November 8, 2017

REDS

Steve Dedalus    posted 3 Oct 2017, 02:58 PM

What a line-up! Stage event of the year! Place’ll be packed!

Dean Parker       posted 8 Nov 2017, 01:10 PM

QUENCHING THE THIRSTY DOG

At the start of the current decade Auckland’s annual Bloomsday show—which a group of us had been putting on intermittently since the start of the current century—shifted to the Thirsty Dog, a pub in the red-light area of K Rd. With Robyn Malcolm guesting as Molly Bloom, the shift took off with a bang and punters poured in. The publican counted the notes in his till and said to me, “Any time you want to come back, mate, the pub’s yours.” Subsequently we had guests like Carmel McGlone, Geraldine Brophy, Michael Hurst, George Henare, Bruce Hopkins, Noelle McCarthy, Lucy Lawless, Jennifer Ward-Lealand. And developed a following.

The regular band that did the music was the Jews Brothers Band. Amongst their number were Linn Lorkin, Hershal Herscher and Peter Scott. Musicians have many guises and these three were also known around the traps as the musical trio, French Toast. One day Linn suggested doing a show about Edith Piaf, whom she often covered. I went away and wrote down an outline which would act as a vehicle for Piaf numbers, together with songs written by Linn and Hershal. We worked this up into a show: Linn arrives in Paris at the end of the 1960s—as she did—with a language scholarship to the Sorbonne; instead she gets drawn—as she was—into cafes and bars, singing. In our case she is waylaid by two unscrupulous French musicians (Hershal and Peter) looking for an Edith Piaf for their itinerant tribute show. We did a trial run at a tiny stage in Westmere then presented the show at the Thirsty Dog with a splendid backdrop, a stand-up Eiffel Tower that I bought off Trade me for $36. Huge success. I tried to book it at The Basement but heard nothing back.

At the end of 2015 Frank Sinatra’s centenary was coming up. Most people know of Sinatra’s singing life and mobster connections but hardly anyone knows of his early years when he was close to the Communist Party and to organised labour. So we put a show together with a big band (well… it ended up being called “the Mouse Pack”…) and with Linn Lorkin and Justin Horn. Justin was a philosophy tutor at Auckland University who was a bit of a dab crooner in the evenings. Emphasis was on the songs, with me giving a biographical and dramatically constructed commentary on Sinatra in between numbers. Show was entitled, sensationally, When Sinatra was a RED.

This was a big success. We did it again at the Thirsty Dog, did it for the Auckland Jazz & Blues Club at the Point Chev RSA, did it for a Labour Party Christmas gig at the Polish Society Clubrooms.

This year I had a modest novel published. The novel was set in the 30s, 40s and 50s and was a sequel to John Mulgan’s Man Alone. I’d found my writing was frequently taking aboard musical numbers (such an immediate way to connect with an audience) and the novel was no different. So for the book launch, at the Thirsty Dog, Linn, Hershal and Peter—now calling themselves “Linn Lorkin and the Men Alone”—played two sets of eight songs that appeared in one way or another in the book and I read excerpts between the numbers. Big success! You don’t see many two-hour book launches where the crowd’s still there at the end. I’m currently negotiating with the Auckland Writers’ Week for its re-presentation as a cabaret evening next year.

This year was also the centenary of the Russian Revolution and so I wrote a script based on Alfred Rosmer’s Lenin’s Moscow and circulated it round theatres and announced on Theatreview.com its availability. No response—apart from a heartening enquiry from Jean Betts. I hadn’t really expected much of a response as the tide seemed out here on revolutionary enthusiasm, despite as we all know the poorest 40% of the population scraping by on 3% of the wealth. Of course this was before Winston Peters announced jaw-droppingly that capitalism had failed New Zealand, but I didn’t see NZ theatres taking a lead. So I thought I’d do it myself, as a reading, and at the usual venue.

It needed a cast of 10 and a pianist and I emailed a mixture of union organisers and actors. Everyone I contacted was hugely keen. I tried to get a grant from Creative NZ but crapped out, entangled in the most nightmarish bureaucratic thought-processes I’ve ever come across. On the day of the show we had a sort of rehearsal in the morning at the Trades Hall and I didn’t realize how long the piece was and arrived at the Thirsty Dog just thirty minutes before curtain-up. Place was already packed. The show turned out to be almost three hours long and the audience that had assembled clapped and shouted and was still there at 4.45pm, having listened attentively (in a beer-swilled pub!) to the longest and most important speeches ever delivered from the NZ stage. A friend said to me, “I drifted in and out of Kollontai’s big speech,” and of course I replied, “But that’s what speeches are like!” It was a wonderful and memorable occasion.