Casey Bennetto, writer of Australia’s most successful musical, Keating!, will sing us through some of his  major musical theatre influences and his history as a creator within Geelong’s favourite genre.

As well as receiving an enormous number of awards for Keating! (and getting the nod from the man himself), Casey also dramaturged Eddie Perfect’s Shane Warne: the Musical and
has been oft seen on ABCTV’s Spicks and Specks.

Part cabaret, part lecture, part hilarity – if you are interested in Musical Theatre – writing, watching or performing – you MUST come to this!!

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About the Artist

Born in 1969, Casey Bennetto spent his formative years amongst the fragrant meadows and blossoming malls of Greensborough, Melbourne. He made his way to university, procured a B.A. (Hons: English Lit) and, through his 20s, fulfilled his part of that social contract by being (variously) a proofreader, a copywriter, an I.T. specialist, lead singer in a band and – of course – unemployed. (The band was Melbourne group Skin, who garnered national commercial airplay for their 1994 EP, Waking Up With You.)

In 1999, as a pretext for a party with musician friends, Casey wrote an album’s worth of songs to be played live on the night by the assembled partygoers. The project was simply titled “the Drowsy Drivers”, and the songs (recorded in demo form and distributed to the invitees) dealt with intersection squeegee-wielders, the north/south inner-city Melbourne divide, the Big Banana and Indira Naidoo, amongst other equally urgent metropolitan issues. The recording made on the night itself (Drowsy Drivers Live!) could be charitably described as haphazard, but the songs continued to float around, augmented by a second Drowsy Drivers album in early 2002 (Operation Gettin’ Down).

Ben Harkin and Todd Macdonald, then heading up the Store Room Theatre in North Fitzroy, dragooned Casey into performing the Drowsy  Drivers songs with friends as a Melbourne International Comedy Festival show. “Northcote Country Soul” ended up being a 2002 MICF Best Newcomer winner, as well as winning a Green Room Award for Best Original Music in the Cabaret category.

In 2004, Casey decided that the next Drowsy Drivers MICF show would be a musical-theatre biography of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, and “KEATING!” premiered in late March 2005, produced by Catherine Woodfield. The show was completely sold out by the fifth performance. The MICF awarded it the Barry for Most Outstanding Show, along with the Age Critics’ Award and the Golden Gibbo; the Green Room gave it another Cabaret nod; the cast and crew met with Keating himself, and the show toured to the Sydney Opera House, the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the Brisbane Powerhouse and the Darwin Festival over 2005-06, meeting with ovewhelming response and garnering a 2006 Helpmann award for Best Original Score.

Casey took the show to Company B in Sydney for reworking and presentation as part of the Belvoir Street Theatre’s 2006 season. The expanded “KEATING!”, under the direction of Neil Armfield, premiered in November of that year and went on to tour Australia until August 2008, playing to over 250,000 people, as well as being broadcast live nationally on the ABC. The show won the 2007 Helpmann award for Best Musical.

In late 2008, Casey premiered a new project as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival: “A Largely Fanciful History Of The Spiegeltent”, starring Casey, Mike McLeish, Eddie Perfect, Scott Edgar, Aurora Kurth, Andrew McClelland and more. It received a wonderful response from audiences and critics. He followed it with “Evening”, a low-key cabaret celebration of the twilight’s highlights, which premiered at MICF 2009 and included several pieces co-authored (and co-performed) by the increasingly legendary composer Iain Grandage.

During the last few years, Casey has also served as dramaturge on Eddie’s “Shane Warne: The Musical” as well as making contributions to Company B’s “The Adventures Of Snugglepot And Cuddlepie” and Die Roten Punkte’s “Super Musikant” (and upcoming “Kunst Rock”). Recently, he has contributed writing to a forthcoming major film release, appeared as the narrator in the workshop version of “Tripod Vs The Dragon”, and written and performed a piece to close the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas gala at the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House.

Casey has hosted a regular show on 3CR, worked extensively as a composer, performer and engineer for PBS-FM, and written and recorded a series of songs for RRR’s Breakfasters, as well as making regular on-air appearances on that station as host, panelist and guest. He has made several appearances on 3LO: as a guest and co-host with Jon Faine on the latter’s “Conversation Hour”, in the nighttime with Derek Guille and on weekends with Alan Brough.

Casey has also made a number of appearances on ABCTV’s popular “Spicks And Specks” as guest, accompanist and performer, and has played originals in studio as part of the ABC’s Sunday Arts coverage.

He has toured internationally as a theatrical technician, stage manager, sound and lighting operator and lighting designer, and has scored several plays – from “Conquest Of The South Pole” to Ross Mueller’s acclaimed “Construction Of The Human Heart”.

Casey is currently writing and recording the score for the ABC comedy series “Lowdown”. In June of 2010, he essayed the role of ‘Tiger’ Brown in the Malthouse’s production of “The Threepenny Opera”.