Brie Keatley At 11:30 am on a brisk Wellington Tuesday, the Circa foyer is filled with parents, grandparents, and children. This can only mean one thing - it’s kids show time. This time around it’s the wonderfully goofy All the Things I Wish I Could Be, featuring the lovable dads Tom Knowles and Jed Parsons (as Jeff Parsnips)
Brie Keatley As the in-house children’s reviewer for Art Murmurs, I am honoured to dust off my title for The Home Inside. Directed by Timothy Fraser, written/starring Emma Rattenbury and lead/produced by Kerryn Palmer, The Home Inside is a reflective piece of theatre about the importance of finding emotional resilience (mostly through focused breathing.) as a child.
Guy van Egmond When it comes to polished period theatre, Stagecraft takes the cake in Pōneke. ‘Stagecraft Theatre presents’ has become shorthand for well-produced and relevant classic productions, as evidenced by a packed opening-night for their current show, The Heiress. A well-chosen and -directed script, The Heiress proves to be another feather in the company’s cap.
Guy van Egmond ‘When one buys a ticket to a First Nations show, one expects to be gently and respectfully reminded that indigenous people deserve to exist.’ This line came from the end of A Nightime Travesty, in an aside where the performers took the piss out of snooty, white critics. But it was a useful line, because it summed up everything that the show was not.
Jack McGee  Teaching cycle skills at a primary school the other day, I asked a 10-year-old to define integrity for me. She said that “integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching.” This is one of her school values and, as a teacher coming in just for a day, it’s a relief to hear. I can turn my back.
Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin When the email came in inviting us to review the Heath Franklin’s Chopper, whom I used to watch on Seven Days as a teenager, I became jittery. Oh my god, I thought, doesn’t this guy make low-key problematic jokes? This Boomer-Bogan persona makes me nervous in this day and age. Maybe I’ve just spent too much time voting Green in woke Wellington that I’m afraid of revisiting an icon. They say you should never meet your heroes… and the chance of finding something disappointing when revisiting old male comedians has never been greater.
Jack McGee  Bonetown opens with host Brynley Stent giving an extensive explanation of what it means to conceptually fuck something. This is a show about picking the things you want to fuck the most, but, as Stent points out, that doesn’t mean you should be trying to figure out if you could fit your dick in it. Instead, it’s all about a more profound satisfaction, a sense of catharsis and release. It takes a while to break this all down, but we don’t mind. None of us have got over the absurdity of Stent’s leather devil suit.
Austin Harrison Shoshana McCallum’s Merely Beloved pitches itself as a “compassionate interrogation…of where love goes when we die” written and performed by a kiwi who has literally won an Emmy. Having recently watched and enjoyed TV Three’s Madam and noted McCallum as a co-creator, I was all too eager to see her in action. The show that met me was not what I expected.
Alia Marshall  The chaos fuelled fever dream that is EPIC WAY! I'm Gay? Oui oui faguette™ I LOVE KIM HILL (1999 version) has returned to BATS for the International Comedy Festival after two sellout seasons and several award nominations from the Fringe Festival. Liv Ward and their trusty sidekick, the Lobster, are once again taking us on a journey we shall never forget, led by the effervescent Kim Hill (radio NZ host and certified Lesbiana).
Jack McGee  There’s two Hoani Hotene jokes I want to celebrate straight out the gate. The first, is the title to his show; It’s Getting Hot-ene so Tell Me All Your Jokes. Billy T awards aside, Hotene should be walking home with a joint-win for title of the year (shared with Liv Ward of course). The second joke, is this one. I needn’t describe it, except to say that this one joke proves the necessity of local art.
Jack McGee  Early on in Rebellina, Lesa MacLeod-Whiting professes that the “the vibe tonight, is silly.” She’s not lying. MacLeod-Whiting moves from joke to joke with manic enthusiasm. She swerves from embodying a “petulant Spanish prince-ling”, into jokes about the need for better representation of women keeping secret families, “how can she be it, if she can’t see it?”. She’s so light on her feet that she’s no longer touching the ground.
Guy van Egmond As we sink into the cold and early darkness of winter in Wellington, it’s easy to forget how revitalising a good show is. I wouldn’t so much say that Inverted Citizen’s Revel was a pick-me-up, more like a bolstering, golden elixir that settled, warm and sparkling, long after the final bows.
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