There’s a dearth of queer work in Aotearoa, and very little of it is supported by our mainstages. Homos, or Everyone in America is a gleaming light in the darkness. Sam Brooks responds to the play, and talks to the director about its urgency. (For the purposes of this piece, the label ‘queer’ stands in for LGBTQI+ … Read more
Last week, Auckland Theatre Company announced their 2018/19 programme – one with a glaring lack of representation for women and new New Zealand work. James Wenley takes the company to task. Auckland Theatre Company’s response can be found at the bottom of this piece. During the uproar over the Pop-up Globe’s decision to use an all-male cast … Read more
Tonight in the Auckland CBD you might stumble across a tequila-soaked glamour queen and a T-Rex with no head — but don’t worry, you won’t go hungry. What links a headless dinosaur and a vegan fried chicken burger? Art, that’s what. StreetArtDego, now in its third year, teams artists with purveyors of street food, with each … Read more
How do you write about an experience that’s not your own – and do it without offending anybody? Sam Brooks, author of the play Burn Her on now in Auckland, offers a solution. A month or so ago, I saw playwright Victor Rodger give a talk about cultural appropriation. Drawing on Lionel Shriver’s controversial (and … Read more
Yesterday, the Pop-Up Globe announced their new season of work, with #metoo and #timesup hashtags flying wild in their marketing. Penny Ashton responds. “Scarce can I speak, my choler is so great: O, I could hew up rocks and fight with flint, I am so angry.” Mate. Just like York in Shakespeare’s Henry VI right now … Read more
The arts are meant to be for everyone. But are they really? Mary Sea looks at theatre for babies and why we really really need more of it. Baby theatre. Theatre for babies. What’s the point, I hear you cry, rotten tomatoes at the ready. Why not just get out a wad of cash and hiff … Read more
Everybody Cool Lives Here is one of Wellington’s most exciting theatre companies, and their work Big J Stylez comes to Auckland’s Herald Theatre this week as part of Matariki Season. Sam Brooks interviews artistic director Rose Kirkup. “The award-winning theatre company Everybody Cool Lives Here produces art that reflects and celebrates Aotearoa’s unique and diverse identity,” reads … Read more
Breakout performer of a hit local film and now award-winning theatre maker, Ana Scotney is the definition of a rising star. She talks to Sam Brooks about her upcoming show The Contours of Heaven. If you’re most people, the first time you saw Ana Scotney (Ngāti Tāwhaki) was in The Breaker-Upperers, in which she plays the take-no-shit … Read more
A talk show… about theatre? You mean Shakespeare and shit? Sam Brooks watches the first episode of Louise Wallace’s Opening Night. Theatre is a hard sell. Even for people who enjoy theatre – hell, even for people who make theatre – it’s hard to get people to actually go to a play. If it’s not … Read more
When your audience is children, and their attention spans are shorter than their tempers, how do you keep them entertained at a theatre show? Thomas LaHood talks about his approach. The thing about making live performance for kids is that kids as an audience are just not polite. If they are bored with the show … Read more
Ahead of her debut at the Auckland Fringe on Thursday night, former Green MP Catherine Delahunty writes on the good, the bad and the toxic of nine years in parliament – and what needs fixing. Warning – the show I am describing contains swearing and explicit feminist content. I did nearly nine years of Question Time … Read more
Like the rest of the internet-having world, Sam Brooks has been listening to Lorde’s new album today. Unlike most of the world, he writes plays for a living. Here’s his interpretation of his favourite song from the album. First published on 16 June 2017. * The following is what happens when you sit in The … Read more
After a rocking season last year, Briefs Factory returns with their new show Briefs: Close Encounters. Sam Brooks responds to the two very different sides to the show, and how the company marries them. There are two shows I want to talk about here. There’s the show that you pay for: the high-quality, beat-perfect and burlesque-circus-dance hybrid … Read more
Simon Wilson called the play Te Pō “a masterpiece” when it premiered last year. It’s back for a short return season and he went along to see if he got it right. There’s a moment late in the play Te Pō when the actor Carl Bland stands alone on stage and bawls out his grief that … Read more
Playwright Miria George talks to Leonie Hayden about her new satire of Māori ‘one-percenters’, and challenging assumptions about what Māori art should be. The Vultures is a curious departure from most Māori theatre I’ve seen. It’s not explicitly about post-colonial disenfranchisement or violence, although it can be argued these underpin all Māori existence. It’s about … Read more
Eugenia Woo reviews HAMLET: The Video Game, a brave attempt to bring together the disparate worlds of gaming and theatre. HAMLET: The Video Game – A Shakespearean Stage Show is a mouthful. It’s also got all the earnestness of a high school production, with none of the good-natured missteps or overbearing parents being idiots in the … Read more
If Bill Shakespeare was around today, the old huckster would probably have a crack at making a video game. A stage show currently playing in Auckland aims to construct what that might look like, complete with Angry Birds and live Tetris. Eugenia Woo talked to director Greg Copper. Auckland’s theatre scene is no slouch. With … Read more
Maraea Rakuraku is an award-winning playwright whose latest work is being presented in Te Pou’s Kōanga Festival in September. Sam Brooks talked to her about history, playwriting and cultural commentary. Kōanga Festival is a two and a half week festival (September 1 – 17) presented by Te Pou, Auckland’s Home of Māori Theatre, consisting of … Read more
Fractious Tash’s new production as part of Q’s Matchbox Season, The Effect, doesn’t quite translate the play’s complexities into a production, writes Sam Brooks. On the face of it, Fractious Tash producing The Effect seems like an ideal match of company and play. Their previous productions, the tremendous Titus and the mixed-but-visually-stunning Not Psycho, have made big … Read more
Shane Bosher was the artistic director of Silo Theatre for many years and directed many of its most famous productions, including Angels in America, When the Rain Stops Falling and Holding the Man. Now he’s back in Auckland to direct two new Silo shows, Cock (co-presented with Auckland Live) and A Streetcar Named Desire. Sam Brooks talked to him about them … Read more
Like the rest of the internet-having world, Sam Brooks has been listening to Lorde’s new album today. Unlike most of the world, he writes plays for a living. Here’s his interpretation of his favourite song from the album. The following is what happens when you sit in The Spinoff, rushing through your first listen of … Read more
Sam Brooks reviews If There’s No Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming and Power Ballad, two plays by rising star dramturgist Julia Croft on now at The Basement. Winter brings us many things. It’s the weather for holding your hot water bottle tight, for drinking coffee for warmth as well as staying awake and … Read more
An interview with the super-sharp, furious, funny and startlingly creative Eleanor Bishop, whose acclaimed play about campus rape, Jane Doe, is on for two weeks in Auckland. When she was aged 20, Eleanor Bishop says she was struck by three things. One, she was surrounded by sexual harassment. Two, there was, thank god, feminism. And … Read more
We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: Madeleine Chapman caught the latest musical in town with the longest name. When I was younger, I watched a DVD of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat almost every day during one school holidays. And in all those viewings, … Read more
Alex Casey interviews Eleanor Bishop, a theatre-maker whose new work reimagines the rugby classic Foreskin’s Lament in the world of Tony Veitch and the Chiefs stripper scandal. If a phone case is a window to the soul, the pink “well behaved women seldom make history” emblazoned on theatre-maker star Eleanor Bishop’s pretty much nails it. … Read more
The Spinoff Auckland editor Simon Wilson loathed Wednesday night’s Rufus Wainwright concert. But onwards: this weekend at the Auckland Arts Festival looks to be full of wonders. There was a moment about halfway through Rufus Wainwright’s vainglorious “symphonic visual concert” Prima Donna (a concert version of his opera) when I thought the diva might be … Read more
Right now at the Civic, the audience screams are spiking right off the charts. And with good reason: the Auckland Arts Festival show Horror is scary good, says Alex Casey. I’ll admit it. I once hit a werewolf over the head with my handbag. In my defence, he did lunge at me in a haunted house … Read more
If you see only one show in the Auckland Arts Festival, says Simon Wilson, make it The Encounter. Its short run starts tonight. Every arts festival has a special show. It bedazzles, but that’s not all. It jolts your senses and your sensibility, and has such a depth of theme and strength of creative expression … Read more
In the Arts Festival play Cellfish a drama teacher invites a bunch of prisoners to do a Shakespeare class – and it’s not why you think, says Simon Wilson. The rain came down and then it stopped and nothing got cancelled. Five shows opened in the Auckland Arts Festival on Wednesday and this one, Cellfish, … Read more