DAMIEN Bermingham is one of the busiest actor singers in Australian showbiz.

The winner of a Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actor in a musical, he’s toured in the Australasian tour of “Chicago”, appeared in the Australian premier production of “Xanadu”, voiced half the characters in the award-winning children’s animated series “Patch Pillows” and played both a drag queen and a mechanic in the “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” musical.

He’ll be back in his home town Canberra to perform a song from “Love Never Dies” at the 19th annual CATS gala on February 22 and he couldn’t be more pleased.

Bermingham, 37, “never went to NIDA or WAAPA”, but got his entire training in Canberra and looks back proudly on his 1999 CAT award for playing the dustman, Alfred Doolittle, in the Canberra Philharmonic production of “My Fair Lady”, directed by Tessa Bremner.

His success and his gameness is a tribute to Philo’s commitment at the time to hiring good professional directors.

Of course, he could always sing. A member of a big Canberra musical family, he took his sister Lucy along for an audition for “King Kong” last year and she ended up being invited to become assistant musical director on the coming Baz Luhrmann stage musical version of “Strictly Ballroom”, in which he also has a part as Merv, one of the over-the-top inhabitants of the dance studio.

19th Canberra Area Theatre Awards, the CATS, Llewellyn Hall, 7pm, February 22, inquiries to 0418 249658 or 6281 0250.