The latest Theatreview Weekly includes reviews of My Name is Gary Cooper, Stomach, and Twelfth Night.

See more recent reviews at theatreview.org, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory.

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The latest Theatreview Weekly includes reviews of My Name is Gary Cooper, Stomach, and Twelfth Night.

See more recent reviews at theatreview.org, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory.

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MY NAME IS GARY COOPER: Gary Cooper an absolute must-see
Kumu Kahua Theatre, 46 Merchant Street, Honolulu, HAWAI'I
- reviewed by Will Caron

Complex, entertaining and vivid, Kumu Kahua’s My Name Is Gary Cooper is a theatrical triumph that will leave you with questions about identity and mainstream narratives of the Pacific.

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STOMACH: A delight to digest
BATS Theatre, The Propellor Stage, 1 Kent Tce, Wellington
- reviewed by John Smythe

When creating a play about a relationship that ends badly, one way to achieve a happy ending is to tell the story in reverse. The strategy also helps if the story might seem a bit prosaic, told as a straight narrative. Giving the audience that bit of brain work to do enhances our engagement.

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TWELFTH NIGHT: A fluent flow of seamless unseemliness
re.SPACE, 176 Victoria Street, Te Aro, Wellington
- reviewed by John Smythe

A programme note reminds us Twelfth Night on the Christian calendar, the feast of the Epiphany, brings days of feasting and revels to their climax with “intense merriment, misrule and confusion”. And although this happens in the northern hemisphere’s winter, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is abounds in references to spring and summer, allowing it to sit “perfectly in a New Zealand context.”

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TWELFTH NIGHT: Art gallery woven into comic take on Shakespeare
re.SPACE, 176 Victoria Street, Te Aro, Wellington
- reviewed by Laurie Atkinson [Reproduced with permission of Fairfax Media]

Last year Samuel Phillips directed a very funny A Midsummer’s Night Dream that was performed in an unpromising venue: a large abandoned retail space in Victoria Street. This year the company have crossed the road to a much smaller and a no more promising theatrical venue, the art gallery, re.SPACE.

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MY NAME IS GARY COOPER: Sensual complexity
Kumu Kahua Theatre, 46 Merchant Street, Honolulu, HAWAI'I
- reviewed by Moana Nepia

Like some of his contemporaries, Samoan New Zealander Victor Rodger, author of this latest production to hit the Kumu Kahua Theatre, (home of contemporary Hawaii-centred theatre in Honolulu), unsettles some of the historical Euro-American depictions of Pacific Islanders through focussing on the personal experiences, day to day realities, and complexities of Pacific Islander encounters with colonial legacies and globalised forces.

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See more recent reviews at theatreview.org.nz, the NZ Performing Arts Review & Directory

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