The laid-back, homespun sensibility of Rangi and Mau’s Amazing Race is supercharged with fast-paced energy, spirit and infectious humour.  Playing to a rather light Saturday evening crowd of twenty odd doesn’t stop anyone on stage fully investing their hearts and souls, producing an instructive and entertaining showcase with commitment and generosity. 

A truly collective effort, the company comprises the skills and talents of Joy Vaele and Troy Tu’ua, co-directing six players through a hyperactively hilarious script originally wrought by four playwrights – Vaele, Tanya Muagututi’a, Ave Sua and Raniera Dallas. Muagututi’a and Dallas are also credited along with Pos Mavaega, Talia-Rae Mavaega as ‘Production support’, presumably responsible for the professionally executed sound, lighting, costume and stage designs. 

Josephine Mavaega plays Rangi, a sassy, switched-on Maori schoolgirl.  Jake Arona is Mau, a less academically driven Samoan schoolboy keen on rugby and food.  Joining forces they set out to complete their school project: a presentation about Matariki, celestial focal point of the midwinter Maori new-year. 

As luck would have it, when Mau spins the tiny disco-ball he thought was a diamond, a Genie named Mata appears in the sagaciously cheeky form of Luse Su’a, to send Rangi and Mau, and by extension us, on an Amazing-Race styled crash course through a number of aspects of Matariki tradition, known to many as the Seven Sisters and more still as the Pleiades constellation. 

A couple of pint-sized dynamos, Ella Mavaega and David Ray-Lelisi first appear as the camera and sound crew assigned to track the kids’ progress and record the occasional diary-cam segment.  Later the same two plucky youngsters appear as characters from Rangi’s past, met while visiting Maungakiekie in the seventies. 

Travelling magically through time, first back to World War II, Rangi and Mau encounter Kahu (Levi Matautia-Morgan), an earnest young Maori farmer who explains that the Matariki rituals of his tupuna are all but completely unpractised by his own generation.  As their trans-dimensional journey ensues, rising to various challenges in the hope of earning all seven ‘stars’, the kids repeatedly encounter Kahu at different stages in his life.  His repeated comical flirtations with Mata are a crowd favourite, exchanging some of the cheesiest clichéd pick-up lines you’ll ever hear if you haven’t already. 

There are a few unpolished transitions and mildly awkward moments along the far-reaching journey across land and sea and sky, over six decades or centuries if one considers the star cluster’s average distance from Earth in light years (444), or even millennia if you include the amusingly concise challenge-fulfilling performance of the classic Maori legend of Rangi, Papa, Tane and Tawhiri.  Any such glitches are immaterial thanks to the inherent inclusive nature of the production.

Educationally they pack heaps in, on a number of levels.  Firstly we are invited to observe and compare various features in Samoan and Maori culture, language and lore, with a central focus on Maori’s relationship with the Matariki constellation, the way it influences each area of life.  Secondly, we learn of our land’s social and political history, again emphasising the massive decline and resurgent comeback of these annual month-long celebrations, now thankfully a familiar event. 

All that combined with inimitably Pasifika irascible humour, Rangi and Mau makes for ideal holiday pseudo-escapist entertainment, where you and your kids might inadvertently learn some interesting facts.  The half-dozen odd kids in this evening’s audience leave the theatre with big smiles and sparkles of inspiration in their eyes. 

Now well into their third decade, the collective known as Pacific Underground has itself a long, rich and artistically prosperous history.  Along the way they’ve introduced and cultivated some stellar individual careers, and produced some of the most laugh-out-loud and intensely dramatic theatre I’ve seen from anywhere.

A well-impressed tip of the hat also goes to Glen Innes’ classy new arts and performance complex Te Oro, officially opened in May and boasting several studio spaces, a whare-kai (opening soon) and of course the central theatre-space, modestly sized but well-appointed with a high lighting grid (which for this production features a long string of fairy lights woven through it for astronomical effect).  Artwork created by participants in various holiday workshops is also on display in the foyer. 

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