Scoop Full Coverage: Fringe 07
Wellington, 9 Feb - 4 Marwww.fringe.org.nz
The Asia Pacific
Festival also ran in Wellington from 8 -16
February.
www.asiapacificfestival.org.nz
See also: Scoop Coverage: Festival 2006
Fringe Update: 'Best Production Design' Show For Return Season - Fresh from a successful season during the Fringe Festival, the award-winning play Brain Power returns to the BATS stage for one last brief return season in March. Written and directed by Dean Hewison, the show is a strikingly inventive and hilarious film-noir styled comedy set in the darkest regions of the human brain and featuring a massive cast of 17 actors. See... Brain Power Returns
Fringe Awards: Festival Checks Out For
07 - The 14th annual New Zealand Fringe Festival has
drawn to a close, with the announcements of this year’s
Fringe 07 award winners. Thirteen awards were granted at the
award ceremony and closing night party, held tonight at
Wellington’s San Francisco bathhouse. The top award, Best
of Fringe 07, went to Hotel. See... Best
of the Fringe Festival 2007 announced
Fringe Review: The Orderly -
Peter is a general orderly. He is very much on the recieving
end of the pecking order but at least he is not, despite the
ongoing threat, a radiotherapy orderly. Peter is also a
historical re-enactor. On the coming weekend, he will be
participating the 991 Battle of Maldon. The Saxon army to
which he belongs will relive Byrhtnoth's heroic and
much-sung defeat at the hands of the Vikings. See... Fringe
Review: The Orderly
Fringe Review: Fight or Flight
- Set on one of the biggest panic-magnets of our age – an
aircraft with a destination in the USA – Fight or Fight
plays with fears ranging from simple social anxiety to
paralysing terror. There is a great deal of entertainment to
be had at the lower levels, and the whole production does
leave you with at least something to think about. See... Fringe
Review: Fight or Flight
Fringe Images:
Gravity and Other Myths - Gravity and Other Myths
opened last night under the sails on Wellington's Queens
Wharf. A good crowd gathered to take in the skills of some
of the city's top 'new circus' performers. Starting with
music based around remixed commentary on astronomy and space
exploration, they showed of a range of mostly aerial circus
skills; swinging, climbing, twisting and suspending with the
actual sky as their backdrop. See... Scoop
Images: Gravity and Other Myths
Fringe Review: Strike - In the
Cube - Did you know fire is tuneable? It is if you
blow it through various lengths of steel pipe. This might
give you some idea about the inventiveness on display in In
the Cube. The fact the piece which included this trick
started with the performers playing a quite complicated
rhythm using nothing but the flick of cigarette lighters
will give you an idea of the level of skill involved.
See... Fringe
Review: Strike - In the Cube
Fringe Review: The Little Shop of
Horrors/Redubbed - It sounds a simple concept: take
a classic corny movie; and replace the soundtrack with four
live actors and two cunning sound people. The result, for
The Little Shop of Horrors/Redubbed, is both
strangely compelling and compellingly strange. See... Fringe
Review: The Little Shop of Horrors/Redubbed
Fringe Review: Antigone's
Death - One might want to speculate about what it is
in the Zeitgeist that led two groups in this year's Fringe
to independently produce the classic rebellion story of
Antigone. In fact, both are (very different) versions of
Jean Anouilh's play, which draws the battle between idealism
and pragmatism into sharp focus, and plays on the idea of
tragic inevitability so heavily that one eventually feels
the urge to rebel against even that. See... Fringe
Festival Review: Antigone's Death
Fringe Festival: Giant Comic
Stolen - Fringe 07 artist Mat Hunkin is reeling
today at the discovery his public artwork Public
Announcement has been stolen in broad daylight - on the
first day it was displayed. The theft of Mr Hunkin's work
occurred between 2pm and 4pm Monday, February 19 from the
Cuba Street Wilson Carpark. Mr Hunkin's work, Public
Announcement, is a five part giant comic strip with a new
instalment being pasted up at two sites in Wellington every
day for the next week. See... Art
heist hits Fringe artist
Fringe Review: Trouble in Tahiti - This last performance of Leonard Bernstein's one act opera, 'Trouble in Paradise', took place late on mellow Wellington afternoon at Wesley Methodist Community Church. Inside the church, a comfortable crowd of Wellington music lovers sat on pews. Some of the pews had hymn sheets in Samoan on them, reminders of a church service earlier in the day. See... Fringe Festival Review: Trouble in Tahiti
Fringe Review: Antigone -
Jean Anouilh's 1942 Antigone might be considered a study on
Sophocles' original tragedy... There's a sense that Anouilh
sought to dissect out the essentials elements of the tragedy
and then amplify them - resulting in a play noticably longer
than the original, and one that, as well as being a tragedy,
expounds a theory of tragedy. See... Fringe
Festival Review: Antigone
Fringe Review: The Return of
The Lonesome Buckwhips - I think I've found that
underclass John Key was looking for. Arty, Benny and Gary
Buckwhip, performing with Arty's new bride Miri Buckwhip,
"grew up mean" in a broken, welfare-defauding home and have
a collective age in prison-years that exceeds their
individual expected lifespans. They're back, and they're
here to share their pain. See... Fringe
Festival Review: The Lonesome Buckwhips
Fringe Review: Couch Soup - In Couch
Soup Stephanie Christian, Ross MacLeod, Bronwyn Williams and
Benny Marama take on the dramatic challenge of presenting 30
playlets from dozens of authors in a little over an hour.
The show features sweet and poignant vignettes of some very
dysfunctional relationships, along with many genuinely
absurd and funny moments. See... Fringe
Festival Review: Couch Soup
Asia Pacific Festival Review: Pacific Dreaming - Let's face it: contemporary classical music is far from being everyone's cup of tea. Regular concert goers roll their eyes and joke about squeaks and grunts and scraping, while programmers and some performers tend to treat it as the greens we must finish before we get dessert. Cynicism aside, there can be a lot that is interesting, surprising and genuinely exciting in contemporary music-making. See... Asia Pacific Festival Review: Pacific Dreaming
Asias Pacific Festival Review: Asia-Pacific Music-Theatre - Asia-Pacific Music-Theatre gives Wellington audiences a rare chance to sample musical theatre works based on three different traditions - two of them using forms that UNESCO has declared Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. See... Asia Pacific Festival: Asia-Pacific Music-Theatre
Fringe Festival: Let's Get Ready To
Uke, Wellington! - Fricnic, the Fringe Festival's
picnic with a twist, will take a crack at the record books
this week when it hosts an attempt for the world record
ukulele sing-along this Saturday, February 17 in Wellington.
Fricnic, brought to you by Cadbury Picnic is a
family-orientated event organised by Fringe 07, featuring an
exceptionally good-looking line-up and activities for
families under the sun at Frank Kitts Park on the Wellington
Waterfront. See... Fricnic
to host 'world's biggest uke-off'
attempt
ALSO:
Fringe Review: Hot Pink Bits -
We all have 'em , and people spend an awful lot of time
thinking about 'em - Hot Pink Bits! Penny Ashton's lively
show is an energetic hurtle through 7,5000 years of
sex-obsessed human social evolution, from Palaeolithic stone
idolatry through to Internet dominatri and 0900
relationships. Based on an awful lot of real-life stories
Hot Pink Bits is cheerfully irreligious, and delightfully
disrespectful of politicians, celebrities and many other
desperate wannabes. See... Fringe
Festival Review: Hot Pink Bits
Fringe Review: The Chit-Chat
Lounge - The Chit-Chat Lounge is a melange (or is
that blancmange?) of a show, a self-proclaimed
Frankenstienian compilation of bits from other events,
presented by three fine hosts in a mock Parkinsonesque
chat-show format. This is a great place to sample hors
d'oeuvres-sized snippets of other Fringe shows, and meet
some minor local personalities. See... Fringe
Festival Review: The Chit-Chat Lounge
Fringe Review: Lovers of Central
Park - 'Lovers of Central Park' takes its audience
on a walk exploring romantic love. In keeping with its
theme, it is beautiful theatre. The audience is guided along
the wooded paths of Wellington's Central Park constantly
discovering moments from some ten different stories of
lovers - relationships occuring within that space, in times
ranging from 1855 to beyond the present day. See... Scoop
Review: Lovers of Central Park
Fringe Review: The Bowler Hat
- There was a hold-up with the programmes - they were only
distributed shortly before the beginning of the show. Which
is a shame, because The Bowler Hat is the kind of play that
benefits from being explained in advance... Having struggled
my way to an approximate understanding of this purpose by
watching the actual play, this doesn't help me understand
why it was worthwhile. See... Fringe
07 Review: The Bowler Hat
Summer
Shakespeare Review: As You Like It - For its
25th production, Wellington's Summer Shakespeare has
returned to what some consider its natural location - The
Dell at the Botanic Garden. And it has given us the kind of
entertaining ensemble production that seems to be the Summer
Shakpeare's goal. See... Summer
Shakespeare Review: As You Like It
ALSO:
Festival Press Releases
(Some)
Production Press
Releases
Theatre:
Dance:
Music:
Visual Arts: