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The Show of the Year

When

Event Status

It’s back, by popular demand! Join us for a fresh instalment of our new annual tradition: The Show of the Year.

With a stellar line-up of talent, we’ll hold a mirror to the highlights, lowlights, shocks and surprises of 2014, in storytelling and song.

Planes disappeared and plummeted from the sky. Australia became the first country in the world to repeal a carbon tax. Adam Goodes was Australian of the Year, and Peter Cosgrove became Governor General. We lost Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Japan’s Antarctic whaling program was ruled unscientific. Clive Palmer teamed up with Al Gore. Delta’s bad dancing went viral, and Justin Bieber and Orlando Bloom had a punch-up. Ian Thorpe came out. Perennial bachelor George Clooney married international human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin.

We marked 100 years since World War I started, and US-Russia relations reached a post-Cold War low. 276 girls and women were abducted from a school in Nigeria. Fighting re-ignited in Gaza. The Ebola virus erupted in west Africa, and the Heartbleed bug threatened internet security. Germany won the World Cup, and Brazil was resoundingly trashed. And it was the UN International Year of Farming and Crystallography.

Host-with-the-most Casey Bennetto will be joined by some of Australia’s favourite entertainers and writers, including Josh Earl, Hannah Kent, Helen Razer, Crikey’s Bernard Keane, Gillian Cosgriff, Karl Kruszelnicki, Zahra Newman, Zoe Daniel, Die Roten Punkte, Lior, Omar Musa and Monica Weightman.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the show – delivered in slices of song, stories and slam poetry – as we farewell the year in high style.

Featuring

Karl Kruszelnicki

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney. He is a qualified medical doctor, engineer, physicist and mathematician. This MasterGeek consistently appears on the list of the Top 15 Most Trusted Australians, and was recently named one of Australia’s National ... Read more

Zoe Daniel

Zoe Daniel is a three-time foreign correspondent, former ABC U.S. Bureau chief, Southeast Asia and Africa correspondent. Her book Greetings from Trumpland was released in March 2021. Zoe Daniel is an ABC journalist and presenter. She was the ABC’s South East Asia correspondent from 2009 to 2013 ... Read more

Monica Weightman

Monica Weightman is a musician and Murri woman. She grew up in Townsville, influenced by her Islander father Ray but with the musical genes of her Scottish-English-Italian mother. Although she never really associated with the large Torres Strait Islander community in Townsville, she said she had mor... Read more

Josh Earl

Josh Earl is a comedian with a very weird family. His latest show for children is called My Family is Weider Than Your Family. And believe us, he’s not lying.

Lior Attar

Lior Attar, better known simply as Lior, is an independent Israeli-Australian singer-songwriter based in Melbourne. His first album, Autumn Flow, was recorded and released independently, to critical acclaim. His other albums include Corner of an Endless Road, Compassion and Scattered Reflections. ... Read more

Zahra Newman

A 2008 graduate from the VCA, Zahra was most recently seen onstage in The Government Inspector (Malthouse/Belvoir). Prior to that she appeared in the Australian premiere of The Mountaintop (MTC), The Cherry Orchard (MTC) and Menagerie (Daniel Schlusser Ensemble) as part of the inaugural MTC Neon Fes... Read more

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent’s debut novel, Burial Rites (2013), was translated into over thirty languages and won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, and the Victorian Premier’s People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Pri... Read more

Gillian Cosgriff

Gillian Cosgriff is a singer, songwriter, pianist and performer. After graduating from WAAPA in 2010 with a Bachelor of Music Theatre, Gillian wrote her debut show, Waitressing…And Other Things I Do Well, which played to sellout crowds in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. She also recorde... Read more

Omar Musa

Omar Musa is a Malaysian-Australian rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He is the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam. His first book is Here Come the Dogs. He has released three hip-hop albums, two poetry books (including Parang), appeared on ABC’s... Read more

Die Roten Punkte

Astrid and Otto are Die Roten Punkte (The Red Dots). Orphaned as kids when Astrid was 12 and Otto was 9, the brother and sister duo found shelter in a Berlin squat and never looked back. A Die Roten Punkte gig is a wild, rock‘n’roll cabaret ride, full of hilarious, truly catchy and award-winning... Read more

Casey Bennetto

Casey Bennetto is an award-winning writer, musician and radio broadcaster. He wrote the musical KEATING!, hosts the program Superfluity on Melbourne’s 3RRR, and has appeared in places as diverse as ABCTV’s Spicks and Specks, the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Festival of Dangerous... Read more

Helen Razer

Helen Razer was a broadcaster and is now a writer. Her appointments in radio were at the Triple J national network and ABC Melbourne. Her books include A Short History of Stupid, co-authored with national affairs correspondent Bernard Keane, a 2015 work on the history of bad Western thought shortlis... Read more

Bernard Keane

Bernard has been Crikey’s correspondent in Canberra since 2008; he writes on politics, media and economics. He was educated at the University of Sydney, where he studied history. Before joining Crikey he was a public servant, and worked in transport policy and as a speechwriter before moving into ... Read more

Location

Athenaeum Theatre

188 Collins Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.