On the surface, Ladies For Hire is a characteristic Alison Quigan seasonal celebration. It’s almost as if she never left Centrepoint. The play has appealing characters entwined in an easily identifiable and understood situation, an obstacle to overcome with a feel-good resolution, some frivolity, a little froth, and a cherry on the top. As popular and as entertaining as this may have proved in the past, five years on Shortland Street have surely and inevitably had an influence.

In Quigan’s twelfth play for the theatre and the first since 2004’s watershed 30th anniversary season, there is harder social undercurrent. It’s a restless unkind world that intrudes via employment and health uncertainty, petty ambition, manipulation, dishonesty, bullying, and sociopathic (P-fuelled?) violence.

With their elder patron away on retreat, members of the happy-go-lucky ladies’ church choir at St Mary’s parish come up against the new order in Father Paul – young, ambitious and uncompromising.

They may be volunteers but he unceremoniously sacks them for their disrespectful attitude. However, the girls aren’t quite ready to be sacked. Shelley, a young hairdressing student from Waipukurau has only just joined, and they’ll really miss Marijke’s Dutch home baking.

Mary Mac, veteran chain-smoker and teacher, gets the singers some private gigs courtesy of a misleading poster – so there they are outside their comfort zones, performing at a stag do, singing gorillagrams in Woodville, and providing seasonal in-store entertainment.

But Mary O’s husband and partner in their wrecking company suffers a stroke; choirmaster Harriet is made redundant under stressful circumstances; Father Peter is accused of unspecified impropriety, while Marijke’s sullen and increasingly belligerent teenage son Trent is becoming more and more of a handful, and disturbed by the insinuating allegations against Father Peter, she drops away. The approaching Christmas is looking anything but merry.

The strands supporting this play are its believable characters and the relationships that bind them, even if a couple of the story’s climactic situations and contrivances test the boundaries of that belief. There’s a cleverly constructed encounter with a cop in the Manawatu Gorge, but a bit of a makeshift feel about the Carols in The Square scene, with its shocking and tragic act that doesn’t allow enough time to properly react or to fully register its much wider implications.

However, the play’s dialogue sparkles, laced with quick earthy and ironic wit, especially when delivered by Jennifer Ludlam’s wisecracking Mary Mac – "Marriage is like the Middle East: there is no solution!" And there’s the lovingly constructed character, poise and accent of Lyndee-Jane Rutherford’s Marijke to appreciate.

And through it all, they sing – from high choral to pop ditties and carols – in harmonious expressions of hope, friendship and love on the beautifully finished two-tier choir loft-crowned set by Bruce Graham and Harvey Taylor. 

Thought provoking as well as fun, Ladies For Hire is entertainment as in tune with the season as it is with the times.
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A bunch of people turning up to sing in a choir, voluntarily, whenever needed, week after week, year after year, is in itself quite impressive. There may well be the pleasures of the singing, of contributing to harmonies, and big choral sounds, of relatings, and the meanings tied up with being part of something larger than the sum of its individuals; even so, it is genuinely impressive. Much would similarly be true for sundry groups of musos.

The `Ladies for Hire’ complication comes about in this show when a small Catholic church’s small, all-female choir gets heaved out by a stroppy, ambitious, control-freak junior priest, while the senior priest is away on a retreat, and they have to find other ways of carrying on, preferably paid. An injudiciously-worded poster, with this heading, gets them into several tricky situations, as you might guess.

For years, Alison Quigan, usually with a collaborator (Ross Gumbley, Lucy Schmidt, or whoever), used to write and create Christmas season shows for Centrepoint, some of which went on to applauded productions in other theatres around the country. She’s now based elsewhere, and yet here’s another that certainly deserves to do well. (Incidentally, for this premiere, local production, many of the performances between now and Christmas are reputedly already heavily booked.)

It’s well-crafted, has plenty of strong and amusing lines (some of them laugh-out-loud), and adequately differentiated characters, each with their own lesser stories. It moves along effectively, with sufficient incident and interesting twists.

It’s great to see much of the old team working together again, with Kingsford-Brown directing, and Alison’s partner Bruce Graham designing the set, both very capably. And, curiously, the youngest choir-member Shelley is played by their daughter Sarah Graham, with plenty of vivacity and in good voice; clearly a promising trouper.

Even more of a Centrepoint veteran, David McKenzie plays the senior priest, Father Peter – benign, wise, yet absurdly impractical – who becomes, for a time, the target of a bevy of baseless-but-hard-to-disprove Doubt-type allegations promoted by his junior, Father Paul. McKenzie also doubles as a kind-hearted cop.

Josh Harriman, a newcomer, is suitably obnoxious as Father Paul, and as Trent, the increasingly toxic son of one of the choristers, but is allowed to make up for this at the end as another character again, Shelley’s amiable new boyfriend, and Father Christmas.

Still, much of the life of the show is in its singers and its singing, with Harriet the choir-mistress (Helen Moulder), Mary McIntyre (Jennifer Ludlam), Marijke Van Demon (Lyndee-Jane Rutherford) and Mary O’Donnell (Kate Louise Elliott), plus of course Shelley:  a cast who sing, act, and – where necessary – dance their socks off. It’s grand-quality singing, with plenty of variety, heart-warming and enjoyable. 

Bruce Graham’s versatile two-level set serves as a church with a choir-loft, or whatever else it needs to be, with effective reinforcement from Clinton Poole’s lighting.

Obviously, I reckon Ladies for Hire hits the spot for a Christmas-season show rather well. 
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