[Pertinent Then and Now] The set is a quiet ghost of a fantasy. Cloth draped from driftwood billows outward, echoing a midnight nature. Several levels built from wood allow the actors to play into contexts of hierarchy and distance. Set designer John Verryt does well, matching the set to mythic histories. The Mooncake and the Kūmara, written by Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen […]
[West Side for Life] A whistle. The Jets gang lounge around like the they own the city. A beat. One starts clicking. The others join in. They get together and strut. On the lighter notes their arms and legs slide out for a balletic flourish. They stop in their tracks when members of the Sharks arrive. Whites versus Puerto Ricans […]
[Rock ‘n’ Roll Avengers] There’s a bit of scuttlebutt as to what happened when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins got together in Memphis at Sun Records on December 4, 1956 for an impromptu jam session (that, after years of legal wrangling, became an album in 1981). Cash is said to have only turned up for the […]
[Take me back to the Rainbow] Perhaps you, like I was, are skeptical about a musical making a plot entirely around advertising jingles. You resent the marketing inception, you loathe the Pavlovian ear-worms that had burrowed deeper and deeper during endless commercial breaks, the very sound of which will have you craving McDonalds for breakfast, or make you smash your […]
[Pop-up Globe 2017 Season] At Auckland’s Pop-up Globe, Shakespeare is enjoying a 400-year-old career resurgence. Shattering any lingering perceptions that Shakespeare might be elitist or alienating, this year 80,000 people have paid paying anywhere from $1 to stand as a ‘groundling’ in the yard, to $299 for a royal room at the side of the stage. The atmosphere in the […]
[Giving Auckland Something to Believe in] By the end of Eli Kent’s 3&1/2 hr epic Peer Gynt [recycled], we’ve crashed a wedding, attended a troll kink-party, seen the author give birth to a baby Henrik Ibsen, escaped from a spiritualist retreat, hung out with Milo Yiannopolous, given James Cameron a taste of his Titanic medicine, and confirmed that onions, like […]
[Still Stunted] Musicals have notoriously long gestation periods. It takes a lot of chutzpah, then, to think that you can create (and stage) a musical from scratch in one hundred days. Or is that hubris? But that’s the challenge The Other People team (writer/director Adam Spedding, composer Brayden Jeffrey, producer Hadley Taylor) set themselves, and the result, Schlunted, was first […]
[Auckland Fringe 2017: Auckland Needs You] As we head into the finals days of the 2017 Auckland Fringe, it’s weird to think that it almost didn’t happen. The Fringe has bumped along biannually since 2009, but after decoupling from Auckland Live support, its long-term survival has been precarious. After funding decisions did not go its way, late last year Fringe […]
[Into the Void] Theatre is a visual medium, I was reminded shortly after viewing Beth Kayes’ solo performance Once There Was a Woman. Its an observation more commonly applied to film, but if anything it’s more true for the stage. Theatre withholds as much as it shows, drawing magic not just from what we see, but from what is absent […]
[Let the Production Fit the Time] The clichéd criticism of Opera is that it is a form stuck in the past. I believe that in one major and urgent respect, Opera does indeed need to be dragged into the 21st Century. It is becoming increasingly clear that our own NZ Opera has a race problem. In their 2016 Auckland Arts Festival […]
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