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NZ Fringe Festival 07
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at Muritai School Yard, Eastbourne
reviewed by John Smythe 1 Mar 2007
The old make it new again
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Florence McFarlane, is set in Athena Village, a retirement home. It works surprisingly well, with clues to the interpretation offered in the programme. Sir Jasper Theseus owns the home, his fiancée is Head Nurse Hippolyta and Ms Egeus, from Social Welfare, regards the ‘inmates’ as her possessions. [more]

NZ Fringe Festival 07
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at Muritai School Yard, Eastbourne
reviewed by Ewen Coleman (The Dominion Post) 3 Mar 2007
Sheer delight
The two plays of Shakespeare that are most associated with youth are Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so to have the latter set in a rest home where the majority of the characters are in their dotage, as they are in Butterfly Creek Theatre Troupes current Bard-In-The-Yard production seems a most unusual approach. Yet surprisingly this works exceptionally well showing that elderly folk regressing into second child hood can be as fanciful and romantic as adolescents. [more]

Christchurch Arts Festival 2009
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at Town Hall
reviewed by Lindsay Clark 25 Jul 2009
A magical presentation
On rare occasions ... it is possible to have one's cake and eat it too. In this case the feast was for eye and ear; a cornucopia of beautiful music, Shakespeare spoken with intelligent feeling, visual delights and of course the interwoven stories of fairy and mortal in the theatre world's favourite Dream. [more]

Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival 2012
A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM at Tudor Garden, Hamilton Gardens
reviewed by Gail Pittaway 21 Feb 2012
Humorous invention in fast and tight production
When for some reason the planned and advertised production of Twelfth Night from the core troupe of the Hamilton Gardens Festival Slip of the tongue theatre was jettisoned, a new production was born out of the panic, adding in some more of Hamilton’s finest actors from a range of theatrical groups such as Full House, Improv Combat, Apocalypse Lounge, and Crossmatch. [more]

A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM at Maidment
reviewed by Lexie Matheson 6 May 2012
Playful, heart-warming, riddled with excellence
The opening night of Auckland Theatre Company’s fine production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream coincided with the largest full moon in a long time and an absolutely cloudless, star-filled sky. Somehow the two went magically together. [more]

A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM at Maidment
reviewed by James Wenley (Theatre Scenes - Auckland Theatre Blog) 7 May 2012
Fancy a Puck?
At the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, hobgoblin Puck famously excuses all that has gone before as a “weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream”. If so, it was a fantastic and crazy dream that the audience collectively dreamed in the theatre. [more]

A MIME TO KILL at BATS
reviewed by John Smythe 8 Feb 2009
Meditations on the notion of mime
... it was Bob Goldthwait's Shakes the Clown ... who saw his ilk as a downtrodden minority so [beat] Street Mimes senseless. [But] the maiming and murder of Mimes is not the focus of this new show from the Magniloquents ... A Mime to Kill is more about how the magic of mime dies when real objects and sounds intrude. [more]

A MIME TO KILL at BATS
reviewed by Lynn Freeman (Capital Times) 11 Feb 2009
Quiet triumph
Mime is a polarizing art form, you either get it and love it, or you don’t. I’m in the former camp, especially when the performers both explore and subvert the genre. [more]

A MIME TO KILL at The Basement, Lower Greys Ave
reviewed by Nik Smythe 17 Mar 2009
Literally shifts the boundaries of convention
I’ve never had any personal disdain for mime, but I’ve long understood it to be the most classically despised of the performing arts. I was reminded when I went to text the title of this play to a friend, and my predictive phone didn’t know the word ‘mime’. [more]

NZ Fringe Festival 09
A MOST OUTRAGEOUS HUMBUG at Waimapihi Reserve, end of Holloway Road, Aro Valley
reviewed by John Smythe 21 Feb 2009
Dichotomies that lurk within us all?
The merciful heavens dropped only a gentle mist upon the opening performance of A Most Outrageous Humbug, adding to the ambience – and to the post-performance laundry challenge, once Edgar Allan Poe had fought himself to death on the muddy lawn – of a most dramatic divertissement. [more]
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