A selection of reviews from Theatreview from the last week including: Private Lives, Tiny Spectacle / Shitty Lyricism, Precious Things, and Well Hung.
 
See more recent reviews at theatreview.org, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory.

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Basement Theatre, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - TINY SPECTACLE / SHITTY LYRICISM: Brazenly intellectual, expressionistic, blunt, emotionally rich and splendidly performed
- reviewed by Lexie Matheson

Tiny Spectacle/Shitty Lyricism is an evening of two short plays each written and directed by Joseph Harper. Honey comes first and is followed, after a 20 minute interval, by The Boy and the Bicycle. Both shows have been performed before but in Wellington so that doesn’t count.

This season is performed upstairs - at the Basement - which sums it all up. Really, it does.

There is an aura of sublime chaos about the evening which is both infectious and disarming.

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Q, Rangatira, Auckland - PRIVATE LIVES: My love-hate relationship with Silo’s Private Lives

- reviewed by James Wenley

Consider this plot: A newly remarried man about town books into a hotel room for his honeymoon only to discover that his ex-wife has booked the very next room for her own honeymoon. Will old sparks be reflamed? And what about their new partners? Hijinks and hilarity ensue.

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Torbay Community Hall, Auckland - PRECIOUS THINGS: Youth dancers achieve very high standards
- reviewed by Barbara Snook

The theme of Precious Things saw articles being placed on a table at the front of the stage as each item progressed, providing a link throughout the programme. The dance Precious, choreographed by Janine Parkes, was a highlight of the second half with the dancers moving fluidly through a series of trust motifs designed to demonstrate the fragility and preciousness of life itself. The ensemble work was strong and provided opportunities for the dancers to display their technical skills.

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Centrepoint, Palmerston North - WELL HUNG: Still edible if a little gamey
- reviewed by John Ross

This is cop-show/whodunnit as farce, and very farcical and amusing the action and the characters increasingly become. It gets hard for a reviewer to say much directly about the action without giving away its power to surprise. Let’s just say that in the shift from comedy towards farce, the play is reasonably successful in treading a fine line between plausible yet ridiculous human behaviour and utter absurdity...

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Downstage Theatre, Wellington - FLOWERS FROM MY MOTHER’S GARDEN: Harcourt family’s life history full of vibrancy

- reviewed by Ewen Coleman

Although it is fourteen years since Kate and Miranda Harcourt’s Flowers From My Mother’s Garden was first seen at the 1998 NZ International Arts Festival, the telling of their life stories has lost none of its impact.

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Q, Rangatira, Auckland - PRIVATE LIVES: Slick pastiche reboots Coward for modern audience
- reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton

Director Shane Bosher has created an emphatically contemporary interpretation of Private Lives, designed to introduce a new generation of theatre-goers to Noel Coward's scintillating wit and exquisite sense of structure.

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Circa One, Wellington - CLYBOURNE PARK: Exposing hypocrisy deliciously

- reviewed by John Smythe

Thanks largely to the Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago, with which Bruce Norris is associated as an actor and playwright, he saw seven of his plays produced over 14 years before going on to hit the jackpot with Clybourne Park. More often than not, that’s what it takes to grow excellent playwrights.

Director Ross Jolly scored the rights to it after it won the Olivier, Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard Best Play awards in 2010 and before it won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2011 and Tony Award for Best Play this year.

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Circa One, Wellington - CLYBOURNE PARK: True colours on show

- reviewed by Ewen Coleman

When creating his play Clybourne Park, currently playing at Circa, American writer Bruce Norris probably never realised how relevant his themes would be to New Zealand situations.

But the changing demographics of communities and the impact of this on the real estate of an area, which is at the heart of Norris’s play, have been issues within NZ for many decades and will no doubt resonate with Kiwi audiences.

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Centrepoint, Palmerston North - WELL HUNG: Retro cop caper a joyfully reconstructed jaunt
- reviewed by Richard Mays

Yes, even the cops got ever so slightly shaggy(!) under their dark blue custodian helmets in the early ’70s, with over-the-collar hair, sideburns and upper lip facial-fungus. And while Well Hung may look like a New Zealand slapstick stage take on the British and American Life On Mars TV series, this play by Robert Lord actually does come from ‘Mars’, making its stage debut at Wellington’s Downstage in 1974.

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Q Loft, 305 Queen St, Auckland - MICHAEL JAMES MANAIA: Compelling but nerve-racking
- reviewed by Janet McAllister

The music sets the tone for this excellent, troubling Taki Rua revival, even before all the audience has arrived. The melody is jaunty, but the lyrics jar with that bubbliness: "I don't know what to do / I feel so helpless." The sharp shadows of palisades in the gloom add to the foreboding – as does the deliberate ricketiness of Daniel Williams' intriguing set; later on, its rafts of sticks seem to threaten lone performer Te Kohe Tuhaka with impalement at every turn.

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BATS, Wellington - MUSIC AND ME: Raw edge in tale of four underdogs

- reviewed by Ewen Coleman

It’s not often that we get to see a theatre group from South Auckland performing in Wellington. Especially with a production about marginalised people from that area who, through music and friendship, are trying to make something of their existence.

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Q, Rangatira, Auckland - PRIVATE LIVES: Perfect mis-matching
- reviewed by Melisa Martin

For a play about relationships, you buy a ticket, you take your seat, and you settle in for a couple of hours of relationship mayhem. But Silo’s season of the sparkling 1930’s Noel Coward comedy Private Lives, which opened last night at Auckland’s Q Theatre, is so much more than a play about relationships.

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Downstage Theatre, Wellington - FLOWERS FROM MY MOTHER’S GARDEN: A wonderfully rewarding sharing of experience

- reviewed by John Smythe

So this is Stuart distilling and scripting Miranda’s quest to tell Kate’s story from her earliest memory until around the time Miranda left home; when the daughter’s ‘finding herself’ in Australia echoed her mother’s young adult adventures in Britain, where she’d gone by boat to learn singing.

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Maidment, Auckland - LEN LYE THE OPERA: Story, music, visuals and colour merge to inform, entertain and move
- reviewed by Robbie Ellis

The opera is structured as a biopic, tracing the life of Len Lye (1901-1980) from formative childhood experiences to an old age recap: “his life passing in front of his eyes,” as the programme book puts it. Across such a vast time scale, forming a cohesive narrative will always be difficult, but this production succeeds in this regard.

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Maidment, Auckland - LEN LYE THE OPERA: Stimulating work deserves longer life
- reviewed by William Dart

Ten years in the making, with a full house on opening night, Len Lye the Opera was an arresting piece of musical theatre.

A clever libretto by Roger Horrocks pretty much nailed the maverick Kiwi art hero and Eve de Castro-Robinson laced it with stylish, zesty music.

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Q Loft, 305 Queen St, Auckland - MICHAEL JAMES MANAIA: Homage to a Maori Theatrical Classic
- reviewed by Tamati Patuwai

The restaging of John Broughton’s deeply influential Maori play, which opened last night in Auckland at Q Theatre’s Loft, remains packed with forceful dramatic power as Vietnam war veteran ‘Mr Manaia’ unveils his turbulent and disastrous life before us.

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BATS, Wellington - MUSIC AND ME: Great potential undercut by avoidable technical elements
- reviewed by Uther Dean

Music and Me is, at its best, a refreshingly gritty look at what life is like for the forgotten and down-trodden in South Auckland that crackles with witty one-liners. It is sad, however, that in a production strewn with tragedy, the greatest tragedy is how little it is at its best.

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See more recent reviews at theatreview.org.nz, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory

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