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Time Out
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Brisbane's biggest fireworks display is back with a show to rival Sydney's NYE
Last month, Australia's largest international art festival dropped its 2025 program, featuring more than 1,000 performances across 23 gloriously jam-packed days. Brisbane Festival will kick off with a serious bang on Saturday, September 6, as Riverfire lights up the skyline with the city's biggest and most beloved fireworks spectacular. Sparks will fly from bridges, barges and rooftops, painting the night sky in a kaleidoscopic display of colour and light. In a Queensland first, Riverfire 2025 will feature pyrotechnic drones illuminating the sky in 600 thrilling formations. Here's everything you need to know about Riverfire 2025, including the best viewing spots and pre-show entertainment. What is Riverfire Brisbane? A highlight on Queensland's cultural calendar since 1998, Riverfire has grown to become one of Australia's largest public events, attracting more than 500,000 people each year. Crowds flock to Brisbane's riverbanks, parks, bridges and rooftops to watch the explosive spectacle, with fireworks shooting from 17 firing locations, including two bridges, five barges and seven city rooftops. Riverfire 2025 is set to dazzle with more fireworks than ever before and a powerful synchronised soundtrack curated by acclaimed composer and sound designer Guy Webster, broadcast live on Triple M. For the first time in Queensland, this year's fireworks display will also feature a never-before-seen drone concept, with three specially-made pyrotechnic drones firing nearly 600 laser effects in various thrilling formations. When is Riverfire 2025? Brisbane Festival will kick off with a bang, with the launch of Riverfire on Saturday, September 6. The festivities will run through to September 27, featuring a smorgasbord of 1,000-plus performances, including 500 free events and 21 world premieres. What time is Riverfire 2025? The fireworks display officially starts at 7pm local time, but the fun begins earlier with live entertainment from 4pm. This includes loud and legendary aerial displays from Australian Defence Force aircraft. The pre-show entertainment will also feature a powerful dance and song performance by First Nations artists, Tribal Experiences. Where to watch Riverfire? If you want to be right in the heart of the action, South Bank Parklands is the place to be. Gates to the free, fenced zone at South Bank open at 9am on September 6. Other popular viewing spots for Riverfire 2025 include: Mt Coot-tha Lookout – for one of Brisbane's highest vantage points Kangaroo Point Cliffs – for a panoramic experience over the Brisbane River The Star precinct – for close-up viewing from a multi-level venue City Botanic Gardens – for a pretty riverside setting Victoria Park/Barrambin – a family-friendly spot for a picnic Howard Smith Wharves – for a range of ticketed drinking and dining experiences, complete with roving entertainment and DJs, including Fiume Rooftop Bar, Felons Barrel Hall and Babylon Rooftop Is Riverfire on TV? Prefer to watch from the comfort of your couch? You can watch the fireworks display live on Channel Nine. If you're enjoying the show from a distant lookout, tune in to Triple M to enjoy the synchronised soundtrack. How much does Riverfire cost? Riverfire is a free event, but many of Brisbane's top hotels, bars and restaurants will offer ticketed experiences. You can find out more about Riverfire 2025 here. 🎊 🌳
Time Out
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Ed's Note: Hailed by Rolling Stone as 'the best rock musical ever', Hedwig and the Angry Inch is on now at Sydney's Carriageworks (you can buy tickets over here). Time Out critic Guy Webster reviewed the production last month when it was on at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre. Read on for his five-star review... ***** Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That's Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006. You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York's punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called 'the music of gay bashers', and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell's life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask's work with the SqueezeBox band. It's the closest I've come to calling a musical 'punk' without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago. This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place. We're somewhere in the Midwest waiting for Hedwig to start a 90-minute cabaret performance accompanied by her band, the Inch. The set (by Jeremy Allen) evokes an industrial warehouse and a dive-bar in one: think a simple circular rise centre stage with a staircase at the back furnished with cooly metallic scaffolds and exposed wire. And the costumes (designed by Nicol and Ford) cover the stellar cast – who also double as the on-stage band – in patchwork denim and glam rock glitter. For the uninitiated, the show might seem a little impenetrable at first. There's not much of a plot, really. It's a series of loosely connected anecdotes drawn from Hedwig's life that are both surreal and debaucherous. She's gorging on gummy bears in a ditch by the Berlin Wall, discovering Lou Reed while locked in an oven, or recounting her botched gender-affirming surgery in graphic detail. But it's not a cohesive storyline that propels Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It's vibes, and Hedwig herself. Seann Miley Moore is transcendent as our glamour goddess, achieving the perfect balance of taboo-flouting confidence, unpredictability and thinly-veiled fragility in between high kicks, soaring top notes and horny audience ad libs. As her husband, the retired drag queen Yitzhak, Adam Noviello offers a soulful counterpoint: brooding, pissy, stoic. Noviello's operatic vibrato and Moore's buttery tone combine beautifully to fill the Athenaeum Theatre to overflowing. The vibe, meanwhile, resembles that propulsive brand of chaos you find drunk at an impromptu four am drag show – all sweat, screams and in-cast fighting underscored to a pub-rock backbeat (and the occasionally eerie theremin from expert music director, Victoria Falconer). It is refreshing to see a show that avoids the trap many other revivals of queer theatrical classics fall into by leaning into its transgressiveness instead of a nostalgia-heavy approach that would relegate it to being a mere artefact of a recent past. Co-directors Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis have worked hard to faithfully replicate the show's underground origins for the mainstage, leaving its essential edge intact. We're clapping along to Hedwig's anthem for sugar daddies or watching a group of unsuspecting audience members don blonde wigs to join in on the chorus of 'Wig in a Box'. Even tropes like glitter bombs and balloon drops feel intimate in their immersiveness. Moore also never shies away from Hedwig's flaws, whether via her morally dubious actions or jarring ad libs. In a world as risk-adverse as mainstage musical theatre, her thornier characteristics – matched by equally unbridled design and direction – make for a show that feels authentic and even quietly radical. We talk a lot about the mainstreaming of queer culture these days. Look! There's a Pride flag shirt at Target, another off-shoot of Ru Paul's Drag Race, another green-lit Ryan Murphy series or another cop at Mardi Gras. We should be critical of connecting political progress with Absolut Vodka bottles covered in rainbow flags, or a floating shark decked out in Pride colours. But there hasn't been a rainbow-coloured corporate wave for Pride this year, or even a tepid ripple. Late last month J.K. Rowling created an organisation dedicated to offering legal funding designed to support transphobia. This week there's the possibility of a Pride march in Tel Aviv while Palestinians are murdered in line waiting for aid. SqueezeBox has been closed for years. I do not mean to imply that this production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is somehow politically radical or world changing. It's not going to force us marching into the streets to protest queer freedoms – to throw new 'bricks' in defence of new 'Stonewalls'. But it did have nearly 880 people laughing at Moore doing an impression of an owl as they treated Rowling's transphobia with all the ridiculousness it deserves. It did end with us leaping to our feet to applaud a cast of gender-diverse people telling a story of connection and identity that began more than thirty years ago in a small club somewhere on the margins. Where this production succeeds is in making us believe that Hedwig Schmidt would at least lead us outside and hand us a brick – and that we'd have cause, mixed with a healthy dose of punk-like anger, to throw it with her.
