EVERY BRILLIANT THING
Luggate Hall
PORTRAITS IN MOTION
Wanaka Masonic Lodge
SING IT TO MY FACE
Lake Wanaka Centre
Tuesday, April 4
REVIEWED BY: Nigel Zega
The seventh Wanaka-run Festival of Colour was launched with typically quirky, innovative shows - a comedy about depression, a rethink of an old animation technique, and a local sing-off for different generations to complain about each other.
Every Brilliant Thing is a heart-warming, heart-breaking emotional roller coaster that achieves the seemingly impossible in presenting a laugh out loud comedy about life and death subjects.
It's not so much a one-man show as a one-man plus entire audience show as James Rowland takes us on a convincingly believable journey through the major events in his loveable character's life, starting as a child in the '80s.
Rowland's considerable skill in directing his amateur actors and ad-libbing through their reactions ensures every show will have its own flavour, and a strong musical soundtrack plays with emotions on and off-stage.
Writers Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahue turn tragedy, pathos and vulnerability into genuinely funny material, displaying a rare skill in being able to swing laughter to tears and back again in mid-sentence.
The tone is consistently upbeat, the overall experience uplifting, and the take-home message is clear - if you're having a tough time, talk to someone - get help to bring the black dog to heel.
Portraits in Motion combines photography with the old trick of using a flip book to create motion from single images.
Volker Gerling offers a new take on sharing your holiday pictures. His books of photographs, taken on marathon walks mainly across Germany, are simplicity itself, both freezing moments in time and bringing stillness to life.
The depth comes from the stories he tells around the shots.
They're social snaps, vignettes of life, candid glimpses of the souls of people he's met on his travels.
As Gerling flips painstakingly through his 36-shot books he gives us an alternative way of looking at time. But the pictures are really a catalyst for his real focus - his sympathetic but droll commentary offers us new ways of looking at society.
For new ways of looking at the generation gap, give four generations of locals a choir each and a chance to tell the others how you feel about them, and you get Sing it to my face.
Retirees, active parents, teens and tinies all have their turn to accuse, appreciate, and tell home truths to each other in a show with a warm community feel.
Writer/director Jo Randerson and composer and musical director Julian Raphael had just a week to get four choirs of local amateurs up to speed on Randerson's clever, perceptive and balanced views of the differing perspectives on the past and the present.
They gave the affectionate libretto warmth and fun, apparently relishing the opportunity to say things they've probably all said to each other in real life, but without the rancour.
Great stuff.
