Fea­tured Image Graph­ic design­er: Jared Palle­sen 

Fea­tured Image Pho­tog­ra­ph­er: Leoluchi­no Linu­mus 

 

The per­for­mance style for The Best is Yet to Come has a lit­tle bit of every­thing auto­bi­og­ra­phy, ted talk, mag­ic show and queer inspi­ra­tional guid­ance.

Adorned in won­der­ful­ly sparkling nails and gems across his fore­head, Jere­my Rol­ston opened the show with some guid­ance on par­tic­i­pa­tion and encour­aged us, the audi­ence, to be as respon­sive as we want­ed. As a reg­u­lar audi­ence mem­ber, I fre­quent­ly notice the audi­ence hold back as if to main­tain some kind of unspo­ken eti­quette. I appre­ci­at­ed Jeremy’s invi­ta­tion to emo­tion­al­ly engage as this increas­es enjoy­ment for the per­former and the audi­ence.

Jere­my shares his sto­ry of nav­i­gat­ing his emer­gence as an open­ly gay man to him­self, his fam­i­ly and soci­ety while inter­spers­ing his sto­ry with incred­i­ble mag­ic per­for­mances.

A men­tal­ist by descrip­tion. Much of Jeremy’s skills in mag­ic are based on well-honed intu­itive abil­i­ties, although some clas­sic illu­sion-based tricks are also in the mix.

I love mag­ic shows, and Jemery’s seam­less per­for­mance demon­strates some­one who has spent years per­fect­ing his craft right down to the nail-bit­ing finale.

Through­out the show, he talks of his pas­sion for the LGBTI com­mu­ni­ty, its his­to­ry, progress and the recent events that threat­en that progress. I par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed the infor­ma­tion hand­out pro­vid­ed to all audi­ence mem­bers on queer organ­i­sa­tions in Aotearoa that are doing pos­i­tive work.

I felt that the point of dif­fer­ence in The Best is Yet to Come is Jeremy’s sto­ry of dis­cov­ery as a per­son deeply embed­ded in a non-LGBTI sup­port­ive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty and the emo­tion­al con­flict that this can present. I believe that this per­spec­tive is less com­mon in today’s nar­ra­tives and one many peo­ple could iden­ti­fy with. It would be inter­est­ing to hear more of Jeremy’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence in his sto­ry­telling.

A heart­felt per­for­mance with mag­i­cal sur­pris­es.