REVIEW: The Bitching Hour (Basement Theatre)

June 29, 2023

[Best Bitches] Carrie Rudzinski and Olivia Hall’s friendship has always been at the heart of their work. In The Bitching Hour it is front and centre, the glue that holds the show together. As soon as they enter, they launch into a poem about being bitches. It is bitching that brings them together – this fun, juicy, feminine-coded (oft degraded) […]

REVIEW: The Tempestuous (Basement Theatre)

June 15, 2023

[Promising Pastiche] Award-winning comedian Penny Ashton has once again delved into classic texts to present their tropes in a new light. A mash-up of Shakespeare’s plays and modern-day reality TV, The Tempestuous is a funny and clever romp. Replete with cross-dressing, disguises, bawdy jokes, puns, wordplay, and musical numbers, it is an excellently written script that Shakespeare himself would be […]

REVIEW: Cake Baby (Basement Theatre)

June 23, 2021

[Nobody puts Cake Baby in the corner: fatness, art, and representation] The Basement stage floor is littered, quite literally, with trash – empty take-out boxes, wrappers, and containers of food – directly contrasted by diaphanous pink material strung grandly from the centre of the ceiling. It is immediately intriguing and the audience seems to be in a good mood, warmed […]

REVIEW: Boom Shankar (Basement Theatre)

June 9, 2021

[Heaven & Hell walk into a bar…] In the six-ish years that I have reviewed shows at Basement Theatre, I have never found a formula for writing about them. Regardless of my opinion, it requires a completely different approach every single time. I do not like to lump different shows into categories, but one ‘genre’ I have noticed that keeps […]

REVIEW: 45 Cents an Hour (Basement Theatre)

June 4, 2021

[A Portrait of a New Zealand Artist as a Middle-Aged Man] How does it feel to be a struggling artist? What is the line between artistic integrity and corporate success? How do we know when it’s time to give up pursuing our passion? Dominic Hoey, in his new show 45 Cents an Hour at the Basement Theatre, explores his own […]

REVIEW: Fake News (The Actors’ Program)

November 6, 2020

‘Actors have it easy..?’ As the world waits with bated breath for the 2020 US election results, the Actors’ Program premieres Fake News at the Basement. Politically speaking, it is a long, arduous day in which Donald Trump – who uses the phrase ‘fake news’ with alarming regularity – declares he is President before votes have been counted. The night […]

REVIEW: Essays in Love (Basement Theatre)

March 14, 2020

[What the Heart Knows] I’ll admit it: I’m a hopeless romantic.  It’s a quality I share with Otto (Leon Wadham), the protagonist of Essays in Love, though we differ in our preferred outlets for romantic escapism: me, a never-ending catalogue of romantic comedies; Otto, the writings of history’s most erudite philosophers.  We first meet Otto before the house lights have […]

REVIEW: Year of the Tiger 虎- Hǔ (Basement Theatre)

March 13, 2020

[The Tiniest Threads Can Connect Us] Year of the Tiger (虎- Hǔ) brings together six volunteer strangers and pushes them into the spotlight. These strangers are connected by a single thread: their zodiac animal. Coming from different backgrounds, cultures, countries, these people are bound by the simple fact that they are all tigers. Alice Canton explores the cultural ideas of […]

REVIEW: A Frickin Dangerous Space-mas (Basement Theatre)

November 24, 2019

Spoofnik Written by comedy troupe Frickin Dangerous Bro (Pax Assadi, James Roque and Jamaine Ross) and directed by Jane Yonge, A Frickin Dangerous Space-mas chronicles the intrepid crew of the International Space Station as they prepare to celebrate Christmas and welcome the arrival of a new crew-mate, whilst warily awaiting the Captain’s (Sam Snedden) decision as to who will succeed him in his role. […]

REVIEW: An Organ of Soft Tissue (Basement Theatre)

November 6, 2019

[Continuing the #MeToo Conversation] Responding to the #MeToo movement, An Organ of Soft Tissue continues the conversation around perceptions of trauma, sexuality, and gender with an exploration of memory, identity, and sexual politics. At times this show cuts very close to home, the eyes of some audience members glittering with pain and recognition. A pre-show announcement has invited us to […]

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