New Zealand Fringe Festival Launches Its 2025 Programme In Celebration Of Its 35th Year!

Wellington, NZ – The New Zealand Fringe Festival returns in 2025 for a milestone event — the celebration of its 35th year! On Thursday 12 December the festival launches the monumental full programme for its upcoming season. Since its humble beginnings in 1990, the NZ Fringe Festival has grown into an incubator for talent — granting creative space and freedom for both emerging and established artists to showcase their work; providing international artists a uniquely Aotearoa Fringe Festival experience; and contributing to the arts scene by giving new and veteran audiences alike a chance to witness The Birthplace of Brilliance.

From 14 February – 8 March 2025, NZ Fringe Festival events will be taking over the Greater Wellington region. In the three-week season, 170+ events will be open to the public ranging from whānau-friendly showcases, interactive outdoor spectacles, racy burlesque shows, moving theatre and dance pieces, chortle-inducing comedy shows, and so much more. Take your pick from the extensive range of genres, styles, ticket prices, free events, and venues! There’s plenty to go around. Tickets will be available on Thursday evening for the 2025 season on the NZ Fringe website (tickets.fringe.co.nz)

Director of NZ Fringe Festival, Vanessa Stacey, says, “For 35 years New Zealand Fringe has been a hotbed of innovation, creation and emerging talent. Giving birth to many of our most notable artists both in Aotearoa and around the world. We are so excited to share our 35th-anniversary edition of the largest open-access, multi-disciplinary arts festival in New Zealand for your entertainment and so you can say, you saw it here first, at the Birthplace of Brilliance!”

This year, NZ Fringe 2025 sees some huge names, some returning to the festival, and others gracing its stages for the first time. Dunedin Tour Ready Award winner, Nicola Brown joins the festival in Pōneke thanks to support from the NZ Fringe Touring Fund. Brown’s solo show, the comically innovative Space Invaders has earned her Auckland Fringe Festival 2024 — Outstanding Comedy Award, Auckland Fringe TAHI Festival 2024 — Outstanding Solo Performance Award, Dunedin Fringe Festival 2024 — Auckland Fringe Tour-Ready Award, and Dunedin Comedy 2021 — Best Storyteller Award. After returning from five years overseas, Brown is taking Aotearoa by storm! From Australia comes Gendermess Productions with their award-loaded Cabaret/”Drag-u-mentary” Messy Friends. Experience the magical costumes by Ginava, and the dynamically rich storytelling that led to sell-out seasons at Adelaide World Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe in both 2023 and 2024. Messy Friends subsequently won Adelaide Fringe 2024 Best Cabaret, and Weekly Best Cabaret awards, along with Fringe World 2022 — Best Show Award, and Weekly Cabaret and Variety Award, and Weekly Perth Now Critics Choice Award 2022, and a nomination for Binge Fringe 2022 — Best Queer Performance of ED Fringe Award.

Winner of Creative New Zealand’s Most Promising Pasifika Artist of NZ Fringe 2024, LJ Crichton returns with his personal exploration piece, Master of None: Brown Fala, after participating in the 2024 festival’s Best in Fringe award winning show, Show do Café. This will be the live performance of Crichton’s debut album, offering an authentic, heartfelt look into Samoan identity through original music, movement, and storytelling. Much loved Wellington musician Tom Knowles, who performed his whānau-friendly set at CubaDupa 2024 on the Ngā Toi o Te Aro stage, joins the Fringe fold in 2025, with an inventive piece titled CAR-A-OKE! For a koha entry fee, you and your friends can be transported to a late night, rave style, mobile, karaoke party in a van!

Coming to Aotearoa from Hong Kong is Huen Sze Man Suzanne of Taiwan, with her show Dance with Dementia. The story encapsulates her mother’s depression and dementia diagnoses in a poignant theatre piece.. From the United States comes the Young and Wise Theatre Co. with their show THE KIDS MIGHT DIE (a tale told by an idiot). After winning the San Diego Tour Ready Award, this Macbeth re-imagination is all geared up for the Pōneke stage and ready to fight their way to the top!

Thanks to the wide variety of genres and styles in NZ Fringe, the festival also welcomes a range of talented musicians to the 2025 programme. Acclaimed Indie and R&B artist Deva Mahal will be joining NZ Fringe 2025 to close the festival with a night of masterful songwriting and breathtaking vocal talent at Hannah Playhouse. With just under 50K monthly listeners on Spotify, this Hawaiian-born talent has sky-rocketed in her career. Since discovering her voice after moving to Aotearoa, Mahal has performed at prestigious venues and events such as Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, Bonnaroo, Later with Jools Holland, Civic Theatre, TSB Arena, Womad NZ, Splore, Big Day Out, Montreal Jazz Festival, SXSW Festival (named as the “#1 Best New Band at SXSW 2018”), Byron Bay Blues Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival, and London Jazz Festival.

Composer and Saxophonist Louisa Williamson will also be bringing her adapted composition The Chasm Where We Fall Into Each Other to the NZ Fringe stage. Williamson has established her spot on the national and international stage through her own composition pieces, as well as live and recorded performances with notable local names such as L.A.B., Trinity Roots, Dawn Diver, Bret McKenzie Band, AJA, MĀ, Rob Ruha, Clear Path Ensemble, The Rodger Fox Big Band, Other Futures Big Band, Lord Echo and Louis Baker.

More notable names appearing at NZ Fringe 2025 are: Duncan Greive, Founder of The Spinoff, with The Spinoff Live: The Fold, a live-recorded podcast panel show at Hannah Playhouse; Maria Williams, Best Newcomer at NZ International Comedy Fest 2019 (WLG) & 2021 (AKL) and one-third of the Williams comedian family, with Anxiety… The Musical!?; Iris Little, musician, 2024 APRA Silver Scrolls performer, and CubaDupa 2024 performer, with their album release show Iris Little – The Nature Project; Hugo Grrrl, House of Drag season one winner, creator of Naked Girls Reading and The Pun Battle, hits the stage this year with the whānau-friendly Hugo’s Rainbow Show; and Sachie Mikawa, composer, sound designer, award-winning theatre maker and much loved character, with Egg.

NZ Fringe events will be hosted at over 40 performance spaces across the Greater Wellington Region in 2025. Events will return to some of the top theatre venues in Pōneke such as the Hannah Playhouse, BATS Theatre, Te Auaha, Circa Theatre, The Gryphon Theatre (FATG), and the Fringe Bar. NZ Fringe will also take over innovative locales for whānau-friendly events, such as Zealandia, Innermost Gardens, the Wellington Waterfront and Campbell Park, Paekākāriki.

Backed by its small, but passionately dedicated team, NZ Fringe could not be the festival that it is today without the mahi from the artists involved, as well as the key festival partners: Wellington City Council, Creative New Zealand, Inject Design, NZME/The Hits, the Lion Foundation, and Resene.

New Zealand Fringe Festival’s 35th year, 2025 programme will be live on their website and via printed copies available throughout Pōneke. The festival opens 14 February and runs until 8 March across Wellington venues. See the myriad of remarkable shows on offer at the Birthplace of Brilliance by booking your tickets now at tickets.fringe.co.nz.

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