Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 02 July
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
New York, we love you … but you’re bringing us down with your sloppy pizza slices, your stinky subway and your surplus of models, moguls and movie stars.
Sure, you've got your world-class art museums. And, yes, we know, you're the birthplace of hip-hop. And okay, okay, you've got Broadway and bagels and Beyoncé. Congratulations on the High Line. But can you really be top of the list, king of the hill, A Number One when you're overrun with wild squirrels?
As part of MEL&NYC – a city-wide cultural festival celebrating all things New York and Melbourne – we’re staging a night of storytelling from some favourite Melburnians who don’t heart NY. They'll talk fantasy, failure and false starts. They'll share horror stories of gridlocked traffic, closet-sized apartments and dumpster-flavoured coffee.
Join them at the Athenaeum Theatre for hilarious tales of striving and surviving but not quite thriving in the city that never sleeps.
Featuring
Sami Shah
Sami Shah is a multi-award winning comedian, writer, and journalist. Sami is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism, and is the Ambassador-at-Large for PEN Melbourne.
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Dave Graney
Dave Graney started out IN the Moodists. Then there was Dave Graney ‘n’ the Coral Snakes. Then Dave Graney and the mistLY. Involved in the writing, production, recording, mixing and releasing of approximately 40 albums. Four books: It Is Written, Baby (1997); 1001 Australian Nights (2011); Workshy (2018) and There He Goes With His Eye Out – Lyrics 1980–2023 (2023). Presenter of Banana Lounge Broadcasting, a weekly show focused on contemporary Australian music on Melbourne’s Triple R FM since 2008.
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Brodie Lancaster
Brodie Lancaster is an author and essayist from Melbourne. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Vogue Australia, the Guardian and New York magazine. Her first book, the pop culture ...
Sally Seltmann
Sally Seltmann is an Australian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. She has released four solo albums and has toured internationally. Sally is the co-writer of the song '1234', performed by Feist, which became a Top 10 hit on the United States Hot 100. Sally previously released her music as New Buffalo and is a member of Seeker Lover Keeper with fellow Australians Sarah Blasko and Holly Throsby. Her debut novel is Lovesome, published in 2018 by Allen & Unwin.
Beverley Wang
Beverley Wang is the ABC’s National Culture Correspondent. As culture correspondent, Beverley merges years of experience in journalism and media with a deep knowledge of pop culture to share analysis across multiple ...
Kate Miller-Heidke
Kate Miller-Heidke is an award-winning singer-songwriter who traverses the worlds of contemporary pop, folk and opera.
She has released 4 studio albums in Australia, achieving multi-platinum status and appearing in the top 10 album and singles charts numerous times. Her most recent album O Vertigo! debuted at number 4 on the Australian album charts, broke Australian crowdfunding records and was nominated for an ARIA award. Her previous albums include Nightflight, which reached number 2 on the ARIA chart, and Curiouser, which reached double platinum sales in Australia and spawned the multi-platinum hits ‘Last Day On Earth’ and ‘Caught In The Crowd’. In 2009 she became the first Australian to win the grand prize in the International Songwriting Competition for ‘Caught in the Crowd’.
Trained as a classical singer at the Queensland Conservatorium, Kate has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer, and has performed several roles for the English National Opera. Her debut opera as a composer, The Rabbits (based on the book by Shaun Tan and John Marsden), was commissioned by Opera Australia and premiered at the Perth Festival in February 2015, followed by sold out seasons in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It won 4 Helpmann Awards including Best Score and Best New Australian Work. In 2015 Kate broke into national television, starring in The Divorce, a four-part ABC mini-series. Both The Rabbits and The Divorce were nominated for Best Soundtrack/Cast Recording at the 2016 ARIA Awards.
In 2016 Kate released the first retrospective of her work, The Best Of Kate Miller-Heidke: Act One, a two-disc set which, alongside tracks from early EPs, all four studio albums and various other singles, features the new song ‘You’ve Underestimated Me, Dude’ plus a bonus disc of rarities, covers, live versions, and previously unreleased material.
Kate performed a suite of her songs with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at Mona Foma 2016 in Hobart, with visuals created by artist Amy Gerhardt. The show won the Helpmann Award for Best Australian Contemporary Concert for 2016, and has since been performed in cities around Australia throughout 2017. Her 3 concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra were recorded and the resulting album, Live at the Sydney Opera House, was released in 2017.
With her collaborator Keir Nuttall, she has written the music and lyrics to Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical, which premiered at the Sydney Theatre Company in November 2017.
Kate is currently working on material for her 5th studio album.
Sarah Krasnostein
Sarah Krasnostein is a multi-award winning writer. She is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer , the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning and On Peter Carey. She holds a PhD in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in Australia and America. Her awards include the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Australian Book Industry Award for Non-Fiction and the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. Sarah is a regular contributor to The Monthly and The Saturday Paper.
Tina Del Twist
Truly unique, Tina Del Twist is Australia’s much-loved nightingale, known for her ‘beautiful voice and wicked sense of comic timing’ (the Age). With a voice as smooth as honey and a comedic wit that could shred brie, you’ll have a ball enjoying the talents of Tina Del Twist.
Tina Del Twist has featured on ABCTV’s Comedy Up Late, has performed sell-out seasons with Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Melbourne Cabaret Festival, Darwin Festival and has been invited to perform in Copenhagen, Berlin, Edinburgh, and New York. Tina has also performed with the Melba Spiegeltent playing a lead role in La Soiree. And then some.
'Fabulousness' - Age
'Super fabulous' - Herald Sun
'I must apologise for my overuse of the word "fabulous"' - Inpress
Christie Whelan Browne
Christie Whelan Browne is one of Australia’s most versatile stage and screen performers. An award- winning actress who has delighted audiences in shows as varied as A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum ...