Stand Up Love  Written by Gavin McGibbon Directed by Adam Goodall Presented by Making Friends Collective at BATS Theatre, 30 Nov 2016 to 10 Dec 2016 [1 hr 10 mins] I couldn’t help but feel this play to be somewhat gratuitous and a little clichéd. Another failed relationship to unpack and watch unravel before us. What makes this play different from […]

It’s grating but we keep watching… kind of like when you jar your knee but you do it again because the pain feels good. SARAH MCMULLAN reviews The Real Housewives of Auckland. Welcome to yet another chance for New Zealand to snap at the heels of a foreign reality show format proving that while we’re proud to claim the mantle of first […]

ANNABEL WILSON offers her perspective on Byron Bay’s infamous music festival. A music festival experience is a series of encapsulated moments. A collection of vignettes loosely linked to form an overall impression. Every punter’s showreel of recollections is unique, with a few collective overlaps. They’re the kind of highlights you chatter about when debriefing with fellow attendees afterwards. They’re what […]

gONzo journalist ANNABEL WILSON bedazzled her BMX with fairy lights, glo sticks and a luminous orange rabbit for Lucid Dream’s Bike Carnival of Lights and Motion in Wellington. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date… It’s 6:50 on a still winter’s evening. Hooning around Wellington’s CBD on a BMX I bought for 10 bucks from Trash Palace, I’m anxious I […]

ANNABEL WILSON reviews Rob Mokaraka’s one man black comedy about his struggle with depression and how he ended up being shot…bro. In 2009, award-winning actor Rob Mokaraka was shot in the chest during a confrontation with police at his Point Chevalier home. In a manic episode brought on by long-hidden depression, he had dialled 111 then threatened attending officers with a meat cleaver and perceived ‘concealed […]

The Girls – Emma Cline ***** RRP $37, Chatto & Windus / Penguin Picking up THE GIRLS it’s immediately obvious that Cline is writing a fictitious tale of a young girl’s encounter with Charles Manson and his ‘family’ during the summer of 1969, and how it shaped her life in the years since. A single woman drifting from house sitting […]

“I represent the thousand souls that never made it this far,” Malo Luafutu (best known as Scribe) explained at the opening of the 2016 season of The White Guitar at Hannah Playhouse last night. Directed by Nina Nawalowalo and Jim Moriarty and presented by The Conch and Tourmakers, The White Guitar is a living history told by Scribe, his father […]

ANNABEL WILSON reviews the final show of  Hotel Europa at Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School. On the eve of the Brexit vote, third year Toi Whakaari actors performed the last show of their season of Goran Stefanovski‘s Hotel Europa. Directed by Anna Marbrook working in collaboration with designer Kasia Pol, the graduand students explored questions of home, power, ego, nationalism, the […]

SARAH MCMULLAN caught No Fefe Collective’s latest version of PSA at Bats theatre as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival and shares five reasONs why you should too. 1. Because you’re not getting enough political satire in your diet. Look around you. Where are you getting your NZ political satire from? The occasional cartoon? The odd Hosking lashback? Why are we relying […]

ANNABEL WILSON steps out of her comfort zone and into the dangerous territory that is commanded by New York’s comedy-monster the Red Bastard, here as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival. Lots of comedians ask audience members what they do; what their job is. Some comedians ask audience members if they’re happy in their job. I’ve never seen a […]