What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox.
New York: Tens of thousands of Australians live in New York City and surrounds, many of whom work in the performing arts. They have come to chase a dream in the city where anything can happen.
On a recent Monday night, 150 theatre lovers, singers, actors and dancers, clad in tuxedos and gowns, packed into The Players club in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park to celebrate this eclectic community and raise money for this year’s Australian Theatre Festival NYC.
They also honoured three mainstays of the Australian arts scene in New York, including musical director and composer Carmel Dean, who last year received a Grammy nomination for best musical theatre album for her work on The Notebook.
Dean was the musical director for Broadway shows If/Then and American Idiot, and has written five musicals, including Well-Behaved Women, which has been performed in Sydney, London and New York.
She makes it look easy, but it isn’t. “Almost any other industry would have been more reliable, more steady and certainly more achievable in Australia,” said Dean, who first came to the US on a Fulbright scholarship in 2001.
“The fact is that this showbusiness thing is hard. We miss weddings, funerals – we even move across the planet, leaving behind our families, friends, our homeland and a pretty darn incredible quality of life.
“We live in tiny apartments, withstand freezing winters, we share the subway platforms with rats – all to achieve our musical theatre or theatre dreams.”
Hanne Larsen, who is by chance Dean’s cousin, was also celebrated at the Australian Theatre Festival gala. She established Downtown Dance Factory – “ostensibly as a way to get me a visa” – which has grown from 100 students in the basement of a gym to a dance school that teaches 1500 children a week.
Her success story was also one of struggle. Two years after moving to New York, she found herself divorced and raising four kids under the age of eight, with no visa or income in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
“But we’re Australians,” she said. “There’s something very Australian that kicks in during moments like that. We’re pretty good at getting on with things, and we’re pretty good at making things happen when we have to. The good thing is New York is a city that rewards that kind of spirit.”
Finally, the room honoured Ainsley Melham, a 34-year-old musical theatre star from Bathurst who journeyed all the way from Hi-5 to Broadway, where he has played Dwayne in Boop! The Musical and the title role in Aladdin. He said his dad still asks him: “How’s the boy from Bathurst?”
This is the seventh year of the Australian Theatre Festival, a non-profit established by actor Connor Delves and director Mark Barford to develop and celebrate artistry from their homeland.
Each year, they honour a new Australian play, with the winner receiving $US15,000 ($21,000), along with development opportunities and the option to present the work as part of their annual festival in New York in September.
This year’s program features a reading of the winning play, La Malattia by Danny Ball, and the premiere of Legends by Daniel Cullen, who is in New York on a Fulbright scholarship.
Fulbright scholars are well represented among the talent here, as is Perth. Both Delves and Barford are from Western Australia, as is Dean, while Melham trained at the prestigious Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
After 12 and 10 years in the city respectively, Delves and Barford consider themselves official New Yorkers. They say it’s an exciting time for Australians in the world’s theatre epicentre: case in point, this year’s gala sold out for the first time.
“There’s a real appetite for Australian stories and culture in New York, and that’s never been stronger,” Barford says.
“We’re not just attracting expats – it’s also the wider New York theatre-going community and industry professionals that are really investing in Australian talent.”
He adds: “Americans like to work with Australians. There’s a lot of feedback on that. We have a distinct quality that we bring to our work.”
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.