All Blacks vs. Wales

Whenever the All Blacks come to Wellington, we try to get along to see them. Wales are touring with a three-match test series at the moment, and, having come unstuck in Auckland last week, are in Wellington this weekend. I’d got tickets some months ago when it was first announced.

Another thing that’s happening in Wellington this week, for the first time, is Night Noodle Markets. This is a concept that’s been around in Australia for a while, and even Auckland, but for the first time here in the coolest little capital in the world. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of restaurants do an open-air stall. As the name implies, it’s mostly Asian-style cookery, “street food” type stuff (although how you’re supposed to eat pho whilst walking down the street is a mystery to me). We thought it would be a good idea to try it out, then walk up to the stadium.

And so, apparently, did everyone else! It was heaving! We joined a queue at Nam D to get some dinner. The queues were all pretty long, with the exception of TJ Katsu, who had the misfortune to receive an unfavourable review that very day in the Dominion Post. After obtaining some Vietnamese spring rolls and garlic & chili chicken, we took a brief side trip to the Tiger beer tent, then walked up to the stadium along with several thousand other people.

Thoroughly Modern Millies that we are, we had our tickets as QR codes on our phones, which you then place under the scanner. I can haz technologies? You bet!

We found our seats, equipped ourselves with some beer, and awaited the introductions, anthems, and haka. Then it was game on. As expected, it was a tough physical match, and there were two injuries in the first half – one of which, Aaron Cruden, turned out be not as serious as first feared, as they spent 10 minutes on the field administering to him before stretchering him off to hospital on a medicart.

Cruden’s injury brought Beauden Barrett to the field earlier than expected, however, and he was soon making an impact on the play. Although the half-time score was even at 10-10, it’s those long bruising encounters where no points are scored that take their toll later in the match. In the second half the All Blacks ripped out and scored three tries in quick succession, then a fourth with no reply. In the final 10 minutes Wales pulled back some of those points – one try as a result of a careless kick, charged down. Barrett hared off down the field after the ball carrier, tackled him, tackled the support player, but was unable to take down the third. “Guys, a little help?” he could’ve reasonably asked. A final run in the last play of the game would’ve been a further try for the All Blacks if Ryan Crotty hadn’t carelessly put his foot down in touch whilst scoring – to be fair, there was a giant Welsh player tackling him at the time.

As it was, the final result probably flattered the Welsh a bit. With the series won, they’ll play again in Dunedin next week, where the ABs will be intent on building their unbeaten test run of 10 matches.

Shakespeare's Will

Shakespeare’s will is notorious for the bequest of the second-best bed to his wife, Anne Hathaway. The actual document is quite short, as most of the will is about the entailment of his property to his sister and her family.

How did Anne Hathaway feel about that? No-one knows, but this play is an imaginary take on what may have been. It would be fair to say that she’s not best pleased.

Shakespeare’s Will was written by Vern Thiessen in 2005. It is a one-woman play with Anne Hathaway in the lead role, set on the day of her husband’s funeral. She is handed the will, to her surprise. What follows is a speculative rumination on her life with William Shakespeare, culminating with the reading of the will, and her reaction to it.

The performance was a play reading, rather than an actual acting of the play, which was a little bit odd. I can understand why you might do a reading if there was more than one personae in the dramatis, but in this case, it was essentially a monologue. It’s not even a dress rehearsal – the actor still has the script in her hands. There doesn’t seem to be a plan to actually perform the play. It was read at Circa Theatre on the same set as King Lear is performed on, with a table and chair added as props.

It’s quite a good play. I wouldn’t mind seeing it actually being performed.

The Magic Flute

Saturday night was the last night of NZ Opera’s production of The Magic Flute, some opera or other by a chap called Mo Zart. We went along cos that’s just the kind of people we are.

Dinner was at the estimable Zibibbo, which I still call the most under-rated restaurant in Wellington, even though they keep winning awards and stuff. They’ve taken to serving some of their food on boards instead of plates, which is very hipster-ish of them. I would rail against hipsters, but apparently that’s pelvist.

Food on a board

It being Queen’s birthday weekend (the renowned monarch, not the renowned rock group), they were making a celebratory cocktail, Gin Save The Queen, which I felt duty bound to sample. As well as gin, it contained various herbs and was mixed (by yourself, it’s one of those DIY jobs) with cucumber sorbet in a separate glass, to the required sweetness/sourness. I can’t be doing with that, so I just chucked the whole lot in. It was fine.

We were running a bit short of time as we hotfooted it along Taranaki St to get to St James Theatre. We made it with a couple of minutes to spare. The lights went down, the orchestra started up, and we were away!

The Magic Flute is a bit mad. The story  revolves around the daughter of the Queen Of The Night, and her supposed rescue from Sarastro, an evil sorcerer. But he turns out to be not so evil as all that, and the whole thing seems to revolve around "he said, she said". Though the Queen of the Night does order her daughter to murder Sarastro or she'll never speak to her again, which isn't very nice. Also, Sarastro has some very medieval attitudes, which is perhaps unsurprising given that it was written in 1790. I'm not going to go into all the masonic symbolism, cos, well, you know all that.

The staging and performances were all very polished, and it was an English version too, which helped. A lot of the humour of the original was well translated, particularly Papageno's part. 

Is that enough culture for now? Hell, no! Wait until next week's thrilling instalment!

King Lear

OK, comedy festival is over. Time for some tragedy.

Circa Theatre is celebrating 40 years with its flagship production of King Lear, running for a month between May and June. Everyone who is anyone in Wellington theatre seems to be in it. We went along for the ride.

First up, a dinner stop at favourite venue Jano Bistro, who put on their usual great fare. I started with a quail, followed by the veal, which included a veal tartare, a slow-cooked croquette and a medium-rare fillet. Nicola had started with the tartiflette – usually provided as a savoury third course, but also available as a starter – followed by the catch of the day. I puddinged on feijoa whilst Nicola had the lemon pie. Nice.

We drove around to park on Wakefield Street as we were up t’other end of town, and arrived in good time to take our seats. The staging was very bare, with just a wall (graffiti’d with the word “Nihil”), a window and a door as the stage set.    

Most of the productions we see at Circa have a limited cast, usually between one and four. But for this they pulled out all the stops and had a full cast of around 20 people, so no need to do the doubling up that often happens in Shakespeare. There were a few faces we recognised as well as the lead, Ray Henwood. Andrew Paterson was there as well, seen in such productions as Isaac’s Eye, Gavin Rutherford, and others. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the Wellington acting scene.

What to say about the play? Well, they stuck to the script, although the clothing had been updated to modern times, and the soldiers were armed with rifles and pistols, but the language didn't go through the "updating" that some directors do, which was a relief.

As with a lot of Shakespeare, it goes on and on. With an 8 o'clock start, it was nearly eleven by the time we poured out of the theatre. It's at times like this that you consider donating your entire retirement pool into arts funding so that they can buy some comfortable seating. Of course, then you wouldn't be able to afford the tickets...damn. Need to think that one through.

Started At The Top

The comedy festival is coming to a close. Before I decided on the theme for this year’s festival selections (did you spot what it was?) I’d decided that Guy Williams would be a good person to go and see, having seen him on Jono & Ben.

What I’d forgotten was that I’d also booked The Ten Tenors for the same night a month or so previously. It is my habit to book these things when they are first advertised, often several months in advance, to avoid disappointment (these shows do sometimes sell out in Wellington – we’re not that apathetic!).  Fortunately, Guy was doing an early evening slot at 5pm, whereas the next show was at 8pm. Phew! We could do both, and grab some dinner in between.

Guy Williams’ show, Started At The Top, is in homage to rapper Drake with his song Started From The Bottom. Guy notes that he is white, male, middle class and privileged, so naturally he started from the other end. His show is very similar to the kinds of stuff he does on television, including a long section on the TPPA where he shows how ignorant people are of what it is and what it means…and even how many countries are involved. The people he asks about this are MPs, as he accosted them at Auckland Airport. His point being that it’s easy to make someone look stupid when you stick a camera in their face, and news reports of protestors who don’t know what they’re protesting about aren’t the only story. He also riffed on his favourite subjects – being tall but no good at basketball, fulfilling dreams, and emails from his mother.

So this year we’ve been to see five women comedians/actors/performers, and one bloke. I’d never heard of the women before, and selected them more or less at random, based on availability and the short blurb on the festival website. Guy Williams I have heard of. And I’m sorry Guy, you weren’t the best, funniest, or most original act we’ve been to see this year. B-.

I’d originally planned to have a tapas-style dinner at Basque, which is just round the corner on Courtenay Place. But when we stuck our heads round the door all the tables were taken. A quick rethink took us to Yakitori and Sake Bar, where we had a Japanese dinner of – yes, yakitori and sake (me) and sashimi and chicken hotpot (Nicola). We then strolled in leisurely fashion up the road to St James Theatre, where the Ten Tenors were performing.

Now you’ll have heard of The Three Tenors (Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo). They were big in the 90s, and gave concerts of popular arias from opera. I thought that what we’d be seeing was going to be much the same, but with ten instead of three. From the look of the audience, it appeared that they were expecting much the same sort of thing.

That was not what we got, however. The show mostly consisted of covers of pop songs. Mostly not even very good pop songs. They did do a medley of Neapolitan opera in the first half for about 10 minutes, and Nessun Dorma as the encore, but in between they were mostly doing stuff by the current (and not-so-current) crop of boy and girl bands. They threw in a couple of New Zealand songs  - classic lullaby Hine e Hine, and Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. The highlight was probably the opening of the second half - Bohemian Rhapsody. This is a song that's entirely suited to their style.

The performance, singing and staging was all very professional but I couldn’t help feeling that we’d been somewhat shortchanged. I was expecting a lot more opera, and we didn’t get it. I don’t know who selects their songs, but someone needs to have a word. They did a Bowie tribute with Heroes – a song entirely inappropriate for their voices.

So that was Saturday night in Wellington. The comedy festival is over, roll on the food festivals!

Contrast

Last night was the final cheap Wednesday  of the NZ International Comedy Festival and we’d booked in two shows to make the most of it.

It was a rainy, blustery night in Wellington – typical autumn weather, windy but not cold. After parking the car in Courtenay Place for a quick getaway, I realised I’d foolishly left the tickets in my desk drawer at work. It was too far to walk back, but we managed to find a handy internet place to print them out again from Gmail. Phew! Unfortunately we’d wasted a lot of time by this stage so we dived into Egmont Street Eatery for a quick but tasty dinner before scurrying up the road to VK’s Comedy and Blues Bar – in the place that was BATS Theatre’s home away from home whilst their original building was being strengthened.

At the venue we chatted with Tor and Gavin who were also in the audience. Then Angela Barnes hobbled onto stage – as she explained, she’d hurt her foot in an argument with Mount Eden. Angela Barnes is an English comedian who does a good line in self-deprecating comedy. She was doing sit-down rather than stand-up because of her leg. Part of her show deals with the subject of ugliness and expectations of beauty, having suffered at the hands of nasty girls at school. She also told us about her father, who owned a sex shop. Well, someone has to! She illustrated her show with photos and a short film she’d made and put on Youtube, and also discussed her article in the Guardian, and the feedback from it. All good stuff, and very entertaining. This all explained the show's title "Come As You Are", as she played out with the song by Nirvana. We couldn’t hang around much afterwards, though, as we had to head off to The Fringe Bar in Allen St for our next instalment of the evening…

The audience set-up was a little different here. Instead of the serried ranks of seats, it was arranged café-style with tables and chairs. We selected a table near, but not right at, the front, in the expectation that we’d be safe from any audience participation being foisted on us.

This turned out to be a schoolboy error. First, no-one occupied the two front tables - the show had a disappointingly low turnout, possibly due to the weather. I assume they put out tables based on ticket sales, but not even the ones they’d put out were fully occupied. And on a night like this, passing trade was likely to be sparse. As it was, we were effectively in the front row. Not that this mattered.

Tessa Waters’ show, WOMANz, is strange. It’s part performance art, part comedy, total audience participation, and most of all, FUN! She starts off with the birth of the world from a coupling between a rock and a star, and then gave us a demonstration of stagecraft and art. All whilst wearing a leotard and sequin-encrusted sports bra. Fairly early in she demonstrated how to do her favourite dance move, which she explained was like rowing, then asked me to get up and demonstrate my dance…so I invited Nicola up to the front and we did a quick six-turning-basics waltz for her. This, she told us, was amazing! In doing her show over 200 times no-one had ever done that! She then invited other audience members to do their dances, and we were treated to Becs’s box, and Sam’s sit-down dance. She then got us all up on our feet to do a dance medley incorporating all these elements into our performance. Everyone got up and enjoyed themselves.

It’s really hard to explain how and why this is fun. Maybe this will help:

All of this is delivered in a cod Eastern European accent, for a reason that is never explained. After the show she greeted everyone as they left, thanked us for coming, and was generally enthused. We wandered out into the Wellington night, somewhat dazed and confused, but smiling. We'd seen two very different shows, both good in utterly different ways, Both are on until Saturday, but if you get the chance to only go to one of them, I'd pick Tessa Waters. Go see her! You'll emerge a changed person. 

That pretty much ends our adventures in the comedy festival for this year. Did you spot the theme?

Promise And Promiscuity

As you might expect, the New Zealand International Comedy Festival, which is in full swing at the moment, is mainly focussed on stand-up comedians with the occasional double act or group thrown in for good measure. But there are also some other things going on. One of these is a new musical by Jane Austen (and Penny Ashton) called Promise And Promiscuity, performed at the Circa Theatre. With a title and pedigree like that, how could we not go?

As you might expect, the show, a one-woman performance by Penny Ashton, is loosely based around the novels, manners and mores of characters from the works of Jane Austen. It features Miss Elspeth Slowtree and how she finds a husband. Penny Ashton also plays all the other characters in the production, including her mother and sister, her snorting cousin, aunt, and other incidental characters. Many of the lines and scenes from Austen's novels are worked into the narrative, although sometimes subtly changed, such as the use of Lower Huttington Grove, the writer Wilbur Smythe, and the absolute authority on manners, Miss Kimberline Kardashian. There are also many references to modern-day issues such as pay inequality, "but I'm sure that won't be the case 200 years from now" as Miss Slowtree frequently quips, in asides to the audience. Interspersed with the narrative are several humorous songs and at one stage, audience participation is required from an unfortunate chap in the front row.

The show lasts about 70 minutes with no interval. In the programme the notes read: Writer/Performer/Publicist/Producer/Production Design/Concept/Bonnetter: Miss Penny Ashton (I'm quite tired).

If you know your Austen, you will enjoy this production. If you don't know your Austen, you'll still enjoy this production! If the closest you've got to Austen is Bridget Jones's Diary, you'll still appreciate it.

 At the end of the show, Penny gave a quick speech about the production, and exhorted us to tell all our friends. This is running at Circa until 21st May, so if you get a chance go and see it. Later in the year she's taking it to Canada and Edinburgh,

Afterwards she was available for photos and also selling her fridge magnets, which we thought worth the $5 cost: