Promotional poster for Routine magic, magic routineRou­tine mag­ic — Will Aloy­sius aban­don rit­u­al­is­tic pow­ers acquired dur­ing his 10 year social iso­la­tion?

Mag­ic rou­tine — Can YouTube Influ­encer Ant Hill find suf­fi­cient inner har­mo­ny to open a life-chang­ing enve­lope?

This pair of plays, util­is­ing the same set and actors, tell two time­ly and com­pelling sto­ries. Rou­tine Mag­ic, short­list­ed for the Adam NZ Play Award in 2019, takes you on a  thought-pro­vok­ing jour­ney through what hap­pens when Aloy­sius, who has devel­oped extra­or­di­nary pow­ers refus­es to allow court-ordered psy­chol­o­gist Sarah inside his house. Mag­ic Rou­tine is a more humor­ous but still pro­found look at what hap­pens when Celes­tial Spir­it #108 vis­its YouTube sen­sa­tion Ant Hill on the occa­sion of his 21st birth­day bear­ing a mag­i­cal enve­lope from his absent father.

The plays are per­formed by high­ly-acclaimed actors, Barn­a­by Olson and Rebec­ca Park­er. Barn­a­by is a local Welling­ton cre­ative who wrote and per­formed in the fan­tas­tic new work A Traveller’s Guide to Turk­ish Dogs, toured nation­al­ly with pro­duc­tions such as Anzac Eve, and An Awful­ly Big Adven­ture, and starred on screen in BURBS, Miss­ing Sun­day, and Tragi­com­ic.  Rebec­ca Park­er has appeared in var­i­ous pro­duc­tions in the Welling­ton Fringe Fes­ti­val, the Court The­atre in Christchurch, BATS, and Cir­ca The­atre, as well as shows for Stage­craft, Kid­stuff, Kap­i­tall Kids, Show­biz, Back­yard The­atre and Fresh Dada.

Rou­tine Mag­ic-Mag­ic Rou­tine are writ­ten and direct­ed by Dr Frances Stein­berg. Despite Frances’ love of the­atre extend­ing across six decades, from her first director’s job organ­is­ing the neigh­bours into a back­yard per­for­mance of Peter Pan when she was 6 years old, through serv­ing as chore­o­g­ra­ph­er and per­former for the Mar­tial Arts The­ater Com­pa­ny in Amer­i­ca in the 1980s, she spent the major­i­ty of her pro­fes­sion­al life as a psy­chol­o­gist, mar­tial artist, acupunc­tur­ist, inter­ac­tive learn­ing design­er, inter­na­tion­al pre­sen­ter, and author of more than 12 pro­fes­sion­al books, 3 nov­els, 7 online guides, and an illus­trat­ed sto­ry­book.