It’s 1982 in New Zea­l­and, a time of Olivia New­ton-John, Lazy Susans and brick mobile phones, and the stu­dents of the Khan­dal­lah Academy of Per­form­ing Arts are grow­ing their skills, mak­ing friends, and per­haps even find­ing love, all while they try to get a pay­ing per­form­ing arts career. How­ever, things are not quite that easy in Khan­dal­lah, and agents of chaos are afoot. Will these stu­dents reach their dreams through the swirl­ing mor­ass of blood, sweat, and glit­ter? Well, you’ll just have to watch the show to find out.

So You Think You Khan­dal­lah is an impro­vised soap opera being per­formed over five nights at BATS Theatre. There’s ad-hoc dance num­bers, ques­tion­able duets, and all the soap opera non­sense one could ever want.

The arc of tonight’s show was around friend­ship. Rudolf (Matt Pow­ell), a dance maes­tro but total loner, fought to find him­self some mates, two best friends Jas­mine (Tara McEntee) and Sheryl (Jen­nifer O’Sul­li­van) fell out and made up again all over cre­at­ive dif­fer­ences, and naive, but like­able, Quane (Matt Hut­ton) had his friend­ship taken advant­age of by car­penter Albatross (Sam Irwin). Child star Pep­per­mint Sparkle (Christine Brooks) decided to push past her past and become a triple threat, and hip-hop dan­cer Amelia (Dianne Pul­ham) did some pretty rad hip-hop moves. Back­stage guru, turned act­ing star (???) Chad (Wiremu Tuhi­wai) star­ted to find his place in the spot­light.

With live music (by Liam Kelly), live dir­ect­ing (by Clare Ker­ris­on and Luke Rim­melzwaan) and impro­vised light­ing (Darryn Woods), this show is totally cre­ated on the spot and finds itself in some inter­est­ing places. I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed the fade to blacks out of nowhere – it really cre­ated a true low-budget soap feel.

So You Think You Khan­dal­lah is qual­ity improv, and feels very genu­ine. There’s moments of genu­ine hil­ar­ity, times when I felt like ‘aww-ing’ at the pre­dic­a­ments the least for­tu­nate of the char­ac­ters got into, and some pretty swell dan­cing besides. It takes a lot of con­fid­ence to stand up and dance and sing on stage (espe­cially when it’s impro­vised), and I think that really fits in with the byline of this show – “You’ve got tal­ent. Now let’s see what we can do with it.” I hope to see some of these char­ac­ters find their for­tunes and ful­fill their dreams over the next few days, and surely that’s what a true soap opera is all about.

With the final moment of this show’s ‘epis­ode’ being, “She’s preg­nant?!” I’m sure that we’re in for some thrills and spills tomor­row.

 

So You Think You Khan­dal­lah is being per­formed at BATS Theatre between now and Sat­urday. They recap the pre­vi­ous epis­ode before each new one, so you’re com­pletely able to come in and start watch­ing even after not see­ing the pre­ced­ing episde. Tick­ets are from BATS’ web­site.