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: