Multi-award-winning international cabaret performer Michelle Pearson returns to Perth this January to present her hit musical cabaret, Skinny, which makes its WA debut at Fringe World. Fresh from its off-Broadway debut in New York, a string of five-star reviews across UK festivals and the Edinburgh Fringe, and multiple award wins at Adelaide Fringe 2025, Skinny stands out as a must-see cabaret highlight in this year’s Fringe World lineup. Skinny will be playing at The Liberty Theatre from Wednesday, January 21, to Sunday, February 1, with tickets on sale now. Bec Weldon sat down with artist Michelle Pearson to hear all about the show.
Hi Michelle, thanks for joining us! You’re bringing your award-winning show Skinny to Fringe World 2026. What do you have in store for Perth audiences in this WA debut?
Perth audiences can expect a show that’s quite funny, fearless and unexpectedly tender. But for music lovers it’s very rewarding, as we use popular songs to tell the story. It’s very much driven by music. I’m a singer first and foremost, and I would say it’s what I do best.
Skinny is a musical cabaret with an incredible four-piece band, but beneath the sparkle, it’s an honest unpacking of how deeply diet culture and body shame shape our lives. It’s raw, yes—but it’s also uplifting, relatable and deeply moving. My hope is that people leave feeling seen and heard and have more of an understanding of how diet culture and body-shame impact so many people.
Your show challenges society’s absurd and dangerous obsession with thinness and diet culture and is rooted in your deeply personal lived experiences. Tell us about the journey of creating the show!
Skinny came from a place of exhaustion—I was tired of spending my life negotiating my body, my worth and my space in the world. I started writing it from a hospital bed after a slight surgical nightmare—because of something I did in my early twenties to be skinnier!—and to make sense of my own history with dieting and constantly wanting to be thinner. What surprised me was how universal those experiences were. The more personal I got, the more the show opened up into something collective. It’s become a real movement!
Having performed Skinny in venues around the world, how has the act of repeatedly performing the show and reliving its emotional themes affected your relationship to your own experiences?
Performing it repeatedly has been strangely healing. The stories don’t lose their power, but they do lose their sting. Each performance reframes those experiences, and they become something I own, rather than something that owns me and causes shame. And hearing audiences laugh, cry or nod in recognition reminds me that none of this happened in isolation.
How do you find that performance headspace to tackle those experiences and share those stories on stage each night?
There’s a lot of care around the show. I am very close to my band, my producer and my creative team, and everyone treats the subject matter with the utmost respect. In all honesty, sometimes it’s terrifying, but I remind myself why I’m telling these stories. Once I’m on stage, the audience holds me—it becomes a shared space rather than a scary one. Cabaret is brilliant like that: it allows honesty, humour and entertainment to sit side by side.
This is a cabaret show with a live band. How did you approach curating music for the show and finding those pieces that really amplified your messages and storytelling?
Some of the song choices were in my head from the very beginning—for example, the song Cold As Ice by Foreigner would play in my head whenever I thought of the surgeon I had dealt with. It’s like my brain had assigned it to him as his official theme song.
I also had a lot of help from my MD, Aaron Nash, who would suggest songs to amplify my story, and I feel that audiences greatly connect with the music because it covers so many different musical genres, such as rock, pop and R&B.
You’ve previously spoken about your hope that audiences will relate to Skinny and your story. How have you generally found audience reactions to the show?
It’s deeply affirming. As artists, we’re often encouraged to smooth our edges, and Skinny is the opposite of that. To take something once steeped in shame and turn it into connection feels incredibly powerful. Sharing it internationally reminds me that these pressures don’t stop at borders. The audience reaction has been overwhelmingly generous. People come up afterwards and say, “I thought it was just me.”
Were there any particular responses that surprised you?
Aaron, my MD and key player, also plays the role of the surgeon, and when we performed it in New York, I found that he would get booed a lot. NY audiences really hated his character (not him as a person), and that just shows how well he did as an actor—we weren’t quite expecting that.
We were also surprised by how many men connect to the story. Diet culture might target women most aggressively, but body shame touches everyone. I’ve had men tell me the show unlocked things they’d never felt able to talk about before.
In a society that values and promotes unhealthy beauty ideals, what messages do you hope audiences take away from the show?
In a society that profits from our insecurities, I hope audiences walk away questioning the stories they’ve been sold about their bodies. I want people to leave knowing that worth isn’t something to be earned through discipline, deprivation or shrinking themselves.
More than anything, I hope the show encourages gentleness, with ourselves and with each other—and helps make space for a future where difference is celebrated: in our bodies, our cultures and our abilities.
Skinny will be playing at The Liberty Theatre from Wednesday, January 21, to Sunday, February 1, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from fringeworld.com.au
