And now for something completely different from the extraordinary authentic power of My Name Is Rachel Corrie at Bats (7pm). Goldilocks and the Three Queers (9.30pm) – revised from its first outing in the Fringe – delivers the high camp romp its name implies. Yet both are political in their purpose as they explore global issues from an American perspective, one evoking a very true experience, the other opting for bizarre fantasy.

Rather than draw on the rich resources of Wellington’s 1960s-70s underground gay culture (Carmen’s coffee lounge et al), Short Term Visitor Parking’s devised work vamps up a pop culture pastiche of San Francisco at that seminal time, albeit with a Momma Queer straight from the Bronx and Goldilocks from the Deep South Bible Belt.

Given all the elements explored were present in NZ too – TV cooking shows, kids fixated on superheroes and losing their virginity, fanatical moral watchdogs (Patricia Bartlett), socio-political activism (world leaders in legislating for gay rights), suspect spiritual gurus and their communities (Bert Potter’s Centrepoint) – it is a crying shame the opportunity has not been taken to place our participation in the gay revolution into the global conversation.  

So a stroppy Japanese drag queen landlady (Chris Tse), whose only concern is collecting the ‘lent’, sets the scene along with Tane Upjohn-Beatson’s live electro-funk music …

Pill-popping, substance-snorting and lurex pant-suited Momma Queer (Martine Gray) alternately totters about attempting to demonstrate how to cook chocolate brownies, harangues her about-to-become legal son about putting away childish things, goes shopping and flakes out on the sofa.

Baby Queer (Simon Leary) plays out his fantasy life as Butter Boy, the offsider of gay Hero Guy (whose nemesis is Psycho Bitch) while anticipating coming of age when his Papa ‘pops his cherry’: the first hint of the play’s truly sinister aspects.

Goldilocks (Bronwen Pattison), who happens into the Queer home, is loud, committed, clumsy and has a weakness for chocolate brownies.  Her only interest is in converting anyone and everyone but when Baby finds himself aroused by her – a girl! – the plot begins to thicken …

Draped in tie-dyed fabric, Papa Queer (Roger Johnson) is an expansive wannabe guru waxing lyrical on the virtues of peace, love and tolerance – except when it involves his gay son being lured into the conventional, conforming and conservative straits of heterosexuality by a Christian girl.

Involving the audience in a Papa-led Gay Pride protest rally – a very 70s theatrical device – puts us in the position of wanting to play the game in support of the actors while becoming aware that mindless following of a guru figure can be lethal (e.g. Jonestown). And it is.  

As directed by Adam Donald it is hard to tell which is the means and which the end. There is so much time and space given to high-camp theatricality, as if the driving purpose is to create the opportunities to ACT A LOT, that the dramatic potential of an evolving true mutual attraction between Baby and Goldilocks remains sadly unexplored.

Likewise the interrogation of true tolerance – of love, freedom, trust, the right-to-be-oneself etc – is not given its dramatic due in the present moment; it’s just a dimension we may or may not feel moved to contemplate in retrospect. Except I have a niggling feeling this dramatic twist is there to give the show dramatic form rather than deliver a political punchline that has been well set up en route.

So if you want real world politics and consciousness-raising via a stunning solo performance (by Kate Prior), see My Name Is Rachel Corrie. If you want a high camp romp with under-cooked political pretensions, see Goldilocks and the Three Queers. And if you want bizarre juxtaposition, see them both.   

Note: Links below to reviews by Maryanne Cathro, Ewen Coleman and Uther Dean are for the original Fringe season.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

The first thing that really needs to be noted about this season of Goldilocks and the Three Queers is that it is a workshop season. This is an experimental first performance of an in-progress work which will be given its full airing in a few months in a season at BATS.

This is a work with somewhat of a way to go. When it rocks, it rocks. But when it flops, it flounders. But that’s okay, because this is just a tester. A taster of what is to come. I have no doubt that when Goldilocks makes its true debut later in the year that all the complaints I have will be if not totally gone then at least ironed out. There is such great potential in this work (some if not most of it realised in this first outing) that one cannot help but await its return with baited breath. 

Three Queers live together in San Francisco in what seems to be a hallucinatory memory of 1970. Baby Queer, energetically interpreted by Simon Leary, is days away from the age of consent and plans on much consenting. He also flits into and out of a dream world based around his homemade graphic novel about a fabulously gay superhero. Baby Queer’s dream life is wonderfully performed and delightful to watch so it is rather frustrating when it fizzles out to nothing, seemingly abandoned on the way to the end of the play.

There’s also Mama Queer, Martine Grey channelling Fran Drescher with a drug habit, who seems to be constantly in the middle of an anxiety attack. Which is hilarious but not really explored enough.

And finally there is the enigmatic Papa Queer, played by Roger Johnson as more southern priest that gay rights activist. Which is fine because it makes sense in context. I would have warmed to the character a lot more if more of his lines had not been delivered AT THE TOP OF HIS VOICE. Which worked for the character, but not for the fact that the play is performed in a small concrete room where his voices rings off the walls right into the irritated part of your brain.

The same can be said of Bronwen Pattison’s trailer trash, bible bounding, Southern Belle Goldilocks, who would be much more fun to spend time with if she just put a bit more measure into her delivery.

Rounding out the cast is Chris Tse as Ling Ling the Queers’ androgynous landlady. Like the similarly named character in production company Short Term Visitor Parking’s previous work Hansel un Gretel, Ling Ling is a grotesque stereotype. Too amusing to really offend and the fact this work is coming from a devising process so one has to assume that much of the character arose from the performer helps. But, it is somewhat uncomfortable that this company is making a motif across their work of such a grotesque and negative stereotype. Chris Tse however fully commits and has a clear mastery of the nuances of comic timing.

Goldilocks is simply too long. It is rather clearly a nice clear hour of a show, allowed to ramble out to eighty minutes. There is a sense with much of the dialogue that the actors were allowed to riff just a little too long and no one came in and gave it a good prune. The shape of the play also takes great pleasure in allowing the audience to work out what Papa Queer’s mysterious plans are a while before the other characters. Sadly, the ending simply takes too long to occur, going on and rather on, so the audience’s pleasure in having one up on the characters quickly turns to a leaden wait for the inevitable to occur.

Director Adam Donald’s utilisation of the found performance space (a basement on Dixon street) is very skilled as is Fern Karun’s set and lighting. Tane Upjohn Beatson’s live soundtrack is also evocative, fitting and rather groovy.

Goldilocks and the Three Queers has many more hits than misses and you can’t really disagree outright with a show that gives you brownies and cordial. It does however have a little way to go but it’s gonna get there. And it’s still a fun night out.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

An interesting aspect of the Fringe Festival is the way new venues appear, like Basement 39 in Dixon Street where Goldilocks and the Three Queers are assembled in a San Francisco basement flat in the 1970’s. 

Papa Queer (Roger Johnson), Momma Queer (Martine Gray) and Baby Queer (Simon Leary) are not biologically related, just a “family” of gays – preaching the brotherhood of gay rights. There is also their landlord Ling Ling (Chris Tse) – a Jackie Chan look-alike in drag. Into their midst comes Goldilocks ((Bronwen Pattison), a bible bashing hillbilly from the Deep South, trying to convert the Queers from their evil ways.

In the end neither side wins, the moral of the story seeming to be that those in the gay rights movement were just as misguided as those in the Pentecostal movement. 

A devised work under the direction of Adam Donald, it suffers like many of its type in being good in parts and bad in others and overly long. The cast are all highly competent, well skilled actors with lots of energy and animation but, by the time we get to the third cooking demonstration and have suffered incessant shouting, it all becomes rather tedious.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

It’s been a long time since I was in Wellington for a Fringe Festival. Last time I longingly read the reviews from my computer in Christchurch, where theatre tends to happen, well, in theatres. I have long looked forward to seeing experimental shows set in quirky venues that challenge the audience and make a nonsense of the “fourth wall”. The last one I remember was in the late ’90s, set in the front yard of Jason White’s flat in Mt Vic’s Hawker St, which was closed down early by overly challenged neighbours (anyone remember what it was called?).

Anyway, this is the head of excited anticipation with which I waited with the rest of the audience in a hallway off Dixon St to be ushered into a basement that is not usually a theatre venue, to see Goldilocks and the Three Queers. Other audience members were dressed in ’70s fashions to match the setting of the play in the San Francisco of 1970, where the gay rights movement was building up a head of…steam?

We are taken out of our reverie (induced by wondering what the heck is going on) by the arrival of Ling Ling, an OTT caricature of a Chinese landlord who leads us down into the basement to a non-stop and highly amusing monologue of gripes and complaints about the tenants who owe him (her?) rent and get up to all kinds of things. A clever device to set up the time, place and back story. The basement is white painted brick and convincingly dressed (by Fern Karun) as a cheap apartment strewn with saris and daisy floral sheets, and our seating is a mishmash of 70’s chairs sofas and beanbags. Very comfortable.

What ensues is a story devised through workshopping and based on the concept of Goldilocks. It incorporates three queers as promised – Mama Queer (Martine Gray) who is a flamboyant and drug addicted trannie with an abrasive Jersey accent; Baby Queer (Simon Leary) who eagerly awaits his majority and consequent deflowering while living in a fantasy world of comic characters; and Papa Queer (Roger Johnson), a charismatic guru figure who protects them. Goldilocks (Bronwen Pattison) is a southern bible belt trailer trash teen who turns up at their front door to try to convert them to god-fearing straightness.

Devised theatre is always difficult – it means the play is written by committee and the burden falls to the director (in this case Adam Donald) to try to get a coherent plot out of the ideas the cast present. As with many devised pieces, I feel the plot lacks the kind of orchestrated dramatic tension needed to thread it together; all the elements are there but they feel more like a pile of beads than a necklace.

Afterwards I am left wondering exactly what point the show is trying to make. I get the bit about all causes being susceptible to crazy, overzealous users; I get the bit about no one having the moral high ground; but it feels like the most important elements to the cast are the chance to dress up in ’70s gear and put on accents. These things should disappear for us, as their purpose should be to create context not invade the content.

The casualty of all this is the gay rights movement itself, which suffers unintentional – I suspect – derision. Such satire of important historic milestones, hard-won by our forebears, needs to be handled with intelligence and respect if it is to work.

In spite of all this, I was entertained and amused. They are a talented bunch and full of enthusiasm. I think the piece has potential and I hope that they keep refining and reworking it, and maybe take the brave step of losing the constraints of the original setting to give life and relevance to the themes instead. Wellington in 1970 was a pretty heady place to be too, and an unforgiving place in which to be queer.

Oh yes, I must mention Tane Upjohn-Beatson’s musical accompaniment. His electric guitar rifts are the perfect sound scape for the piece; as evocative as a whiff of maryjane.

Definitely worth a visit and I look forward to seeing how the show evolves into its next run. 
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer