The Unruly Tourists is everything I want to see happen to classical music. Too long has opera held onto tradition, languages that people pretend to understand, and upper-middle class etiquette. 

The show, written over Zoom during the Covid lockdowns, moves opera into modern contexts, something that Broadway musicals started decades ago which is part of what makes the form of musical storytelling popular.

At first glance, you might think you’re at your niece’s intermediate school production – low-budget looking costumes, a weird disco ball wrapped in cardboard and just a lot of plastic crap on stage.

But queue [sic] a delicious cluster of chorus, featuring Tayla Alexander, Morag Atchison, Matthew Kereama (Ngāti Manomano) and Shiddharth Chand, underscored by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra who have their sound brilliantly exposed, you’ll be reminded of the classy patron you’re trying so hard to be. [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Might those obstreperous tourists, in the summer of 2019, ever have imagined that their littering, pilfering and profanities would make it to the opera stage?

The genesis of NZ Opera’s The Unruly Tourists, which premiered on Thursday night, has been almost as controversial. From the beginning, librettists Livi Reihana and Amanda Kennedy flaunted their operatic ignorance, while composer Luke Di Somma was best known for his rock musical That Bloody Woman.

Presented in the round, director Thomas de Mallet Burgess fuelled the confrontation between foul-mouthed foreigners and the righteous Kiwi public with seasoned flair. [More]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

He wasn’t really serious … was he? NZ Opera General Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess – with his focus on the small, the unusual and the local – has been a General Director unlike any we’ve seen on these shores. His programming of a Janet Frame opera (The Strangest of Angels, initiated by Anna Leese who created it with Kenneth Young and Georgia Jamieson Emms) played to enthusiastic reviews in her old South Island haunts, and plans were forming to present a more recent local story on a larger scale. However, the publicly-released proposal of an opera based on the Unruly Tourists caused outrage – not to mention high-profile resignations – many feeling there were far more salutary topics for an opera than a tribe of marauding yobbos who, in the summer of 2019, seemed intent on trashing our fair land from one end of the North Island to the other. Further disquiet came when it was revealed that the comedy duo, Livi Reihana and Amanda Kennedy (aka The Fan Brigade) were to write the libretto, one of them revealing on a Stuff documentary that they hadn’t heard the word ‘libretto’ before and both cheerfully admitting they’d never even seen an opera. 

After Covid derailed the original plans with some marauding of its own, the opera has finally premiered on March 23 2023 [with a preview the night before]. Even a pre-show glance at the programme reveals that this is to be an event of significance, with Jennifer Ward-Lealand playing a lead role, award-winning singers in the Ensemble, and members of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in tow. I can think of no other opera which played so close to its plot location (except Alan John’s opera about the building of the Sydney Opera House, premiered at – you guessed it – The Sydney Opera House), the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna being only hundreds of metres from where it all started on Takapuna Beach, January 2019.

On entering the theatre, we’re confronted with a sort of circus cabaret – tables on one side, seats on the other – lit by over 150 hanging lights, the eleven musicians sandwiched between stage and seats. The action begins, after a prologue, with the tourists’ arrival heralded by singing airport staff, leading to the Takapuna Beach confrontation. In a clever change of perspective, we next meet Manaia, a frustrated journalist who takes up the Unruly Tourists story and remains a central character throughout the story. Further scenes (there are 12 in all) alternate between the tourists’ sightseeing spree, the newsroom and the public outrage.

It’s a fast-paced show, sparkling with action and irreverent, down-home Kiwi wit. The five tourists themselves (played by Joshua Cramond, Andrew Grainger, Frith Horan, Jennifer Ward-Lealand and young William Kelly) are a suitably outgoing, rambunctious lot with close family dynamics – young irreverence, a grandfatherly figure, a matriarch holding the family together, and the boy played by William Kelly, who takes to the swearing-black-and-blue role with almost alarming confidence. Ebony Andrew delivers a committed performance as Manaia, standing strong in giving us much of the thought-provoking angle of the show. 

The outstanding Ensemble, made up from this country’s finest opera singers, provide roles such as waiters, policemen and customs officials. It is sometimes hard to identify individuals with the odd headgear and beaky protrusions, but Morag Atchison hits the heights as a frighteningly ear-splitting judge. Robert Tucker commands the stage in a variety of roles, culminating in his portrayal of an imperially-garbed Phil Goff (who is no doubt chuffed at making it into the operatic canon) as he struts the stage like a modern-day Nero in a tour-de-force Verdi would have been proud of (but set to lyrics which would have turned Verdi’s own librettist 13 shades of purple).

It is a plum job for Luke di Somma, who ably conducts his fine musicians in his own original score, which proves to be wonderfully inventive, changing quickly between the minimalist, the quirky and the dramatic, and meeting the needs of singers from varied backgrounds while maintaining cohesion throughout.

Is it, in the end, an opera? Well yes, it is – for one thing, the ensemble writing could hardly be more operatic – yet it lives up to its ‘genre-bending label’, particularly in the second half, where Jennifer Ward-Lealand’s poignant defence of the tourists is set to dark cabaret, and Ebony Andrew’s powerfully-wrought change of heart is a leaf straight out of musical theatre’s book.

Last night’s audience took the production to heart, guffawing at Auckland’s foibles (almost at the expense of the tourists’ entertaining number praising a badly-pronounced Matamata) and proving that we could laugh at ourselves and our primness, hypocrisies and dysfunction, although when hate and menace (in the form of flaming torches and KKK-like masks) are added to the list – almost against the tourists’ ‘loveable rogue’ image – we begin to wonder if we were quite that bad. I can’t help thinking that, if this opera travelled overseas, our tourist industry would be dead in the water! With a number of audience members standing to deliver enthusiastic applause at the show’s end, last night’s rollicking dose of irreverence could certainly be described as a popular success for the unconventional Thomas de Mallet Burgess. He’s off to Finland in August, and goodness knows what they’ll make of him – or, after his irreverent depiction of New Zealand society, what he’ll make of them.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer