The title of the show 'Yesterday, in space' against a pink and purple galaxy background

The good space­ship Yes­ter­day is the first rock­et ship to launch from Aotearoa New Zealand and we get to come along for the ride! Her new crew are deter­mined to show us a good time. What a pity they’re stuck in the mid­dle of pro­fes­sion­al rival­ries, con­fus­ing per­son­al rela­tion­ships, and an aster­oid belt…

All those trou­bles add up to an enter­tain­ing space-opera musi­cal. The Cap­tain (Brodie Tau­ri­ma) is anx­ious about the voy­age so has enlist­ed his old­est friend to be the Pilot (Mol­ly Mason). The Co-Pilot (Beth Mar­riott) knew them both at the acad­e­my. The First Mate (Troy J. Mal­colm) absolute­ly wants the trip to be a suc­cess while The Sci­en­tist (Lou Pri­or) is proud to be on the ship with The Android (Jules Daniel). The Guard (Emma Maguire) is def­i­nite­ly not get­ting paid enough. It’s all very soap opera.*

The songs were fun and catchy although no back­ing track meant that some of them didn’t have the ener­gy they should have. There were some very sweet har­monies in the choral singing dur­ing the open­ing. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked the use of three lan­guages — te reo Māori, Eng­lish and sign lan­guage. Solos weren’t always as suc­cess­ful but ngā mihinui to the cast for singing a cap­pel­la. Char­ac­ters were most suc­cess­ful and hilar­i­ous when the actors first embraced the stereo­type and then broke it.

Heaps of fun.

*Apolo­gies to the cast if I get any of their names wrong — the Face­book event and the Fringe web­site don’t agree on spelling. I’m also using the char­ac­ter descrip­tions rather than names because there isn’t a pro­gramme and the cool cred­its at the begin­ning went to fast for me