‘Velvet Inferno’: A Night Of Groove, Glamour And Thrills

Glitter doesn’t so much fall from the ceiling of Velvet Inferno as detonate. This is disco with the safety off: sweat-soaked, splash-zone-adjacent, gloriously unbothered by subtlety. Seventy five minutes in and you’ll understand why the Studio 54 crowd never wanted to go home either.

The premise borrows its bones from that legendary New York nightclub, the one that let pop culture icons from Jagger to Jones dance shoulder to shoulder with nobody asking questions.

Director Craig Ilott transplants that free-for-all spirit into a fictional club called Velvet, where owner Country Mike (Brendan Maclean) spots a wide-eyed newcomer (KYE) and, with The Diva (Marcia Hines) presiding like a disco oracle, walks her through something resembling a coming-of-age arc.

That arc, if we’re honest, is more of a shrug. Don’t come expecting narrative meat. Our heroine mostly wanders the stage looking pleasantly bewildered until she finally plants her feet and belts out Chaka Khan’s ‘I’m Every Woman’. It’s thin, and the show knows it’s thin, but it never pretends otherwise, and there’s something almost charming about how little it cares.

Where it stops caring about story, it starts flexing on everything else. Duo Stardust, a Ukrainian roller-skating duo alone is worth the ticket: watching one performer swing by the ankles from another’s neck, balanced on a saucer of cardboard, is the kind of thing you don’t see in every circus-cabaret hybrid, and it lands like a gut punch of “how is that even possible.” Craig Reid, a hula hoop performer, cheeky and magnetic through a string of lightning costume changes, quietly runs away with the whole night. Hines is an effortless powerhouse, unbothered and commanding, while Maclean brings the mischief. The aerial work is polished but familiar, the kind of act you’ve likely seen if you’ve seen any cabaret show, though the tension does spike when Oleg Tartarynov makes a splash, literally.

The singing is strong but frequently swallowed by the backing track, which is the show’s one real technical stumble. Everything else compensates hard: the lighting design is a knockout, smoky spotlights that sculpt every performer into something cinematic, and the costumes are relentlessly, dazzlingly good, the sirens especially. Momentum wobbles in the middle stretch, building high then flattening rather than building toward anything, but the energy claws its way back before the night’s out.

This is a night out for the girls, for chosen family, for anyone bold enough to end up in the splash zone.  Walk in ready to be up on your feet, because you will be, whether you planned on it or not, for a glittery, gay, and genuinely good time.

Velvet Inferno is running till 13 September at Sydney Opera House.