Critique Cabaret runs 14 nights at C Venues this August. A Black feminist reimagining of the musical Cabaret, created and performed by Mandy Harris Williams. Co-produced by Family Affairs Studio and Ideals Inc.
I have been thinking a lot lately about Cabaret — the original with Liza Minelli and the Kit Kat Club — and the questions it asked of Weimar Berlin in the rise of Nazism. Do you stay or do you leave? Do you fight or do you party? Do you perform public coherence under power, or step out from under the demand to remain legible at all times?
I think these are the same questions our current moment is asking, again, on both sides of the Atlantic. And unsurprisingly I have a few things to say about it.
This August, Critique Cabaret opens at C Aquila Temple at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For fourteen nights at 7:25 PM, I will be the one onstage.
The show stages the contradictions I live every day: critique and spectacle, scholar and performer, sincere and satirical, and entirely exhausted by the demand to remain legible at all times. Glamour as the Trojan horse. Critical theory as the cargo.
I am bringing this work to Edinburgh in collaboration with Family Affairs Studio, with my longtime creative co-conspirator Michael R. Speciàle co-directing. Family Affairs is also producing Michael's Bottoming for Jesus in the same August. Two artists, two solo shows, two different gospels, with one production company building a slate.
Edinburgh is expensive. Fringe budgets do not care about who you are, and I refuse to make this work, or have my collaborators make it, for free. We are raising $14,000 from the community to bring this production to the festival in the shape it deserves. The page that follows shows you exactly where this money goes.
Here's what I'll say about Edinburgh: it is a refiner's fire and a launchpad. The work earns its next chapter in front of audiences I have not yet met. After August we have plans for an international tour and an extended life for the show via filmed adaptations, which are in the process of developing.
Thank you for being here. Thank you in advance for whatever you can give.
Phase 1 closed on June 15 — thank you to everyone who showed up. Phase 2 brings Critique Cabaret to $14,000 by July 31. That's what fully funds the marketing push, the team's housing in Edinburgh, and the final production support.
Curtain up · August 17.
Here's what your gift to CC goes toward across the production.
Every gift to Critique Cabaret is acknowledged. Every gift puts your name on the supporter wall and in the production program. The five levels below come with stacking perks. Larger contributions follow further down the page.
Every dollar helps the slate.
A small piece of the campaign in the mail.
A signed Edinburgh poster, digital now and printed later.
A Critique Cabaret shirt, plus everything in Champion.
A handwritten postcard from Edinburgh and personal dispatches all month.
Considering $1,000 or more for CC? Skip ahead to Co-Producer partnerships, which carry program credits and deeper access to the work.
Card payment processed securely by Stripe. Apple Pay and Google Pay supported. You stay on this page.
Minimum gift is $5. Tier perks begin at the $25 Supporter level.
Family Affairs Studio is an LLC, not a 501(c)(3). Gifts here are not tax-deductible. For larger contributions seeking tax-deductible treatment, fiscal sponsorship may be available. Email us to discuss.
Your gift just landed. We'll send a receipt to your inbox in the next minute, and your name will appear on the supporter wall as soon as the page refreshes.
If you opted in, we'll be in touch with Edinburgh dispatches over the summer.
Does glamour offer refuge for the beleaguered intellectual, or is it a trojan horse for delivering critical theory?
Critical theory transformed into cabaret glamour by Mandy Harris Williams. Oration, original music, dance and projected video collide in a show about attention, survival and the cost of being politically coherent in public.
Originally commissioned by Performance Space New York. Co-produced by Family Affairs Studio and Ideals Inc.
Photography by Annie Forrest from the Performance Space New York commission
Mandy Harris Williams is a theorist, multimedia conceptual artist, writer, and educator. Harlem-born and Los Angeles–based, she holds a BA from Harvard in the History of the African Diaspora and an MA in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount, and spent seven years as a Kindergarten and first-grade teacher in low-income communities before turning fully to her artistic practice.
Under the name @idealblackfemale, her work interrogates digital culture, Blackness, beauty politics, and the cost of intellectual labor in the attention economy. Her #BrownUpYourFeed project, founded in 2018, now runs as a monthly hour on NTS Radio. She has exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery, MOCA Geffen, Performance Space New York, and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Named to the Dazed 100, Cultured Young Artists, and the HuffPost Culture Shifters. Critique Cabaret was commissioned by PSNY and premiered at the Keith Haring Theater in December 2025.
Fair question. Only about $4,000 of the Critique Cabaret budget is actually in the bank right now — silent investor support already received and in-kind donations like flights. The rest is contingent on box office at C Venues, studio consulting revenue still being booked, silent investor support that arrives in stages, and Ideals Inc.'s share.
Community support is the part that lets us pay artists fully, market Critique Cabaret properly, and arrive in Edinburgh ready instead of scraping by. It is not the marginal dollar of a successful campaign. It's the difference between making the run work and making it work well.
The pie chart above has the breakdown. Roughly a quarter of the $35,000 Critique Cabaret budget pays the creative team: Mandy, Michael, Jeremiah, and Zach. That works out to about $725 per artist per week across six weeks of pre-production, rehearsal, and performance. That's below standard union rates, and we won't cut it further.
About a fifth goes to marketing and PR. Lisa Baker Associates, our London-based publicist, is securing pre-August features and culture press traction, which is what generates the reviews we'll need once the show is running. Another fifth covers production and tech: lighting (Zach Blane), sound, projection, stage management. Venue fees at C Venues, travel and housing in Edinburgh, per diem, music licensing, insurance, and a small contingency buffer make up the rest.
We value transparency. The category percentages and totals come straight from our production spreadsheet.
Edinburgh has gotten more expensive, and the dollar has gotten weaker. Every transaction in Scotland costs us more this year than it would have two years ago, before inflation hit British venue fees, housing, and freight, and before the pound strengthened against the dollar. The exchange rate alone has added thousands to the budget compared to earlier projections.
We are also intentionally not running this on free labor. A month of work onstage, with another in rehearsal beforehand, deserves to be paid. The budget reflects what it actually takes to produce a world-class solo show at the largest performing arts festival in the world.
The show still goes on. Critique Cabaret at C aquila Temple is confirmed and contracted. What changes is how much we have to compromise on the way in. Less marketing budget means smaller audiences. Less per-diem means a more strained team. More reliance on credit means a longer recovery on the other side.
Your gift is what determines whether we arrive in Edinburgh in shape or scraping by.
Not as a direct gift through this page. Family Affairs Studio is a working LLC, not a 501(c)(3). For larger contributions seeking tax-deductible treatment, we work with a fiscal sponsor and can structure the gift accordingly. Email hi@familyaffairs.studio and we'll walk through your options.
Yes. Stripe accepts cards from most countries. For Zelle, wire transfer, check, or larger international gifts, email hi@familyaffairs.studio and we'll arrange the right path.
Gifts of $1,000 and above unlock Co-Producer credits, deeper access to the work, and, for the higher tiers, a real seat at the table on what Family Affairs Studio makes next. These conversations happen by email so we can structure the support cleanly. Zelle, wire, or check also keeps the ~3% Stripe fee in the production.
For Co-Producer commitments we work directly with you to structure the gift, including a co-producer investment instrument with backend revenue participation if that's the conversation you want to have. Email hi@familyaffairs.studio and we'll take it from there.
The studio is the longer story. Monthly membership gives you access to Family Affairs Studio's creative life: productions in development, members-only events at LINT, votes on the Artist Production Fund slate, and an active role in shaping what gets made.