The Purple Onion  peeps into the world of Wellington’s infam­ous bur­lesque par­lour as part of the Kia Mau Fest­iv­al. Estab­lished in the mid 1960s, the Purple Onion was Wellington’s premiere strip club which attrac­ted some of New Zealand’s social elite as well as its fair share of dubi­ous char­ac­ters. Com­bin­ing text, dance and a live funk band, this show acknow­ledges the sig­ni­fic­ant his­tor­ic­al con­tri­bu­tions of the les­bi­an, gay, trans, and queer com­munit­ies to the social night life of Wel­ling­ton City dur­ing the 1960s and 70s.

Tupe Lua­lua, Artist­ic Dir­ect­or of Le Moana talked to me about the show.

“[This pro­ject star­ted dur­ing]con­ver­sa­tions with some of my fel­low Sam­oan act­ors back in 2011, Ian Lesa, Moana Ete, Asalemo Tofete, Saufo’i Fa’a­vale and Taofi Mose-Tuiloma, we were all fairly new in the scheme of cre­at­ing our own works.   I think we were all at the after party for a show that Asa, Taofi, Saufo’i and myself were in and got into a dis­cus­sion with our peers on cre­at­ing some­thing col­lab­or­at­ively.  Asalemo had men­tioned the Purple Onion pre­vi­ously and then Moana had a fam­ily con­nec­tion to the ori­gin­al club own­er, so we embarked on the research pro­cess which included meet­ing with Pasi (the ori­gin­al own­er) his son’s Mark and Steven, some of the ladies that worked at the club and also some of the pat­rons.  We worked on it inter­mit­tently and even­tu­ally had the first devel­op­ment present­a­tion in Feb­ru­ary 2015 at the Pūtahi Fest­iv­al in Wel­ling­ton, fol­lowed by a second devel­op­ment for the Meas­ina Fest­iv­al in Decem­ber 2016.  

What I have been attrac­ted to in this early stage of my arts career are stor­ies that are driv­en by Pacific people and this story in par­tic­u­lar is very unique. Also situ­at­ing the Purple Onion night club in 1970s New Zea­l­and that was going through some major changes, I really wanted to zoom in on the movers and shakers from the Pacific that were act­ive dur­ing that time, namely Pasi Dani­ells and Car­men Rupe.  The iden­tity of the nation was chan­ging with the large influx of Pacific Islanders and oth­er New Zea­l­and theatre com­pan­ies have also con­trib­uted to that nar­rat­ive with per­form­ances such as “The dawn raids” by Pacific Under­ground and “The Fact­ory” by Kila Kokonut Krew.  The Purple Onion is a con­tri­bu­tion to that con­ver­sa­tion, acknow­ledging the multi-faceted Pacific iden­tity in New Zea­l­and and the people who were involved in the adult enter­tain­ment industry at that time.   

The Purple Onion is a fic­tion­al tale inspired by real stor­ies and real events.  There’s some­thing in it for every­one.  ‘Post-war cohort’, ‘baby boomers’ and ‘gen­er­a­tion X’ will love the live band, play­ing some of their favour­ite hits from that era.  The ‘mil­leni­ums’ or ‘gen­er­a­tions y and z’ will appre­ci­ate the multi-layered aspects of live per­form­ance and some of New Zea­l­ands most gif­ted young artists who will be per­form­ing it for them.  Our audi­ences will be trans­por­ted into a world where fantas­ies became real­ity and against all odds, those who were mar­gin­al­ised, cre­ated a space where they could be free and where they were accep­ted and in doing so paved the way for the many gen­er­a­tions to fol­low.”

Fea­tur­ing: Music­al Dir­ect­or:  Court­ney-Savali Andrews; Act­ors:  Tepora Samia and Paul Fagamalo; Dan­cers:  Andy Tilo, Ori­wa Mitchell, Kate Nga­tokorua, TJ Misa, Rikki Tofi and Jac­ob Ioapo; Band:  Sonny Miti, Gio Lesa, Aroma Maui­goa and Jedidi­ah Lesa; Sing­ers:  Greer Samuel, Juli­an Wright and Sina Esera; Pro­du­cer:  Liz Ah-hi.

Con­tent warn­ing: Con­tains coarse lan­guage, nud­ity and sexu­al ref­er­ences.