Mama Alto's internationally acclaimed show Transcendent will put down roots for three nights at Melbourne Recital Centre later this month.
Mama Alto shares a deep, dialogic connection with her audience.
“The repertoire I work with in these cabaret and torch-singing genres is inextricably and vitally tied to the audience’s own lives, stories, and emotions,” says the acclaimed Melbourne-based jazz singer and cabaret artiste.
Mama Alto: Transcendent
- Primrose Potter Salon @ Melbourne Recital Centre
- Thursday 29, Friday 30, Saturday 31 January
- Tickets here
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Mama Alto will be back in front of her hometown crowd for three nights this month, bringing Transcendent to Melbourne Recital Centre as part of Midsumma Festival. Mama Alto, who self-identifies as a “gender transcendent diva”, recalls some wise words she once received from another great diva about the relationship between artist and audience.
“Mary Wilson of The Supremes told me that without your audience, you are nothing,” she says. “Not only their support, but the idea that they co-create the meaning of the work with you.”
Mama Alto had the privilege of seeing Wilson perform several times before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee passed away in 2021. “She was incredible in that all throughout her career, she would wait in the theatre lobby and talk with every single person who lined up to meet her, often for hours,” says Mama Alto. “I don’t have quite the same post-show stamina as she did, but I immensely admire it and try to emulate it.”
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Mama Alto has been performing Transcendent for a couple of years now. The show won Best Cabaret/Concert/Solo Performance at the 2024 BroadwayWorld Australia – Melbourne Awards, and it was recently nominated for Best Debut at the 2025 BroadwayWorld New York Cabaret Awards.
“The shiny nature of award nominations and recognition is always lovely, legitimising and affirming,” says Mama Alto. Though, she adds, the “relationship of art and artist to awards is a complex one.”
For Mama Alto, like Wilson before her, it’s the audience that matters most.
“The kind of songs I gravitate towards have an emotional depth or intensity that can open up people’s hearts and minds,” says Mama Alto. “Post-show, people will often share beautiful and vulnerable stories about what the songs mean to them, or about their lives. That’s part of the wonder of cabaret, and of the arts: human expression begets human connection.”
Transcendent was originally created for Mama Alto’s debut at New York City venue Joe’s Pub in 2024. Performing at the venue, which is regarded as one of the world’s best cabaret rooms, was “truly, a dream come true,” she says.
“For fifteen years now, I have watched some of the greatest cabaret performers strut, glide, prowl and shimmy on that revered and iconic stage,” Mama Alto says. “I go every time I am in New York, and for me, it was a dream club. A kind of peak to aspire to as a cabaret artiste.
“When the opportunity to perform my own show there came about – through the fabulous producers Linda and Alisa, and my work with one of their projects with queer theatre luminary Taylor Mac – it was almost incomprehensible.”
It’s nearly two years since Transcendent premiered at Joe’s Pub, and a full-length recording titled Live In New York: Mama Alto at Joe’s Pub is coming soon. The essence of the show has not changed since its premiere, but every performance is a different experience, says Mama Alto.
“The liveness in the room, of the overlapping intermingling relationships between artiste, pianist, material and audiences, shapes the work every time,” she says. “As a jazz singer and storyteller, the melodic and interpretive choices I make within the songs changes night to night. And the changes in the world and our understandings of ourselves evolve the art forward and deeper.”
Anyone heading along to see Transcendent at Melbourne Recital Centre can expect luscious jazz ballads, emotionally intense torch songs, old school glamour through a contemporary queer lens, and quite a bit of chaos. “In short: expect the unexpected, darlings,” Mama Alto says.
All of Mama Alto’s work is built on a deep reverence for the art form of cabaret, and carried out with a sense of responsibility to proudly represent her community.
“As a person of many margins – queer, trans, a mixed-race person of colour, a person living with disability – who has some level of platform by being an artist, there is always responsibility to community, to many communities,” she says.
“Cabaret, with its history of centring the margins, gave me a space to be truly, authentically, deeply myself, and to explore and celebrate all of that otherness. I hope that’s something my work also gives to others.”
Get your tickets to see Mama Alto’s Transcendent at Melbourne Recital Centre on 29, 30 or 31 January here.
This article was made in partnership with Melbourne Recital Centre.
