Blue Wizard

Blue Wizard runs at Belvoir from 19 February – 15 March 2015. By Nick Coyle.

I first saw and wrote about Nick Coyle’s Blue Wizard at PACT in 2013, when it was part of the Tiny Stadiums festival. My friend Hannah and I was utterly entranced by it. We were thrilled when we heard it was coming back to play at Belvoir, and we took the opportunity to drag a whole bunch of friends along with us this time so that they too could understand its fabulousness.

Blue Wizard is such a special piece of theatre. It’s ridiculous and sublime and silly and touching and spectacular all by turns. The Blue Wizard (Coyle) has come to earth on a special mission from his home – a crystal planet where everyone’s gay – but when his dance of erotic greeting isn’t exactly received the way he’d hoped and he realises that he can’t contact home (in particular, he can’t contact his beloved boyfriend, John Quark Jon), things take a darker turn. Alone except for a truly creepy wizard baby that he christens Meryl Streep, the Blue Wizard must work out how to survive in an unfriendly and lonely world.

The story of a fabulously sparkly gay wizard isolated in a world that does not welcome him is not a particularly subtle allegory, but there’s no reason for it to be. What I remember most from the last time I saw this show is how funny it was, but what struck me this time was just how sad it was as well. That’s something that’s clearly been built on in development, because the underlying level of pathos in this version of Blue Wizard is much more poignant. The Blue Wizard is fabulous and funny, but he’s also horribly lonely. He tries to do the best he can and to parent Meryl Streep insofar as he is capable (parenting is not something that Blue Wizards – the wizards of flirting, fucking and dancing – are usually that good at), but he misses his home, and he misses his life, and he misses his boyfriend, and he misses belonging.

It’s a really wonderful piece of queer theatre and it’s perfect for Mardi Gras. I’m so, so glad I got to see it again, and that I could make more people experience it too. It also clearly contains the best use of Britney Spears’ song Perfume in the history of theatre, ever. It has a truly startling and moving ending (which is still a shock even when you know it’s coming), and the end sequence with the treadmill is hair-standing-up-ingly spectacular. I was worried that it wouldn’t be as magical the second time around, but I was wrong – the Blue Wizard’s spell is even more powerful this time.

(Also, I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to know more about the Pink Wizards of Love and Passive Aggression. I would watch a show that was just about them doing day to day tasks and living their crystal planet lives.)

Trojans

Trojans runs at PACT in Erskineville from November 14-22 2014 as part of the Tiny Stadiums Festival.

Trojans by Project Mess at PACT Sydney is not the greatest piece of theatre you’re ever going to see. It’s probably not in the top twenty either. But it is a lot of fun: and fun, as far as I’m concerned, is a good enough reason to see anything.

The conceit behind Trojans is one drawn from Mexican telenovela (essentially soap operas, generally of the most hyperbolic kind). The story moves so fast and the actors are required to film so many pages of script in a day that it isn’t possible for the actors to learn their lines, so dialogue is fed to them via radio as they tape. One take, one chance: that’s it. In Trojans, the lines are delivered to actors via radio and they deliver them as we watch, the action happening in real time against a green screen.

I love this idea. Like, I LOVE IT. The idea of genre fiction and maligned popular artforms – which most definitely includes telenovela and soap opera – on the stage is one that appeals to me greatly, so when I heard about Trojans, I pretty much hallooed HELL YES to the reverberate hills. Trojans, sadly, does not make the most of this conceit – at least not in the episode I saw, which was the episode performed on November 14, written by Annalise Constable. Instead, it delivers a fairly staid episode of a knockoff Cheers: a kind of sitcom set in a bar where two mental patients converse about pretty much nothing.

It’s not without its charms. Barman Brett (Brett Johnson) is a pretty entertaining fixture, and there are a couple of amusing exchanges. But telenovela is so big, so dramatic, so ridiculous and spectacular, that I wanted something more – something soapier. The program notes state that Project Mess visualise Trojans “as more of a sitcom than a soapie”, so I guess the Cheers-esque vibe suits that, but… why give up a golden opportunity to do telenovela on stage and make it awesome, especially when you’re adopting the conceits of its delivery? The recent success of Jane The Virgin shows that telenovela can be brought and brought well to a mainstream audience, even if the soap opera is the most maligned of televisual forms. I wish Project Mess hadn’t backed away from the spectacularised form of the telenovela and opted for the more acceptable sitcom. I feel the former would have made better theatre.

That said, even though the script on the night I saw Trojans was pretty ordinary, the evening is a great deal of fun. Interspersed with ad breaks and audience engagement, it’s definitely an enjoyable night out at the theatre. Every night features a new writer, and I’m coming back next week to see what another episode of the show has to offer. It’s a short night – the show clocks in at only an hour – and while it might not necessarily be great theatre, it is very entertaining.

Friend Ship + Blue Wizard

The Tiny Stadiums Festival runs in and around Erskineville from November 13 – 23 2013. Friend Ship and Blue Wizard run at PACT.

For the next two weeks, the Tiny Stadiums festival will be taking over Erskineville. Having gone through the program, it looks like awesome fun – there are workshops, panels, site-specific art and all kinds of cool things happening which you should totally check out if you are in the area. Festival organisers Groundwork look like they’ve done an awesome job!

The festival kicked off on Thursday 14 November, and I was lucky enough to be invited along to the launch, which included two performances devised by Club Cab Sav performers Kenzie Larsen and Nick Coyle. These performances will be running a bunch of times throughout the festival. If you go along, you are in for a treat. Trust me. I had an absolutely fabulous night.

Kenzie Larsen’s Friend Ship is not, it turns out, about a bunch of friends on a ship (a misapprehension Larsen says she laboured under for an embarrassingly long time). Rather, Larsen leads us through a workshop on how to make and keep friends, something which she is qualified to do on account of being a self-taught internet scientist, having spent eighteen months living with seals, being able to read minds, and being extremely popular herself. (You guys. She is so popular.) She wants to cure your loneliness and make your life better, and if that means you have to practice your friendship skills on a pet rock, so be it.

Larsen’s show is deft, quirky, and very, very funny – and you leave with gifts! My theatre date and I now proudly sport matching friendship bracelets, which I’m sure means we passed the workshop. Larsen uses multimedia very cleverly and seamlessly (I was kind of terrified that it would screw up in the way that technology always does, but thankfully, it didn’t). It’s a very culturally specific show – there are some references in there that you might not get unless you’re a twentysomething who grew up watching New South Wales ads, but because I am both of those things, I found said references hilarious. There’s probably some room to heighten and hone a little more, but this is such a great little show. Catch it if you can. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of Kenzie Larsen’s work in the future.

…and if you get the opportunity to stay to watch Nick Coyle play an intergalactic space wizard, you should definitely do that, because his show is awesome. Blue Wizard tells the story of (surprise) the blue wizard, who comes from “a crystal planet where everyone’s gay” (something he tells us through song in his “dance of erotic greeting”) and who has travelled to earth to give the egg of friendship to the pharaoh. But he cannot find the pharaoh, and finds himself wandering in a junkyard, drinking Windex, and wondering what to do with the hatchling, which starts out as a grub-like creature he breastfeeds and calls Grubby, and which transforms into a creepy doll which he names after his boyfriend, John Quark John.

Blue Wizard is very, very weird. It’s humour in the manner of The Mighty Boosh (down to the fabulous hair). While the section before Grubby transforms into baby John Quark John drags a little and could probably use a little work, the show is otherwise very tight. What is most impressive, though, is not only how funny the show is – which it is, so much – but also how emotionally involved you get in the blue wizard’s story. He’s a totally ridiculous character who, hearing an ancient recording of Britney Spears’ Perfume, bursts into tears, but when Grubby turns into the creepy doll (want a culturally specific I-grew-up-in-the-nineties reference? baby John Quark John is a dead ringer for EC from Lift Off), you are genuinely afraid for the blue wizard’s life. And the ending! Which comes out of nowhere and yet makes total sense! I won’t spoil it for you, but seriously, if you think that there is no way you could deeply care about what happens to a gay space wizard whose only friend is a doll, you are wrong.

Coyle is a very impressive performer. This show requires him to sing and dance and operate puppets (as well as dress up as a wizard from a planet where the couture is somewhere between Legolas and He-Man), and he carries it all off. He is wonderfully charismatic on the stage. I hope he creates a sequel to this play, because I so want to know what happens to the blue wizard next. And whether he ever does get John Quark John to smell his perfume.

If the opening night is anything to go by, the Tiny Stadiums festival is going to be awesome. Go and see Friend Ship, go and see The Blue Wizard, and immerse yourself in the culture of Erskineville. I’m pretty sure it will be well worth your while.