AUSTRALIAN musical comedian, actor and writer Sarah Gaul grew up in Muswellbrook, but she’s lived in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.
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The 28-year-old arrived in Newcastle, which she now calls home, in June of 2018, after a year of performing cabaret comedy across New York City.
Her plan for New York was simple: work her day job, (something she’s always done to support her creative endeavors) and to perform like crazy in the evenings.
“I made a big list of open mics in New York; they are everywhere, over 10 or 20 happening each night. Some of them are music, karaoke or comedy,” Gaul says.
“I’d do one to six shows per week. Sometimes two shows a night.”
She has many stories about her adventures while in New York, and the skills she gained stateside are helping her take Newcastle’s comedy scene by storm.
“Once you’ve played to a midnight crowd in Manhattan where everyone’ drunk, once you’ve done an open mic where no one is paying attention, once you’re the only woman in a line-up in 12 dudes telling rape jokes, you have to pull a crowd back from that,” Gaul says.
“At the end of the year I’m fearless because what could be harder as a performer than what I did over there?”
She hadn’t been back in Australia long before she caught the country’s attention.
In August she sang her hit “Cinderella” on Tonightly with Tom Ballard, and she started to get noticed in Newcastle after she performed at the Not Just For Laughs Comedy Festival at The Station in October.
She did 10 gigs in December, and her next big performance will be January 25 at the Happy Wombat for Big Dog Comedy’s second birthday.
Along with performing, Gaul recently acted in a feature film called Hot Mess which is scheduled to debut in Australia mid-year.
Written and directed by Australian screenwriter and director Lucy Coleman, the film first aired in 2018 at an international film festival in Seattle.
“In 2016 Lucy saw one of my shows, and she said she had this role in mind. We had coffee, and I read her script. It’s a semiautobiographical film about a woman in her 20s who has this meltdown and identity crisis,” Gaul says.
Gaul was keen and they filmed it in 2016 in Sydney. It was in postproduction for about 18 months.
I had this shitty keyboard in my bedroom; I went home every night and wrote songs with the purpose of making people laugh.
- Sarah Gaul
She could relate to her character in Hot Mess, and much of her music is inspired by her life experiences.
