La Ronde

A tent at the Adelaide Fringe, February 2025

La Ronde opened at the Adelaide Fringe in February 2025 in the Spiegeltent at the Garden of Unearthly Delights, playing nightly except Mondays until 23 March. A critic who saw it on 28 February described about 90 minutes plus a 15-minute interval: Gigi McFarlane singing and holding the room, Sergiy Mishchurenko on flying pole, Sam Goodburn on freestyle unicycle, Diana Bondarenko on pyramid trapeze, Adam Malone balancing head-down on a Washington trapeze, Felipe Reyes across hand balancing, aerial straps and a mouth hang, and an aerialist billed as Polina, a Guinness World Record holder, hanging by her hair. Costumes were red and heavily sequinned, the soundtrack ran to weighty cover versions of familiar songs, and the audience was pulled into the action more than once.

The company's own tally of that debut has shifted with the press releases. Announcing the Sydney transfer in May 2025, Strut & Fret claimed 14 five-star reviews from the first season; by March 2026 the count had been restated as 26 reviews and 11 five-star notices out of the Fringe run. Either way the show moved fast afterwards — by March 2026 the producers were counting five Australian cities in twelve months and more than 15 separate acts cycled through the bill.

The company behind it

La Ronde is produced by Strut & Fret, the Australian company responsible for Blanc de Blanc and LIMBO, and was conceived and directed by Scott Maidment. Melanie Hawkins choreographed the Sydney staging and Harry O'Meara designed its lighting. The producer on the show is Jess Copas, who pitched it before the Sydney opening as a carousel ride of sensations, intimate one moment and high-energy the next.

The structural difference from a touring show is that there is no fixed company. Copas has said plainly that the cast rotates constantly, and that the Sydney return season was assembled from highlights of each previous run, with several performers appearing in Australia for the first time. That keeps the bill fresh between visits to the same city, and it is also why the running order a viewer sees in Townsville will not be the one described in a review from Surry Hills eighteen months earlier. One Sydney critic treated that machinery as the show's limitation, noting it follows an established Strut & Fret format rather than extending it.

The acts that do the work

The spine of the show is a singer who also functions as host, with six or so specialists rotating through solo turns. In the Sydney company of October 2025 that was Geniris on vocals, Zoë Marshall on hair-hang, aerial and contortion, Adam Malone on hoops and an inverted trapeze routine with drag elements, Danik Abishev on balance and fire, Diana Bondarenko on pyramid trapeze in her Australian debut, Sergiy Mishchurenko on aerial pole and Sam Goodburn on comic balance and footwork.

By the Adelaide Fringe return in February 2026 the line-up had turned over again to seven performers drawn from Australia, Europe and Russia. The Barcelona-born singer Gigi carried the vocals, including a reading of I'm Coming Out and a finish perched on a large revolving mirrorball. Abishev stayed, balancing on top of a burning ladder. Jenny Zavadskaia, previously with Cirque du Soleil, worked aerial rope to a cover of It's A Man's World; Bondarenko again took the pyramid trapeze against industrial-rock rearrangements of familiar songs; LJ Marles from the UK handled suspended aerial work; and the Swedish physical comedian David Eriksson, an Olivier Award winner, supplied the prop comedy that breaks up the danger.

The pattern is consistent across seasons: two or three aerial disciplines, a hand-balancer or acrobat working at the edge of what is safe, a hair-hang, and a clown given enough room to land a proper routine rather than a filler bit between rigging changes.

Sydney turned a festival show into a residency

The step up came on 16 October 2025, when La Ronde began its first Sydney theatre residency at The Grand Electric in Surry Hills, a room that opened in 2023 and had at that point also carried Titanique past 300 performances. On 16 December 2025 the producers extended the booking through to 28 February 2026, which took a show built for a four-week Fringe slot to a four-and-a-half-month continuous run.

It then came back to the same venue from 26 March 2026 with a reassembled cast. Running a variety bill in a fixed theatre for that long is the real test of the rotating-company model, and it has so far held: the Sydney extension was announced on the strength of the first two months, and the March return was sold on a line-up of returning highlights rather than on anything new in the format.

Where it stands, autumn 2026

Between the two Sydney stints the show ran Spiegeltent seasons at the Adelaide Fringe, where it played to 22 March 2026, and in Hobart at Salamanca Wharf from 3 April to 10 May 2026, with tickets from $64 and performances at 7pm Tuesday to Friday, 5pm and 7.30pm on Saturdays and 5.30pm on Sundays.

Right now it is in Queensland for the first time. La Ronde runs 24 September to 11 October 2026 in the Aurora Spiegeltent at the North Australian Festival of Arts in Townsville, a booking announced with general tickets going on sale at 10am on 8 July 2026. NAFA creative director Anamari Goicoechea described it as the sort of show where the stage cannot be ignored, and Copas framed the booking as bringing the company's circus and cabaret roster into the Spiegeltent.

The bigger commitment follows immediately. Announced on 28 August 2026, La Ronde is the headline show of season two at Spiegel Haus Melbourne, the Chinatown rooftop precinct, opening in the Spiegeltent on 21 October 2026 and running through the summer — a Melbourne debut for the show and the longest block of dates currently on sale. Spiegel Haus also opens around it with Briefs: The Works and the return of Vaudeville Smash'd from 26 September, and is lined up to act as a hub venue for Midsumma and the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2027.

What the reviews say

Reaction splits along familiar lines for circus-cabaret. Michelle Sutton, writing for Theatre Travels on 24 October 2025, called the Sydney staging a captivating and dazzling piece of theatre and credited the small room with doing much of the work, keeping the performers close enough for the debauchery to register as personal rather than staged.

Cultural Binge, reviewing the same opening week, gave three and a half stars. That critic described spending 90 minutes with their head tilted back and their mouth open, picked out Goodburn's comedy as the standout, and flagged two reservations: the acoustics at The Grand Electric muddied Geniris's vocals, and the show does not advance the house formula. The Adelaide Fringe return drew five stars from The Upside News on 19 February 2026, which summed it up as dangerous and playful at the same time.

The consistent note across all of them is physical proximity. Nobody has praised the writing or the through-line, because there isn't one; what gets praised is the rigging, the timing and the fact that the nearest seat is within touching distance of a woman suspended by her hair.