A NZ writ­ten disco noir set in Har­lem, 1979. Dan­cer Fon­tella Pen­dav­is (Deborah Eve Rea) has been murdered at Stu­dio Soul and Detect­ive Gonzales (Jordan Rivers) has been sent to invest­ig­ate. There are plenty of pos­sible sus­pects – Luz Cruz (Brit­tany Goss), who has inher­ited Fontella’s job; Ari Sug­ar­man (Ed Blun­den), the own­er of the club; Raul Amor­oso (Rod­ney Bane), Fontella’s bene­fact­or, or De Castro (Mar­garet Ortega), Raul’s house­keep­er. They are not the only people mourn­ing a loss – Detect­ive Gonzales’ moth­er Maria (Maria Jones) died recently. Will he be able to solve the case?


Dir­ect­or Cas­sandra Tse has infused this glit­tery disco noir with a sin­is­ter under­belly. Rivers as Gonzales is appro­pri­ately reserved as the griev­ing detect­ive with a secret.  Goss gives Cruz depth with a lay­er of flirti­ness over a real­ist­ic centre. Bane cap­tures Amor­oso’s sense of loss, and dis­reg­ard for the rules of soci­ety. The ensemble –  Rea, Blun­den, Jones and, Ortega – bring their indi­vidu­al named char­ac­ters as well as oth­er minor char­ac­ters to life with changes in voice and stance. Their mont­age moments are some of my favour­ite parts of the show. All the cast use Amer­ic­an style accents which they mainly stick to although there are some shaky moments. Cos­tume design­er Lisa Kiyomoto-Fink uses excel­lent fab­ric choices to evoke the 1970s. Light­ing by design­er Aaron Blackledge effect­ively delin­eates the vari­ous areas of the mostly empty stage as well as adding to the ten­sion. No cho­reo­graph­er is cred­ited so I assume the cast and dir­ect­or are respons­ible for the flash disco moves.

Nice dir­ec­tion and full com­mit­ment from all the cast make this an enter­tain­ing watch through the murky nar­rat­ive to the final out­rageous end.