Review: Cock

Cock is tense. It is beau­ti­ful, jar­ringly intim­ate, and phe­nom­en­ally craf­ted. It’s also com­pletely heart­break­ing. Circa One’s set (designed by Sean Lynch) inspires thoughts of a box­ing ring, or a fash­ion show – in the round, with bright lights cast down onto a white floor below. The audi­ence sits on three sides; I view the […]

Review: Uther Dean’s Elevation

This is a show some­what about the hit U2 song “Elev­a­tion” (which I still haven’t heard) and some­what not at all about that song. From the Fast and the Furi­ous films to fights in Bur­ger King, new part­ners and the cine­mat­ic clas­sic Lara Croft: Tomb Raid­er, Dean spins a verb­ose tale of coin­cid­ence, ennui and […]

Review: Big Dumb Cats

We are all just big dumb cats, stum­bling around on two legs, expect­ing our feline over­lords to hunt food for us to keep us alive. Daniel John Smith’s Big Dumb Cats is part cat facts, part fam­ily par­able, and all great com­edy with a poignant mes­sage. Smith’s in the midst of an excit­ing office fash­ion […]

Review: Token African (Urzila Carlson)

With a few little obser­va­tions to warm up the crowd, Urz­ila, “does­n’t pick on people,” she says, and rein­forces that she can­’t see any­one in the crowd because of the raised seat­ing at Te Aua­ha’s Tapere Nui theatre. She rolls into talk­ing about Wel­ling­ton, stu­dents, and how nobody in their right mind would ever con­tin­ue […]

Review: The Blair Witch Projector

After a few minutes of tech­nic­al issues – which may have been an actu­al ghost in the theatre, who knows! – we’re brought into this show by James Mustap­ic talk­ing about being unem­ployed, to which sev­er­al people in the audi­ence cheer in unfor­tu­nate acknow­ledge­ment (myself included). Mustap­ic is going to do a “prop­er stand-up show”, […]

Get Mr Gay Wellington to Mr Gay World!

This week­end in Auck­land is the Big Gay Out. Now that wouldn’t be of much interest to us here at the Wel­ling­tonista because Out In The Square, the capital’s own queer fest­iv­al is big­ger and bet­ter, but at the Big Gay Out they’re also run­ning the Mr Gay New Zea­l­and com­pet­i­tion and Wellington’s Mar­cus Fen­son […]