Australia’s Top Cabaret Talent Get Together to Foster Emerging Performers

The leading lights of the Australian cabaret scene are banding together over the next 3 months to help emerging cabaret artists find their voice in a ground-breaking new online course. 

The brain child of Australian musical theatre and cabaret star, Queenie van de Zandt, and produced by the Australian Musical Theatre Academy (AMTA), this innovative 12-week online course, will see 30 emerging cabaret performers working with the who’s who of the Australian cabaret scene to write, perform and produce their own cabaret shows.

“Cabaret is having a post-pandemic resurgence” says Queenie. “Cabaret shows have traditionally small casts, small budgets and audiences are already socially distanced, sitting spread out at tables, so it makes the perfect post-pandemic offering. At the same time, thousands of performing artists are out of work and, more than ever, are having to create their own livelihoods. So, I thought I’d get some mates together and help the next generation of cabaret performers find their voice and tell their stories”.

Opera Diva and former artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Ali McGregor, International Queen of Cabaret, Trevor Ashley and Gender Transcendent Diva, Mama Alto, are only 3 of the 16 prominent cabaret artists who will be sharing their knowledge in specialty masterclasses with the participants. 

Because cabaret is such a diverse and open artform, the course is open to  performers from any genre of live performance - singers, circus and variety performers, musicians, stand-up comedians, singer/songwriters, poets, performance artists, magicians, burlesque performers, and drag artists, will all find themselves reflected in the diversity of the tutors.

Alongside touring her own award-winning cabaret shows, Queenie has been teaching cabaret skills for nearly 20 years and many of her former students now regularly perform on the comedy and cabaret circuits.  One such student is award-winning comedian Bridie Connell, who attended Queenie’s 2-week cabaret course, The Cabaret Winter Workshop, back in 2015 and out of it wrote her first cabaret. It was subsequently chosen to perform at the Sydney Comedy Festival and led to Bridie becoming one of Australia’s hottest up and coming comedians. “I couldn’t have done it without the amazing support and knowledge I gained from the Cabaret Winter Workshop,” says Bridie.

Enrolments for the Creating Cabaret Course close on Monday, April 19.   “I can’t wait to work with the next generation of diverse, innovative and enthralling cabaret artists and help make their voices heard” says Queenie.

Queenie van de Zandt is a multi-award-winning entertainer, educator and serenade(r), who has been writing, performing, and producing her own cabaret shows since 1988.  She has toured extensively throughout Australia and Internationally and has been nominated for numerous Helpmann, Sydney Theatre and Green Room awards for her performances, in addition to winning Glug, AussieTheatre.com and Broadway World (Sydney Theatre) Awards for her work.  Alongside her 30+ years as a performer, she runs the Australian Musical Theatre Academy, has taught at NIDA and VCA and over the past 20 years has garnered a reputation for being Australia’s leading teacher of audition technique for musical theatre and cabaret, with her students now populating the professional arts industry.

Australian Musical Theatre Academy Presents CREATING CABARET

Dates: April 20 – July 6, 2021.

Closing date for enrolments Monday, 19 April 2021.

For more information: go to www.amta.net.au or email: admin@amta.net.au