROM 10AM TODAY!
For more information, please visit:
melt.org.au
