Review: Grifted & Talented
Reviewed by Bethany Miller Firstly, what a brilliant premise for a comedy game show. Being one of those “gifted” kids, I was taken by the name from the start — the nostalgia of a school programme for unconventional thinkers that I realise now were probably all the oddballs and undiagnosed neurospicy types. Honestly, a lot […]
Review: Thank You Ten
Review by Felicity Cozens Love musicals? Love Footlights? Want a journey through every show they’ve done since 2014? Book through Ticketbooth and get down to Te Auaha on Dixon for a typically fabulous Footlights show! Laura Gardner’s set is deceptively simple – a raised dais and a set of stairs topped by a platform – […]
Review: Mamma Mia!
Te Auaha’s Musical Theatre cohort for 2023 is bringing Mamma Mia! to our shores this September, and we are all better for it. A spellbinding, fabulous version of Catherine Johnson/ABBA’s jukebox musical knocked my absolute socks off last night, and I’m seriously considering going back to see it again. You might have seen the 2008 […]
Review: Music To Die For
Noted Wellington improv troupe Best on Tap is back performing this month with a new iteration of their grounded and clever improv in a show using your music suggestions! Music To Die For takes six songs that you (the audience) would play at your funeral and uses them to inspire layered, complex scenes about the […]
Review: Into the Woods
Image credit: Maeve O’Connell. Reviewed by Talia Carlisle Not dissimilar to the high fashion of the Met Gala, I adorned my best tiara and lavender frock, ready to descend Te Auaha’s stairs to Witch Music Theatre’s Into The Woods. There isn’t a more magical staircase to a fairytale full of laughter. If the eye-catching advertising […]
Review: Soho Cinders
Reviewed by Talia Carlisle The set of Soho Cinders is a simple train station in London, but the story, design and performances are far from simple. A saucy queer rewrite of Cinderella, Soho Cinders tells us the story of Robbie (Chris McMillan), who’s caught between sugar daddy Lord Bellingham (Stanford Reynolds) and London Mayoral Candidate James Prince (Michael Stebbings). […]
Review: Paradise (Or the Impermanence of Ice Cream)
A man. A woman. A vulture, and a kulfi shop. Indian Ink is back with another one of their fantastic productions. Lead actor Jacob Rajan delivers a glorious performance where he jumps between seven well-formed characters to tell the story of a man trapped in limbo and his dreams of his past. Indian Ink knows […]
Review: System
A sparse set — two walls, some tape on the floor — is given character by lighting (Natasha James) and projection effects (Jason Wright). Flickerings along the edges of furniture, spinning triangles, water on the base of the wall, clearly defined shadows. A light rectangle becomes something to investigate. The score (Jason Wright) is an […]
Review: Mrs Krishnan’s Party
Indian Ink’s second show of the year is quite a step away from its first, and sets us in the back of Mrs Krishnan’s dairy, ready to celebrate Onam (a Hindu festival of life, death and rebirth). Te Auaha has changed, I note, as I step inside. Far from the end-stage configuration the Whare Tapere theatre is […]
Review: The Don
Lust, Murder and Revenge. The Don is a bastardization of Don Giovanni, and I mean that in a very good way. One man, accompanied by a musician, several films, and a puppet, aims to recreate the entirety of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in just under an hour and thoroughly succeeds. This show is an hour of glorious manicism, of many, many accents, and of […]