Brand New Dress - Mardi Gras 2026

Brand New Dress

The Loading Dock

At Qtopia Sydney, Andy Freeborn’s “Brand New Dress” arrives as both confessional and quest narrative: a cabaret tracing their non-binary journey through a fantasy landscape of knights, kings and dragons. Dungeons & Dragons reveals itself as a kind of frame; it provides a dramaturgical scaffold for transformation - armour donned and shed, monsters named and battled, sovereignty reclaimed. It’s a clever metaphorical engine, even if not every quest lands with equal force.

Freeborn is, first and foremost, a formidable vocalist. The instrument is thrilling - elastic across registers, emotionally articulate, and capable of moving from crystalline musical-theatre lyricism to a rougher, confessional belt. Musically, the show leans unapologetically into Broadway idiom. I don’t claim scholarly fluency in the canon, but there are clear echoes of Stephen Sondheimand at times the lush, romantic sweep of Rufus Wainwright hovers in the melodic architecture - praise that is not lightly given. There is also a streak of theatrical bravura that suggests a future kinship with Tim Minchin: piano-led, intellectually agile, capable of holding a large audience in thrall.

Yet for all its musical sophistication, “Brand New Dress” is most compelling when it strips back. Freeborn’s earlier rock cabaret, “Everything is Sht! *”, earned attention for its unflinching excavation of family trauma and queer becoming; that same appetite for candour is present here. A graduate of the Australian Institute of Music (Music Theatre), Freeborn has also worked as a composer and musical director across independent productions, building a reputation as a multi-hyphenate creator rather than a singular performer. That breadth shows in the structural ambition of this work: motifs recur, narrative threads braid, and the dramaturgy strives for cohesion rather than mere anecdote.

A usual at Qtopia Sydney when the show relies on (thankfully few) recorded accompaniments the show flattens.  Without more time in the theatre the sound balance just isn’t achieved. For an artist of this calibre, the choice reads as pragmatic rather than aesthetic and it diminishes the immediacy the material deserves.

There is no denying the scale of the talent on display. Hailing from Adelaide, Freeborn feels destined for platforms beyond the black-box cabaret circuit - one imagines a future berth at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival as a serious musical storyteller. More than that, one can plausibly envisage them fronting an orchestra, piano centre-stage, commanding a festival house with the assurance of a seasoned auteur.

“Brand New Dress” is not a perfect work. It is, however, an urgent and generous one - a show that situates queer self-fashioning within epic narrative and insists that the act of putting on a dress can be as mythic as slaying a dragon.

The question is less whether Andy Freeborn has arrived than how expansively they will be allowed to grow. The raw materials - voice, intellect, theatrical instinct - are indisputably there.

Review by Kate Gaul