The latest Theatreview Weekly includes reviews of Carousel and Clothesline, Gloria’s Handbag, White Rabbit Red Rabbit, and The Twisted Hop Raw Comedy Competition.

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

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The latest Theatreview Weekly includes reviews of Carousel and Clothesline, Gloria’s Handbag, White Rabbit Red Rabbit, and The Twisted Hop Raw Comedy Competition.

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

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BATS Theatre (Out Of Site), Cnr Cuba & Dixon, Wellington - THIS RUGGED BEAUTY: The quest for authenticity and integrity

- reviewed by John Smythe

While Rachel Baker and Simon Haren play out the Judy and Dave story, Joel Baxendale and Claire O'Loughlin deconstruct and comment on the action, as academics might expose and interrogate a classic, or children might pull apart a toy, not only to see how it works but to display the components and the mechanics for the edification of others – in this case, us, their audience.

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The Basement, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland - CRUNCHY SILK: Chilled and thrilled
- reviewed by Candice Lewis

Jess Sayer’s Crunchy Silk is intriguing from the start; a curious name and eerie set have got me primed. The stage (Ben Anderson) is sparsely and effectively dressed with a mattress on the floor, a white crate containing crude homemade dolls, and walls draped in curtains or sheets of slashed fabric through which other swatches of coloured fabric are visible. Chopsticks and twigs hang from the ceiling, portents of something sinister, the shapes hinting at bones.

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Circa Two, Wellington - GLORIA’S HANDBAG: Handbag chock full of entertainment

- reviewed by Laurie Atkinson

Mozart’s The Magic Flute has been described as ‘the most fantastic mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous ever put on the stage’.

While Gloria’s Handbag, which contains arias from the opera, may not be in quite that league it certainly mixes the ridiculous with magic tricks, the future, an unhappy family and the very real predicaments of an elderly woman living alone.

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Court Theatre Pub Charity Studio, Christchurch - WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT: A game of power, control, threat, uncertainty and paranoia
- reviewed by Charlie Gates

When I expect a play or film is going to be explicitly political, I always feel slightly apprehensive. Like I'm about to be served broccoli, when what I really want is a chocolate bar. But White Rabbit, Red Rabbit defies expectations.

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Q Theatre, Rangatira, Auckland - ANGELS IN AMERICA – PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES: America Rediscovered

- reviewed by James Wenley

For his final offering as Artistic Director of Silo, Shane Bosher has given the people of Auckland Tony Kushner’s two-parter Angels in America. A play eight years older than the company Bosher has led for the last thirteen years, performed in a venue (next door to his old stomping ground) that didn’t exist when he first started, Bosher has been preparing the way for some time.

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Maidment, Auckland - PANIORA!: Impressively woven fusion yet to achieve cohesion
- reviewed by Grace Hoet

Like all good stories you have an idea, a spark that ignites and burns then erupts into a wildfire. What better story fodder could you ask for, than this of the hot-blooded Spaniard, Manuel José, who married five Maori women with whom the Paniora whanau was created!

Storyteller extraordinaire Briar Grace-Smith has taken a family history as her source of inspiration and run with it.

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Maidment, Auckland - PANIORA!: Play punctuated with colour, movement and class

- reviewed by Janet McAllister

As the exclamation promises, Paniora! is a spectacle: full of dance, dust and colour. Briar Grace-Smith's anticipated new play puts an often humorous, fairytale twist on the Maori family melodrama genre.

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Maidment, Auckland - PANIORA!: A complex story of cultural tensions, thwarted love and intergenerational expectations
- reviewed by Stephanie Johnson

It is refreshing to see a clever and humorous play that examines the collision of Maori tikanga with a culture other than Anglo-Saxon. In Briar Grace-Smith’s new Paniora! it is a Spaniard who came ashore and took a number of wives, so creating many contemporary descendents. Some of them have gathered for the dedication of a new wharenui.

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Q Theatre, Rangatira, Auckland - ANGELS IN AMERICA – PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES: A powerful, unequivocal and naked honesty
- reviewed by Frances Edmond

Attitudes towards homosexuality may have mellowed and AIDS become a more manageable disease, but Kushner’s portrayal of human frailty wrestling with the nature of love, of truth and of freedom is undimmed by the passage of time.

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Q Theatre, Rangatira, Auckland - ANGELS IN AMERICA – PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES: Dazzling mix of wit, tenderness

- reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton

Tony Kushner's vast portrait of Reagan's America revealed through the prism of Aids is filled with dazzling spectacle, razor-sharp humour and moments of intimate human tenderness.

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The Twisted Hop, 616 Ferry Rd., Woolston, Christchurch - THE TWISTED HOP RAW COMEDY COMPETITION: A wide array of talent
- reviewed by Matt Powell

Drawn from two previous heats, the seven finalists on display tonight represent a perfect storm of diversity: two women, a blind guy, a guy in a wheelchair, a young newcomer, an American, and a self-described "ethnic chameleon". And the comedy on offer, presented for the sake of fairness in random order, is accordingly variegated.

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Allen Hall Theatre, University of Otago, Dunedin - COLT: Multifocal choreography

- reviewed by Jonathan W. Marshall

Choreographically, the unlikely use of non-preferred body parts, or unusual, tangled configurations and pairings, certainly provides the most striking images within the piece. Head forward, balanced crazily on one leg, McGregor at one point looks like a cubist spider, her other leg folded awkwardly but somehow elegantly beneath and through the standing leg, before a sudden low drop pushes the feet apart as she sidles away. Adams sits cross-legged on the raised legs of another dancer lying prone beneath her on his back, in what could be a gesture of violent repression, or alternatively intensely pleasurable and liberating sadomasochistic play. Adams too is literally thrown by her partner just prior to this, a stiff rod to manipulate as he pleases. Also memorable is Reynaud’s opening section, focussed on the closed palms of his hands as he sinuously moves them in ripples against each other and about his body.

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Circa Two, Wellington - GLORIA’S HANDBAG: Well worth rummaging through

- reviewed by John Smythe

In the guise of a play about a 97 year-old woman spending up large on a handbag and resisting her son’s attempts to put her in a twilight home, Helen Moulder has, with her co-playwright and director Sue Rider, fabricated our possible future. From 2021 to 2037 technology, language, politics, education and value systems progress – if that’s the word – in fascinating ways, while other elements of humans being remain ever thus.

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Q Theatre, Rangatira, Auckland - ANGELS IN AMERICA – PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES: Part 1: Millennium Approaches
- reviewed by Johnny Givins

Bosher has masterminded a huge journey for his cast and support crew. The dramatic demands as well as the technical requirements are extraordinary. With only a week to get the production mounted in the proscenium arch layout of Q’s Rangatira theatre, they made a brave decision to cancel the preview performance on Friday night. The opening night then became the first real ‘run’ of this production.

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Court Theatre Pub Charity Studio, Christchurch - WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT: Charged with immediacy

- reviewed by Lindsay Clark

No director, no rehearsals for the solo actor who will read the playwright's words, no set apart from a chair, two glasses of water and a ladder ... but an interesting model of theatre-making which guarantees us a unique experience. A different actor will act as the intermediary between writer and audience for each performance and none will have advance understanding of the material.

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Kings & Queens, Performing Arts Centre, Dunedin - CAROUSEL AND CLOTHESLINE: Creating a space into one of limitless possibilities and dreams

- reviewed by Jonathan W. Marshall

What really distinguishes Vague de Cirque, apart from an extremely high level of proficiency, is the enormous good nature with which all the material is presented. Whilst not always going for laughs per se, the performers always seem to be beaming. This also gives great scope for more overt comic interjections, provided liberally by our hopelessly inept but ever confident, lanky M.C. Philippe Thibaudeau. The almost dangerous level of concentration and intensity which can accompany some circus and New Circus (some of the works of Australian company Acrobat spring to mind) is avoided, as is the tasteless kitsch styling and faux-artiness of the hugely over-rated Cirque de Soleil—let alone the cheap eroticism which this famous company repeatedly trades off.

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Mayfair Theatre, Dunedin - IN FLAGRANTE: Dance element outweighs burlesque

- reviewed by Hannah Molloy

The burlesque element is much less than the dance element for me though. The choreography allows the beautifully trained dancers to show their skill, and they really are lovely to watch. The dominatrix/submissive piece is easily the most beautiful and evocative and the one where the dancer seems to feel most in her own skin. It is dark and subdued but elegant as well. A sense of the power that can come from submission comes through very strongly – perhaps the only piece where I sensed the intent I have read so much about of this performance.

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The Anteroom, Dunedin - CIRCLE IN A BOX: Sleek sophistication and cartoon shoes

- reviewed by Anna Bate

This choreography demands a participatory spectatorship of self like no other that I have experienced in my years as a performance attendee. It is clearly here and now. Contemporary. It is acutely precise in its design and provokes an active thinking/feeling in and around social constructs of a theatrical nature.

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Fortune Theatre Studio, Dunedin - TAKE BACK THE HOOD: Grim, funny, brilliantly wicked

- reviewed by Terry MacTavish

Fairytales provide prodigiously fecund ground for theatre as well as psychoanalysis: not only do they originate deep in the darkest recesses of the human psyche, but they inform our childhood, from bedtime stories to carefully marketed Disney princesses. Some of us are still hopefully awaiting rescue by the handsome prince.

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Playmarket Online Bookshop, - 20 NEW ZEALAND PLAYWRIGHTS: The chroniclers, conscience, predictors, pretention-prickers and imagineers of our times

- reviewed by John Smythe

Yes, it’s true, New Zealand does have twenty living playwrights whose work has helped to create the multi-facetted gem that is New Zealand Theatre: Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis, Hone Kouka, Fiona Samuel, Dave Armstrong, Roger Hall, Briar Grace-Smith, Victor Roger, Greg McGee, Renée, Ken Duncum, Lynda Chanwai-Earle, Gary Henderson, Sarah Delahunty, Stuart Hoar, Lorae Parry, Angie Farrow, Carl Nixon, Toa Fraser, Jo Randerson.

In fact the editors of this splendid volume – Michelanne Forster and Vivienne Plumb – confess they were “spoiled for choice” ...

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BATS Theatre (Out Of Site), Cnr Cuba & Dixon, Wellington - I, MONSTER: Morphing and mutating between, man, monster and machine

- reviewed by Lyne Pringle

The images are strong; a mannequin in a white square with a string attached, a dancer gagged with a strip that says ‘fragile’ morphing into a red light actor gorging on a string of disconnection. “Getting the monster out, seeking beauty”.

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Community Gallery, 20 Princes St, Dunedin - THE WAY WE FALL: ... simply brilliant

- reviewed by Hannah Molloy

I came home and I tweeted about this show and then I went to sleep and I dreamt about it. I don’t usually do either of those things so, my advice is, if you can, go to the last performance of The Way We Fall tonight or else start a petition to have it come to a town near you.

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Fortune Theatre Studio, Dunedin - FINDING HEPHZIBAH: Sincerity, beauty, flashes of humour

- reviewed by Terry MacTavish

his is out of question the most enthusiastic, nay, enraptured audience I’ve seen at the Fringe so far, filling the Fortune Studio, buzzing excitedly before the show and leaping to their feet to applaud at the end.

The popular appeal of Finding Hephzibah might seem a little surprising for a devised feminist work uniting dance, dialogue, film and original music with the lofty aim of finding “redemption for the women of today” through uncovering the true essence of Shakespeare’s Juliet. The Hebrew name Hephzibah means “My delight is in her”, and creators Nadine Kemp and Claire Sara are touchingly determined to challenge the objectification and over-sexualisation of women; to see them instead as delightful and precious.

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Playhouse Theatre, Dunedin - CHERIE JACOBSON: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG CYNIC: The right mix of fond nostalgia and self-deprecation
- reviewed by Brenda Harwood

A girl's diary was often her best friend and non-judgemental confidant.

I no longer have a record of my childish scribblings, but Cherie Jacobson does – and she makes good use of them in her show Cherie Jacobson: The Diary of a Young Cynic.

Last night's opening performance in the cosy bar at Dunedin's Playhouse Theatre has the 20-strong audience chortling with delight, as Jacobson shares the unintentionally hilarious contents of two childhood diaries.

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Playhouse Theatre, Dunedin - THE RUBY LADY'S HAREM: A BOYLESQUE SHOWCASE: Bawdiness and gloriousness

- reviewed by Hannah Molloy

The Ruby Lady’s Advisor drew the show and its story together neatly and with quick wit and not too much respect for his audience or the occasional small technical glitch – they all seemed to be a choreographed part of his performance - and the audience lapped it up with bawdy encouragement.

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

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