Murdered To Death

We haven’t been to Gryphon Theatre for what seems like ages…in fact the last time I was there was probably as a volunteer during the Fringe last year. The theatre is mainly used by Wellington Repertory Theatre and Stagecraft, both small theatrical companies. Murdered To Death is put on by WRT.

We decided to go for dinner at The Old Quarter beforehand, as they do a good range of Vietnamese dishes which can be mixed and matched. We had dumplings, salmon and prawn parcels, noodles and barbecued chicken. This time we’d taken the precaution of ordering drinks and making sure they’d actually arrived before ordering food – last time we were there our cocktails arrived halfway through the food service.

The theatre is a short walk away along Eva Street to Ghuznee Street, and we were there comfortably in time. There’s no allocated seating so there was a little bit of a scrum at the beginning as the show was sold out – indeed, I think it pretty well sold out for all of its short run.

The play is a pastiche, a lampoon of the country house murder whodunnit genre as popularised by Agatha Christie. Instead of a 1930s house, the setting has been updated to the 1980s, for no apparent reason other than to allow more modern costumes to be worn. Following the murder of the house’s owner, the assembled cast, who’ve arrived for a weekend house party, are variously exposed as having a motive for her murder. Acting Inspector Pratt arrives, with his trusty constable Thomkins, battling against the odds and his own incompetence to uncover the murderer. There’s a Miss Maple, a Frenchman, a colonel and a butler.

Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds, but it’s all good fun, the murderer is finally revealed (not by the clueless Pratt), and we can all cheer.

Belle: A Performance Of Air

This is a show which originally premiered in 2022, to an audience of 30 people, when New Zealand was in lockdown due to the omicron variant of Covid-19. It’s only now getting a release in a larger venue – St James Theatre. It’s part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts. We got tickets and went along.

It was an early 7:00pm start, so we decided to go for dinner at old favourite Mr. Go’s. As usual we had their Korean chicken wings, typhoon prawns and some pork dumplings. Excellent as ever.

St James Theatre is but a skip and a jump away across Taranaki Street and we were there well in time for the start. I activated the tickets on my Ticketbastard app, and…for the second time in two goes, they failed to scan. Ticketbastard have implemented this new technology where there are moving lines on the QR code, presumably to prevent fraud. It’s all very well installing this new technology, but it’s no use if the bloody thing doesn’t work! Anyway, the usher said “I’m sure it’s fine” and waved us in anyway, which is kinda what you’re not supposed to do.

We were near the front at the end of a row so didn’t have a full-on view of the stage. It did, unfortunately, mean we were right on the angle of some of the lighting effects, which somewhat blinded us. The premise of the show is that it fuses music, light, and dance with aerial acrobatics, using hoops, silk, ropes etc. There wasn’t as much of the aerial manoeuvres as I thought there would be, and it took about 15 minutes to even get going, really...which for a one-hour show is quite a lot. The accompanying music, some of it live, either vocal or violin, was very moody, occasionally straying into electronica. The lighting effects and hazing machine were such that what you saw was mostly shadows and silhouettes, with very few instances of the subjects being well lit. Whilst I’m sure this was intentional, it did mean that you couldn’t really see what was going on, for the most part. It felt to me that they had around half an hour’s worth of material, and they’d padded it out to one hour.

I think this one gets filed under “interesting”, and also under “don’t bother with again”.

An Unfunny Evening With Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin is back in town! It’s been a while since we last saw him – 2019, in fact – so of course we had to go and see him again. Tim Minchin’s appeal does appear to be a bit patchy…obviously, we’re fans, but when my barber asked what I was up to and I mentioned going to see him, he’d never heard of him. Similarly, when I bumped into a Zealandia colleague in town who enquired what we were going to see, again it was “who he?” Both of these are young persons, so maybe it’s a generational thang. As is saying “thang”.

 I’d wanted to go to Koji for dinner, but they had no availability so we ended up back at Rosella again, which we’d enjoyed last time we went there. There’s been no change, but we did manage to select some different menu items this time (although I still had oysters to start). Then it was a short walk  up Courtenay Place to St James Theatre for the show. 

Waiting for Timot

Tim Minchin is known for his humorous songs. As he explained at the beginning, he hadn’t set out to be a comedian, and had started out in a band with his brother, before becoming more comedy-based, and also taking up acting. So tonight’s show was not going to be his usual comedy routines and songs, but a selection of songs, old and new, with various levels of sincerity, pathos, and bathos…including some from his musicals, Matilda and Groundhog Day. Did you know he was responsible for those? He’s a man of many talents. He did warn us in advance about how sincere each song was, giving us a value on a scale of one to ten. So this was a set of unfunny songs, punctuated, as usual, by Tim’s musings and ramblings on any number of subjects, his acting career, the background to the songs, and anything that popped into his head, really.

On the poster and other publicity materials it does say that “artist may inadvertently amuse”. This is a lie. The amusement was definitely advertent. And amusing it was, too, as the evening ran on, finally ending up almost half an hour longer than the advertised run time. No, I’m not complaining. It was a great fun evening, and if it comes anywhere near you, you should go and see it.

Hutt Sounds

Hutt Sounds is an annual festival in its second year, held at Brewtown in Upper Hutt. Brewtown? What’s that? It’s like an industrial park…for breweries! The anchor brewery there is Panhead, who have established themselves in the Wellington area over the last few years; but there are other breweries, a gin distillery, and other related industries like, er, axe-throwing?

In their inaugural year, the line-up had a distinctly Antipodean feel to it, headlined by Aussie rockers Hoodoo Gurus, and supported by Mi-Sex and Stellar*, both kiwi bands of yesteryear; those are the ones you’ll have heard of, anyway. This year, however, the theme was definitely Eighties. This started with Kiwi band The Mockers, and The Choirboys. We didn’t really care about them. 

The event is held in an open field, with food and beverages available from the adjacent covered area. Despite the weather forecast two days out looking like it would be a washout, by the time we got to the day this had been revised to sunshine, and this is how it turned out. We’d taken the decision to skip the first three acts, and arrived just in time as Nik Kershaw kicked off his set. Arriving late has two distinct disadvantages: finding somewhere to park (we found a space a few hundred metres away), and then finding a place in the crowd…for this is not a festival for those young folk who can stand around for hours on end. No, this is a festival that you bring your camp chairs to; this is Dad Rock. The ground had been divided up into standing at the front, sitting on rugs next, then low-back chairs, and finally high-backed chairs at the back. These were set out in serried rows by the punters who’d been there all afternoon, and we had to try to find somewhere to squeeze in. We managed, though, and were soon sitting and listening to the strains of Nik Kershaw. He’d sensibly decided to leave all his new material at home, and just belted out the classics. He’s got more hits than you probably remember, not just The Riddle and Wouldn’t It Be Good. He also mixed in his pension plan (in case you don’t know, he wrote world-wide hit The One And Only, sung by Chesney Hawkes) and gave us a cover of Yazoo’s Only You.

Next on the list was Go West. Why were they higher up the set than Nik Kershaw? They’ve only had one hit! (We Close Our Eyes, in case you’ve forgotten). But it turns out that their album was a huge seller in New Zealand – triple platinum! OK, triple platinum in New Zealand is only 60,000 records (compare UK 900,000, US 3,000,000), and this is what justifies them being higher up the ranking. Meh. I only know one of their songs, and from the sound of them, that’s the only one worth knowing.

But what we were really there for was the headline act: The Human League. Yes, Phil Oakey and the girls (ha! Both in their sixties now), with a new band behind them playing the instruments. They cranked out all the hits you know and love. They also slipped in what I consider some of their more recent works – Tell Me When and One Man In My Heart (from 1995’s Octopus album - so recent!) and a cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Behind The Mask. After finishing their set with the inevitable Don’t You Want Me? They returned for an encore of what might be considered non-canon works – Being Boiled, from when the Human League included Martin Ware and Ian Marsh, who later left to form Heaven 17; and Together In Electric Dreams, which was Phil Oakey/Giorgio Moroder, from the film of the same name.

As the venue is in a residential district, I assume that there are regulations about late night activities. The gig ended early and we were heading for the exit at the prescribed finish time of 8:40.

 

  

Lads On The Island

Nicola is back on ushering duty at Circa again, and this month there’s an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Sounds fun!

Due to various time constraints, we’d had a big lunch at Arcimboldi – pizza and pasta – rather than trying to find somewhere to eat before afterwards, as the show started at 7:30 and lasted 75 minutes. Now that Field & Green have closed we have fewer good options for dining nearby. No matter, we satisfied ourselves with what was described as “bread and dips” off the snack menu, but actually turned out to be “bread and dip”. It was OK.

I’ve never seen or read The Tempest before, so I did a quick bit of swotting (Wikipedia) to get the gist of it. I needn’t have bothered: it’s not so much an adaptation, as a play loosely based on characters from the Tempest. There are three actors – the eponymous “lads”, Prospero and Ariel; and four female characters all played by Bronwyn Ensor: Prospero’s sister Miranda; Ariel’s boyfriend Sebastian; Prospero’s ex-girlfriend, Fern; and Ariel’s mother. Sycorax.

Shakespeare afficionados will have spotted that Miranda isn’t Prospero’s sister, and Fern doesn’t exist in the original. She is, however, the driving force of the plot, as it is Prospero’s breakup with her that is the cause of his angst. Prospero has magically bound his best friend Ariel to the island, and Ariel is trying to comfort him in the time-honoured way of all men, with beer, chips, and an acoustic guitar. Whilst the plot in no way follows Shakespeare, quotes from the play are liberally worked into the dialogue, in particular echoing the “thou liest” from the play with “I truthest”, repeated several times at different points. They also debate the relative merits of being Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson. It is the arrival of Ariel’s mother that finally opens Prospero up, and he discusses the details of his breakup with Ariel and Sycorax.

It all comes to a satisfactorily unsatisfactory conclusion, rather than wrapping up neatly. There are few twists and turns along the way as well – spoiler alert!* It turns out Ariel was never bound to the island, and that Prospero had been unceremoniously dumped by Fern, rather than the way he told it.

 

* It’s OK, it’s finished its run in Wellington, and you probably won’t get to see it overseas.