Theatre | Parade
13 January 2024
When mime Tape Face made his first appearance on America’s Got Talent in 2016, judge Simon Cowell called him “clever”, Mel B labelled him “genius” and Howie Mandel called him “brilliant” and predicted that…
Theatre | Sydney Morning Herald (The)
30 January 2023
“Thomas Monckton has been performing his circus-informed, clown-honed show The Artist since 2017, and it shows. This physical theatre performance, now in its final outing at Sydney Festival following a successful season at…
Theatre | Spectrum News 1
16 July 2022
Shakespeare in the backyard? At the height of New Zealand’s Covid-19 restrictions, American-New Zealander Laura Irish had an idea. Sarah Yamanaka Waipahu investigates for Spectrum News 1.
“I had just experienced being let go from…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
4 April 2021
The mentor to some of Britain’s top performers believes the best acting comes from a childhood sense of playfulness – and is fraught with danger, David Jays reports for The Guardian. Defining the core…
Theatre | Stage (The)
4 August 2020
Launched last year, the Gillian Lynne and Peter Land Foundation continues the work of choreographer Gillian Lynne, whose widower, Taihape-born actor Peter Land tells Nick Smurthwaite, a journalist for The Stage, how the fund…
Theatre | GamesRadar+ | Washington Examiner
9 April 2020
“New Zealand comic Rhys Darby is perhaps best known to American audiences from the two recent Jumanji films and his show-stealing role on Flight of the Conchords as the eponymous band’s well-meaning but hapless manager Murray Hewitt,” Jibran Khan…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
8 January 2020
The Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie, 43, who is guest curating this year’s New Zealand Festival, speaks to The Guardian’s Charlotte Graham-McLay about his career thus far and the cost of compromise.
Although…
Theatre | Creative NZ
13 December 2019
A season of New Zealand theatre is set to hit New York stages next year. Showing at SoHo Playhouse, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, Modern Māori Quartet: Two Worlds and The Contours of…
Theatre | Bucks Free Press
30 November 2019
New Zealand-born teenager Harry Sills is starring at the Royal Opera House in Benjamin Britten’s, Death in Venice on London’s West End through 6 December.
The 14-year-old, who can act and dance, said: “The opportunity…
Theatre | Stuff
27 August 2019
Upper Hutt singer Jason Henderson, 30, is heading to New York City to spend two years studying acting at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theatre, where he will follow in the footsteps of Robert…
Theatre | BBC | i news
31 July 2019
New Zealand stand-up Rose Matafeo, 27, talks on-stage confidence, teen crushes and writing her own BBC sitcom with Alice Jones, a journalist for UK newspaper, i.
It is almost a year since Matafeo won the…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
17 June 2019
Profoundly inclusive and spectacularly eclectic, cabaret is what ‘theatre could have been if it hadn’t started building walls’. “Growing up, I never saw anyone who looked like me in the arts industry,” New Zealand-born…
Theatre | Chortle
10 April 2019
Rose Matafeo is to star in BBC Three sitcom Star Struck, which follows a twentysomething woman living in London as she tries to work out life and love. Jay Richardson reports for
Theatre | Deadline
8 March 2019
New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo will star alongside Harry Potter star Matthew Lewis in feature comedy Baby, Done, which is exec produced by Taika Waititi. The film is directed by Curtis Vowell (Fantail). Nancy…
Theatre | Broadly
11 February 2019
Rising star Auckland-born Rose Matafeo recently won the prestigious Best Comedy Show Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, one of comedy’s biggest prizes, for her show Horndog. Matafeo, 26, talked to online news site…
Theatre | Vancouver Sun
1 February 2019
Mrs Krishnan’s Party is a semi-improvised comic celebration of the southern Indian harvest festival of Onam, brought to Canada’s shores by New Zealand’s Indian Ink Theatre Company. It is reviewed by the Vancouver Sun.
“The…
Theatre | Irish Examiner
22 October 2018
“It was a long march for Rhys Darby to go from the New Zealand army to starring in Flight Of The Conchords, writes Richard Fitzpatrick” in an article in The Irish Examiner.
After finishing…
Theatre | Evening Standard
1 October 2018
“When Rose Matafeo won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show at the Edinburgh Festival in August the acclaim was widespread. The director of the awards, Nica Burns, described the London-based New Zealander as…
Theatre | Brotfabrik
27 September 2018
Germany-based actress New Zealander Dulcie Smart performs in the Berlin production of Blonde Poison, on until 3 October at the city’s Brotfabrik theatre.
In the one-woman play, Smart plays Stella, an older woman looking…
Theatre | Guardian (The) | TimeOut
14 September 2018
Playing the boy who lived – well, the man who lived, given that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child takes place 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts – is Gareth Reeves (pictured right),…
Theatre | Mail Tribune
13 September 2018
Retired Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) executive director Paul Nicholson is interviewed by Oregon daily newspaper, Mail Tribune as part of the publication’s periodic ‘Community Builder’ series.
Nicholson, who moved to the United States in 1980, says…
Theatre | Times (The)
2 September 2018
“Thom Monckton has demonstrated what an outstanding physical comedian he is during several previous Fringe visits. In The Pianist he used his gangling frame and rubbery face to puncture the pomposities of classical music….
Theatre | Scotsman (The)
27 August 2018
New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo, 26, has won the biggest comedy award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for her show Horndog, becoming only the fifth female comic to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award since…
Theatre | Arts Desk (The)
26 August 2018
“New Zealander Alice Snedden is well established in her native country as a comic, television writer and newspaper columnist, Fringe. It’s a breezy run-through of…
Theatre | London Evening Standard
24 August 2018
New Zealand-born comic Rose Matafeo’s show Horndog was a highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and it is also one of the London Evening Standard’s top picks to see in the UK capital.
“Insatiable comedy fans…
Theatre | Big Issue (The)
22 July 2018
Through the story of 18th-century Founding Father of America, Alexander Hamilton, and the American Wars of Independence, blockbuster stage musical Hamilton is fiercely relevant today, and especially last week, when President Donald Trump brought…
Theatre | Fortune
14 July 2018
Netflix “is launching an international stand-up comedy event series that will feature 47 comedians from 13 regions”. New Zealand comedians Urzila Carlson and Cal Wilson are part of the line-up. Anita Bennett reports for…
Theatre | Matangi Tonga
5 April 2018
New Zealand-born Tongan, Albert Mateni, 26, aims to inspire Pacific youth with his play, Hearts of Men set to debut on 5-14 April at the Mangere Arts Centre in Auckland.
Affected by the suicide rate…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
31 March 2018
Few comedians ever play London’s O2 Arena and fewer still manage three nights in a row. Those who do tend to have some things in common: a relatable observational style, limited creative ambition and…
Theatre | Vancouver Observer
22 March 2018
New Zealand comedian Deb Filler recreates 50 years of chart-toppers and pop icons in her solo show I Did it My Way in Yiddish (in English). Toronto-based Filler performed the show at this year’s…
Theatre | The List
17 March 2018
“Is it the accents? Is it the hirsuteness? Is it the manner in which they stumble around an awkward social situation while singing a lovely / silly ditty? Just what is it that makes…
Theatre | Chortle
10 February 2018
New Zealand silent comedian Sam Wills, aka Tape Face, is to embark on a three-year residency in Las Vegas.
The Harrah’s casino has custom-built a cabaret venue for his mime show at a reported cost…
Theatre | Straits Times (The)
26 January 2018
In If There’s Not Dancing At The Revolution, I’m Not Coming, New Zealander Julia Croft performs a striptease and dissects the objectification of the female body in pop culture. Croft took the show to…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
16 January 2018
Flight of the Conchords and Rose Matafeo are two “uproarious” comedy acts Guardian readers are recommended to buy tickets for this year, included alongside the world’s biggest standup Chris Rock and fellow American Maria…
Theatre | Telegraph (The)
23 December 2017
“Following the delirious success of Kraken and Nautilus, extraordinary celebration of the…
Theatre | Blouin Artinfo
7 December 2017
America’s Got Talent sensation Tape Face will be performing at the Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, UK on 20 February 2018. Sam Wills is a 39-year-old New Zealander who lives in Lincolnshire but as his…
Theatre | Independent (The)
2 November 2017
Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie are back, and will tour the UK and Ireland in March 2018 for the first time in more than seven years. The ‘Flight of the…
Theatre | Sydney Morning Herald (The)
26 September 2017
If there were a holy grail for costume designers today, it would have to be working on Game of Thrones, according to Kerrie O’Brien writing for the Sydney Morning Herald. New Zealander Chantelle Gerrard,…
Theatre | Courier-Mail (The)
31 August 2017
They killed her off in Australian prison drama Wentworth in 2016, but Auckland-born Danielle Cormack will live again on stage for Queensland Theatre next year. Cormack, 46, played Bea Smith in the television series…
Theatre | West Australian (The)
27 August 2017
New Zealander Rhys Darby believes he was a bird in a former life and it’s this premise that forms the basis for his new live show, Mystic Time Bird, which is on at Perth’s…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
26 August 2017
This year, Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s “best-loved mime act” New Zealander Trygve Wakenshaw has teamed up with his one-year-old son on stage in Trygve vs a Baby.
“The publicity asks: who’s more entertaining? And the answer,…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
18 August 2017
New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo, 25, “keeps things upbeat as she lightly interrogates Hollywood cliché and the role models on offer to young women” in her new show Sassy Best Friend, on now at…
Theatre | Financial Times
27 July 2017
New Zealand-born Amber Sainsbury is founder and CEO of UK-based creative arts charity Dramatic Need, for which Oscar-winning film director Danny Boyle has served as a trustee since 2007. The charity’s South African flagship,…
Theatre | Sydney Morning Herald (The)
12 July 2017
The Pop-Up Globe theatre, brainchild of New Zealand-born Miles Gregory, is opening in Melbourne in September, and will host four plays: Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, As You Like It and Henry V.
The
Theatre | Adelaide Review (The)
29 June 2017
“The one-woman musical-of-sorts, , which New Zealander Penny Ashton says was co-written by her and Jane Austen (as we approach the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death), the often hilarious Promise and Promiscuity…
Theatre | Otago Daily Times
24 June 2017
Dunedin-based singer Jason Henderson is the first New Zealander to be accepted to attend the St Louis Cabaret Conference from 17-23 July, after which he plans to relocate to New York City, the home…
Theatre | Daily Review
30 May 2017
New Zealand-born musical theatre performer Hayden Tee has been playing the role of Javert in Les Misérables since 2014, first as part of the Australian cast, then on an international tour, and finally on…
Theatre | Allied News
28 April 2017
Jane Doe, previously titled We Are Steubenville, is a play created, written and directed by Eleanor Bishop, a New Zealand-born director who studied fine arts at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama in…
Theatre | Japan Times (The)
3 March 2017
Founded in 2012 by New Zealand-born James Sutherland, you won’t be alone if you’ve never heard of the Tokyo-based International Centre for Theatre Arts, because few have seen any plays it has staged and…
Theatre | Northern Echo (The)
2 March 2017
New Zealand-born writer and performer Brad McCormick is taking his production of Sammy and the Snow Leopard, under the auspices of the ground-breaking children’s theatre company Travelling Light, to the North-East of the UK…
Theatre | Las Vegas Review Journal (The)
23 February 2017
New Zealand performance artist Sam Wills, aka Tape Face, has begun a highly anticipated residency at The Flamingo in Las Vegas.
He doesn’t call himself a mime, but he swears that’s only “because I know…
Theatre | West Australian (The)
11 February 2017
After a year away from Perth’s Fringe World Festival, New Zealand comedian Trygve Wakenshaw returned to Western Australia, performing the highly-anticipated third work in his “underwater trilogy”, Nautilus. Wakenshaw also performs his collaboration with…
Theatre | Daily Telegraph (The)
10 January 2017
A musical written by New Zealander Tim Finn is heading to Sydney for the very first time as part of the Sydney Festival, which takes over the city from 7-29 January.
Finn wrote…
Theatre | West Australian (The)
9 December 2016
When it comes to improvised comedy, Cal Wilson, 46, is no rookie, Vanessa Williams writes for the West Australian. Having built a solid stand-up career over the past 19 years, the Christchurch-born, Melbourne-based comedian…
Theatre | Guardian (The)
20 November 2016
Fresh from a stint on America’s Got Talent, New Zealand comedian Sam Wills, aka Tape Face, recently preformed in Milton Keynes, delivering “a captivating set of skits that the audience on stage and…
Theatre | New York Times (The)
17 November 2016
A New York Times reviewer describes Auckland-born actor Lisa Harrow’s performance as “superb” in her role as Volumnia in Red Bull Theatre’s “gripping new production” of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, on now at New…