The Secret Life of a Belly Dancer is a total snore-fest followed by possibly the most entertaining night of your life: a short story made long then saved with great dancing.

A Kiwi girl with a middle-eastern background returns to New Zealand from her life and husband in Egypt. Shamed through her love of belly dance and cast out by her in-laws, Jamila (played by an enchanting Amanda Rodriguez) returns home to stay with Kiwi mum Carol (Angela Kemp) and exotic dad Rex (Paul Norell).

Rex had forbidden his daughter to leave for foreign shores so her return is dealt with sternly. He is the owner of the local supermarket and he gives Jamila a job there, on nightshift shelf stacking duty as punishment. There she meets Barb (Melissa Charbonneu), Angela (Suza Lawrence), Tellus (Jess Forsman)  and Sandra (Robyn Donnelly).

These girls form ‘the gang’ and look after poor Jamila. The characters are really lovely and contrasting and make for some great comic moments, particularly the way that Forsman and Donnelly work together! But after catching a sneaky look at Jamila doing her belly dancing in the isles of the store, the rest of the girls want in and convince her to teach them.

Enter the dastardly Delilah Delight (Carol Seay), the owner of a successful Belly dancing school franchise – she is set on running Jamila out of town (in order to remove the competition) … Well this culminates in a dance competition which forms the finale of the show. 

Geoff Allen’s script is similar to his direction: slow, clunky and repetitive. If I never see another scene change with stage hands scuttling around in semi-darkness, it will be too soon. We audience members should not have to waste precious moments of our lives this way! The challenges that are setup for the characters to overcome are too contrived (particularly the cancer scenes – which I find a little macabre).

I really wish Geoff would trust his work enough to get someone else to direct it; I’m sure they would tear it in half, which is just what it needs! I am speaking metaphorically of course: cut the play in half and it would be twice as good!

Let me explain; being a new work I expected the play to come in at about 1 ½ hours, I imagined 2 hours tops. No my dear readers The Secret Life of a Belly Dancer comes in at 3 full hours! This is potentially a feel good comedy fusion of Ladies Night and Calendar Girls only more beautiful, sexy and less rude than both.

However, I am prone to exaggeration and things are not as bad as they seem. The dancing at the end is truly fantastic (thanks to the brilliant choreography of Fiona Harding) and the way the ladies struggle to learn the moves (in often hilarious ways) then to shine, is fabulous because I am really wondering if they’ll pull it off … Sorry to let the cat out of the bag, but it’s the dancing that makes the show so great!

I seriously recommend you sit through the first half and stay for this! It’s so rewarding to see these beautiful stunning women do their "thang", both as their characters but also as brave, sexy, confidant people too, because you can’t watch the performance without being acutely aware these are real people as well as imaginary characters and that is what belly dance is about to me and what makes it so great.
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