New Zealand Fringe Festival

The New Zea­l­and Fringe Fest­ival is com­ing at you with their 25th year of excit­ing, fright­en­ing, amaz­ing, and puzz­ling works. As well as loc­al artists there are 39 out-of-town acts bring­ing their stuff to Wel­ling­ton. Prices are mostly under the $25 mark but the smart choice is to buy an Addict card. It’s only $15 […]

Review: Richard III

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is in the line for the throne if only the people before him would get out of his way. If they won’t – well, he can help with that… Dav­id Lawrence (Richard) is glee­fully nasty. The audi­ence is made his con­spir­at­ors as he wreaks hav­oc through the lives of those around him. He […]

Review: Titus Andronicus

One of Shakespeare’s blood­i­est plays presen­ted in a hair salon around Hal­loween? Excel­lent idea. Fresh Dada presen­ted their take on Tit­us Andronicus last week. . Tit­us (Julia Har­ris in the tra­di­tion­ally male lead role) has returned tri­umphantly from the war with pris­on­ers. One of them, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, (Kar­en Anslow) pleads for the […]

World of Wearable Arts Season

I’ve heard the com­plaints; World of Wear­able Arts – WOW is for women of a cer­tain age and is far too expens­ive. I’d not been to the show before so I could­n’t con­firm or deny, but oh wow are those people wrong. To start with WOW to me was two exper­i­ences seam­less mel­ded togeth­er, and also […]

Three shows in Wellington (until October 4)

There are three shows on in Wel­ling­ton this week that are abso­lutely worth your time and money. An unseason­able fall of snow at Circa Theatre, and God-Belly and Everything is sur­roun­ded by water at BATS Theatre. I feel like An unseason­able fall of snow should come with a con­tent warn­ing how­ever that would give away […]

Review: Whore &, Lashings of whipped cream

I had high hopes for Whore. Described in the promo mater­i­al as “Con­tem­por­ary, top­ic­al, true-life based mono­logues told by six characters…this work is a col­lec­tion of stor­ies about street sex work­ers in Auck­land, New Zea­l­and” I thought it would be an up to date explor­a­tion of mod­ern, decrim­in­al­ised sex work. Well, I was dis­ap­poin­ted. If […]

Review: A view from the bridge

Eddie and his wife Beatrice live with Beatrice’s dead-sis­ter­’s daugh­ter, Cath­er­ine in Brook­lyn, New York. Beatrice’s two cous­ins, Marco and Rodolpho, are com­ing into the coun­try (illeg­ally) to stay with them in order to earn money to send back to Italy.  Cath­er­ine and Rodolpho get on really well. Eddie is sus­pi­cious of Rodolpho’s motives. Is he […]

Can it really be the end?

Well the Castle that Cares is on its last week and boy is there a line-up cel­eb­rat­ing the high­lights and the high-nights of the good ship Mighty Mighty. We’ve Wel­ling­ton­isata Awar­ded prizes there, we’re broken up, pashed up, made up, spewed up, chat­ted up, felt up and partied hard with the best of them. And […]

Review: Other Desert Cities

Lyman and Polly Wyeth are wealthy Repub­lic­ans enjoy­ing their lives in Palm Springs. Their chil­dren, Brooke and Trip, are at their par­ents’ place for Christ­mas for the first time in six years. Also stay­ing for Christ­mas is Polly’s sis­ter Silda. She’s been in rehab. Everything seems to be going well (at least, as well as […]

Review: Once we built a tower

The latest Dean Park­er play (with songs! and live music!) per­formed by the Bac­chanals fol­lows the lives of Eth­el and Ger­van McMil­lan, and Frances and Arnold Nord­mey­er. Ger­van and Arnold played act­ive roles in the Labour gov­ern­ment’s intro­duc­tion of a wel­fare scheme in 1938. It looks at cir­cum­stances that influ­enced their think­ing on wel­fare, then the […]