Skyduck

Skyduck is subtitled as a Chinese Spy Comedy. Sounds fun? You bet. It’s on at Circa until the end of the week, so we popped along to see it.

Nicola was on ushing duties again, so we decided to dine in at Circa’s restaurant, where they do a mean dumpling with spicy sauce. Only they mixed up our order (how? It was two plates of dumplings!) and brought us steamed vegetables instead. So sorry, here, have the vegetables on the house, we’ll bring your dumplings in 10 minutes. Anyway, we felt much healthier after eating the free vegetables, and enjoyed our slightly delayed dumplings.

The show is written and performed by Sam Wang. Around half of it is in Chinese, but fortunately, there’s subtitles. This is all part of the multimedia experience of the show, which also includes visual effects, music, puppetry, and loads of other DIY theatrical effects. It basically documents the efforts of a team of Chinese spies (Yan and Chang, both played by Wang) to steal the code for a US flight simulator game in the 1990s. Opposing him are the American CIA agent Commander Kendrick, (voiced in a bad imitation of Donald Trump), and the leader of the Australian Air Force’s Aerobatics Display Team, all played by Wang. The performance is peppered with 90s music and references from Top Gun, The Matrix and Inception. He also showcases some extremely complex machinery that he’s built that perform multiple functions in the show. It’s all a jolly jape, so if you get the chance, give it a go!

Pascoe & Bracewell

Sounds like a detective duo, doesn’t it? But it’s not…

The New Zealand International Comedy Festival is well under way, and we’ve been partaking of its wares. International, you say? Well, yes, we have some visitors from beyond our shores, and we went to see one of these on our first excursion: Sara Pascoe, star of Out Of Her Mind and regular on the comedy quiz show circuit – QI, HIGNFY, Cats etc. She’s doing a show called Success Story.

She was performing at St James Theatre – a fairly sizeable venue, capacity c.1,500. With that many people going to the show, it was likely that all the local eateries would be jampacked, so I took the precaution of booking at Mr. Go’s. It was, predictably, full, but they’re pretty efficient there and we were quickly seated, orders taken, and food delivered in short order. As usual, we had the Korean chicken wings – still the best in Wellington! And a couple of other dishes.

Sara’s show is about her life, and how she came to be a comedian. At the beginning of the show she points out that she is pregnant – she thought she’d mention it straight away in case we thought she hadn’t noticed. She did expand on this towards the end of the show, but in between we had the delights of her first forays into television fame (failed at fourteen), and a repeat attempt a quarter century later (still forgot how to sing…”how can I make the same mistake twice?”). The show was quite short – it ran for 70 minutes without a break – but absolutely packed with not just the trappings of demi-fame, but also her more recent success at becoming a mother of a “suicidal chimpanzee” (her words, not mine).

That was Thursday. On Saturday we found ourselves – guess where? – yes, back at St James Theatre for a second round of comedy, this time from homegrown comedian Melanie Bracewell. She may not be as well-known as Sara Pascoe, but still managed to pack out the venue, and shared her delight at being able to do so – seeing people in the circle for the first time! As she recounted the first venue she played in Wellington, which had a capacity of 50, and wasn’t full. 

Her show is called Forget Me Not, as she doesn’t want to be forgotten. She recounted tales from her childhood and her psychotic older sister, and also about her new boyfriend, who suffered short-term memory loss for the first six months of her relationship. This proved a rich seam to mine for comedy gold. She also told us about her experiences as a Jacinda Ardern lookalike comedian, and during lockdown was booked by an Australian radio station. She hadn’t bothered with doing the voice, relying on appearances alone. But, hey, Kiwi accent, that’ll do. She also told us more about her family, including Cauliflower Granddad’s eye test, and people with too much time on their hands reviewing supermarket products.

All in all a good start to our comedic adventures, There’s more to come!