“Reuben Kaye captivates you and holds your attention in a way few performers can for 110 minutes.”
Gary Nunn
4 Stars
Venue: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall (Sydney Festival)
Date: 16th Jan 2026
From the moment he struts out into the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House, through the audience, flirting as he makes his way up to the stage by getting people to unpeel his arm-length gloves with their teeth, Reuben Kaye captivates you and holds your attention in a way few performers can for 110 minutes.
Before he’d even clambered up onto the stage, grunting for effect – elegance meets reality – Kaye had made me belly laugh into a coughing fit and squeeze my fist in anticipation of a fun night of powerful song, comedy, storytelling and general gender-queer fuckery.
Part of the fun is the surprise – you never really know what he’ll say next, and, ever the master of the tone-switch, hilarity turns to poignancy and back again in the blink of an elongated eyelash. Sometimes, all he needs to do is flash that mischievous grin, and you’re an enthusiastic co-conspirator. Stories of his childhood bullies are interspersed with cum-jokes and deliciously puerile puns. He “serves cunt, whilst politely declining it.”
It was that shock-value that catapulted him to super-viral fame following a joke about Jesus deemed blasphemous on The Project, an incident he references here (along with his inspired casting and backstage high-jinx stories in Jesus Christ Superstar), and subject material classic to his shows. His sharp-tongue can satirise the hypocrisies of sanctimonious conservatism in a way that’s brutal yet entertaining – so this never becomes a rant.
This was my fourth time seeing Kaye – I’ve seen him in marquees at festivals in Adelaide, Edinburgh and Sydney previously – and he looks and sounds better than ever. He can reinvent a classic song like no other, and his voice punched a hole in the roof of the Opera House, with as much bold panache as his lipstick kiss stained its wall. Whilst clearly thrilled to be performing here, his feigned disrespect for the building’s interior – “a year 12 woodwork project” – is snort-worthy funny.
The lighting was superlative, framing him in iconic poses as each song ends, which he holds long enough to cement his legendary status as one of Australia’s best live performers. Impromptu is on-point – when someone dropped their phone, he asked if a piercing had fallen out because they “hadn’t kept up with their kegel exercises,” before the flustered audience member had even picked it up.
Only reason it isn’t five stars is because the sound was off. The live band – whilst superb – sometimes drowned out his spoken-word, and more than once I had to ask my increasingly exasperated plus one what the punchline was. We’re all hanging off his every word – we don’t want to miss a single one.
Shame this was one night only; a longer run could’ve ironed out the sound issues.
But catch him as artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June.
photos by Wendell Teodoro
Gary Nunn, Theatre Now
