Some days are good, and some days are not so good, but each day is valid and each day is followed by a fresh new one. Smilestuff encompasses all the ups and downs and in-betweens of life, giving space and acceptance to the bad days while inspiring us to find joy in even the smallest moments.

Smilestuff is a movement-based solo performance. Daniel Nodder’s performance looks light as feathers, easy, and free, but every movement is incredibly intentional and impactful. Nodder seamlessly involves the audience throughout the work, making them integral parts of the story, engaging them directly as well as through balloons and other items.

Throughout Smilestuff, both Ben Kelly’s musical accompaniment and Campbell Wright’s lighting design are as integral as the performer himself. Spotlights are used as an interactive companion to Nodder’s character: the spotlight becomes a keyboard on the floor that Nodder (and Kelly) plays, or a mirror in which Nodder discovers various facial expressions and emotions, a friend that dances alongside Nodder, and even the spark of life inside himself.

Smilestuff is infused with childlike wonder and innocence. From the moment Nodder discovers the use of his limbs, each movement is tender and pure. Nodder learns the basics before going through the motions of everyday life, each moment saturated with the simple joy of being alive. However, with living comes other complexities; Nodder quickly learns that as time wears on, each moment will not necessarily be as joyful as it was in the beginning. Finding himself in a slump, unable to come to terms with the burdens of life, musician Ben Kelly re-awakens Nodder’s joy and through a moment of quasi-puppetry Nodder lip syncs to Kelly’s beautiful rendition of Nat King Cole’s Smile.

Smilestuff celebrates the joy in everyday life and in mundanity, imploring us to cherish every moment. In the same breath, it recognises that joy cannot be constant. In this challenging time, everyone should go see Smilestuff.

I am a fan of the Uncharted games. No better yet, I am a massive fan of the Uncharted games. So, although part of me may have already cast this film aside when I saw Tom Holland (who bears almost no resemblance to Nathan Drake) cast as the film’s hero, I feel it is only fair that I judge Uncharted in terms of how well it represented the games, because those fans are who the film should have been made for.

Uncharted follows Nathan Drake (Holland) in his mid-twenties after he is recruited by treasure hunter Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg). The two are searching for the 500-year-old lost fortune of Ferdinand Magellan. What begins as a quick heist soon becomes a furious globe-trotting race to reach the prize before the ruthless Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas) can get his hands on it. 

This movie failed from the start. Columbia and Sony Pictures took a big risk when they decided not to adapt one of Naughty Dog’s successful game storylines and instead tell an original prequel. Original stories are fine but to change the fundamental elements of the Uncharted games such as how Sully and Drake meet? That doesn’t sit well with me.

Wahlberg’s take on Sully is perhaps where this film lost any chance of writing its wrongs. Instead of the faithful and trusty mentor from the games, viewers are thrust a Sully who doesn’t seem to care about Drake at all. The pair’s renowned connection is completely lost, and this leads to the story feeling hollow. Although some of Uncharted’s action scenes are downright epic, this is no longer enough due to the regularity of films with impressive computer-generated imagery. Holland does an okay job capturing the personality of Drake, but this fails to make up for his lack of resemblance to the Drake of the games.

Director Ruben Fleischer had a rare chance to inherit a story and characters that were already engaging and build on these elements. Instead, audiences have been provided with another film that hides behind an all-star cast, mediocre humour, and big explosions rather than one that focuses on a thoughtful story that people care about, like those in the Uncharted games.  

This year’s Fringe Festival boasts no less than 20 online events, thanks to the influence of COVID-19, which gives festivalgoers an exceptional opportunity to experience local and overseas work in the comfort and safety of their own homes.

I have to admit to being lured as much by the pun in the title of An Ice Thing to Say as I was to the promise of a blend of ice installation, original music, and physical theatre exploring the human being of the Anthropocene and our impact on nature. It draws inspiration from Erich Fromm’s seminal book on the need for socioeconomic revolution To Have or to Be? and invites the audience into a multi-sensory experience of our inner and outer icy landscapes. It attempts to challenge the idea that humans are at the centre of the universe and why that view of ourselves has caused the current climate crisis.

Having started life as a stage show, An Ice Thing to Say has been translated successfully into a short film. With effective videography, editing, and lighting from Theo Prodromidis, the visual interest has been expanded from the theatre, dance, and musical elements. The central installation of four large blocks of ice and the often-discordant music (Gregory Emfietzis) create fertile ground for visual, auditory, and textural experiences of an element of nature with which the performers interact in various ways from the sensual to the violent.

Without the explanation of the premise of the production, it risks being a little esoteric. However, sections in which the principal dancer, Stella Evangelia, wears a penguin-like mask and crams fruit into her mouth speak clearly of polar melting and rabid consumerism. Her sensuous caressing of the ice blocks equally speaks of the need for kindness towards the natural environment. Spoken interludes reflect the disorder of the modern mind and the human inability to be still, listen, and let instinct reign. As a meditation on Man’s inhumanity to nature, it is absorbing, challenging, and thought-provoking.

Ryan McGhee and his warm-up guy Michael Macaulay were waiting outside the Cavern Club when I arrived. They warmly introduced themselves, didn’t freak out when I told them I was reviewing their show, and we had a lovely chat about COVID and how lucky they were to be able to perform. Both were friendly and down to earth, the best examples of what the Fringe Festival is about.

Their charming openness and willingness to connect continued in an hour of quality stand-up comedy that traversed continents, climates, and cultures. Macaulay, originally from Teeside and now Paraparaumu, opened the show with a dig at Jimmy Carr’s racism and a claim that he doesn’t feel English despite a Geordie accent untouched by decades overseas. Before introducing McGhee, he drew belly laughs from pubic hair, dating before the age of mobile apps, oral sex with a Bee Gee, and his dad’s cremation.

The most successful stand-up comedy often comes from people who are willing to display vulnerability about their own life experiences and laugh at themselves. This McGhee happily does as he talks about being a ‘born and fled’ Glaswegian who is fiercely patriotic about all things Scottish but would never want to live there again.

Starting with his staunch Catholic upbringing, through coming out as gay, to moving to Australia and being half of one of the first same-sex couples to be legally married – and divorced – there, he brings us on his colourful journey to New Zealand and genesis as the Scottish Kiwi.

In his All Blacks shirt and kilt, McGhee pokes gentle fun at, among other things, New Zealanders’ passion for winning at sport, anti-vaxxers and their inability to deal with ‘three wee pricks’, why bungee jumping is the Kiwi equivalent of haggis, and his drunken purchase of a scarily huge sex toy called Dennis the Destroyer. All of this is peppered with hilariously smutty gay jokes and a disarming ability to tell a great story, making a great hour’s entertainment.

As I write this review it feels like the world is on fire. Certainly, Parliament grounds are literally on fire. But thinking back to the Fringe show I went to last night provides a wonderful escape, as did seeing Shift Your Paradigm. I truly forgot about all my troubles and cares – and our global ones too – for one hour thanks to this hilarious, twisty-turny, emotional rollercoaster of a production.

Eric (David Bowers-Mason) is the senior CEO of Do Be Us, a company that is not at all dubious and totally not a pyramid scheme. Under the all-seeing eye of the High Chair Man (Kevin Orlando), Eric has excelled in selling heaps of chairs (read: enlisting others to do it for him) and is now headed for a promotion. With the help of his junior-CEO-in-training Zoe (Isabella Murray), he just has to offload the last 25 of the latest collection before the ink on his new vague contract is dry.

Bowers-Mason is a gifted actor who rides the highs and lows of a desperate man with ease and panache. Murray acts as an anchor and counterpoint for Bowers-Mason’s performance so it doesn’t reach hysterical heights. And then we have Orlando, who reminds me instantly of The IT Crowd’s Matt Berry and might be just as funny. Appearing only onscreen but with excellent comic timing is Adam Herbert as the Fax Man, while Sara Douglas plays Eric’s sister Jessica with sensitivity that beautifully balances the action.

Shift Your Paradigm has high production values, with projection design (projector by Emii Wilson, graphics and filming by Mitchell Botting) greatly enhancing the experience – especially thanks to clever FaceTimes projected onto the screen. Coupled with cohesive, dramatic sound (Wilson) and lighting (Herbert), the show reaches multiple climactic points that put me in mind of watching a thriller on the big screen. Thrilling!

A huge bravo to all involved in the witty and raucous Shift Your Paradigm. Thanks for taking me out of my life for a hot minute!

The Garden of Eden: beautiful, serene, bountiful, and perfect. Until the humans arrived. How could God’s ‘most perfect’ creation be so imperfect? Well according to two tigers Big Stripes (Lewis Thompson) and Sharp Claws (Leonid Wilson), the ‘hewmans’ aren’t perfect at all. In their mind all beasts, no matter the legs or fur, are all created equal; but Adam (Lee Stanton-Barnett) and Eve (Brooke McCloy) seem to disagree.

Written, directed, and performed by ‘You be good. I love you’, Tigers Can’t Change Their Stripes is a touching tale (or tail) about both the differences and similarities between human and beast, what defines a beast, and ultimately what defines a human. Providing a new take on the biblical story of Adam and Eve, Tigers Can’t Change Their Stripes follows the rise, climax, and fall of Eden from paradise to what we inhabit now: Earth.

Specifically touching about the show is how similar the tigers and the humans behave. Though clearly different species, the tigers celebrate their differences to other animals but do not see themselves as superior. Adam and Eve however see themselves as special from their incipience. As Big Stripes wisely proposes: “Humans have a particular quality different from tigers; they want to be like God”. Eve and Adam both eat the apple in this rendition, but they do it to become special to God, to get closer to God.

Post-apple, the world changes: different species can no longer communicate, fear and hunger pervade the world, and life becomes all about survival. Humans and beasts seem to drift further apart, no longer living in harmony. Big Stripes ponders how despite our differences we share so many similarities and we all want the same things: a full belly and a place to live. Maybe our shared desires are what make us fight.

The tigers can’t understand why the humans feel such a strong need to be special. Perhaps only us humans can answer that.

A last-minute venue change from Cuba Street to Odlins Plaza made finding The Door knobs a challenge this weekend. Once I’d unearthed their social media post and hot-footed down to the waterfront, I discovered I hadn’t missed the start as feared because they were running half an hour late.

My second frustration was realising that my understanding of what I was about to see wasn’t what I’d interpreted it to be from the advertising. I’d arrived expecting to see four performances in one one-hour show. However, each artist performs only once per day, so the stated show duration of 240 minutes is literally that. Like most people, I don’t have four hours of my life to devote to street theatre and had a different expectation of something included in the Fringe Festival.

Organisational and advertorial sketchiness aside, the two Door knobs performances I did catch were entertaining. Clown Fraser Hooper was on first. Fortunately, he is not the traditional white-faced clown that I always found terrifying even before the movie version of Stephen King’s IT. He is of the modern, surrealist style with a cute dance, silly electronic sound effects, and a predilection for ducks. His show relied heavily on the cooperation (or not) of the mostly young audience members who gamefully held inflated balloons, chased a motorised mallard, and wore a fish head to swim in a fake pond. The fact that his final stunt was an epic fail due in part to the overzealous propulsion of a plastic duck into the air by an audience member was probably funnier than if it had worked.

The second, shorter, performance was by Patrick ‘Tennis Tricks’ Federer. Anyone who can squeeze their whole body through a destringed tennis racquet deserves praise, as does someone who can ride a two-metre-tall unicycle and juggle three tennis rackets while doing so. He also made the valid point that laughter is great for mental health, which is what street theatre is all about. And I did laugh.

Genoveva is a fish who likes jazz, black and white films, and philosophy but loves only fish flakes. She wasn’t always a fish. Once she was a cheeky little girl, but now she inhabits a tank in an undisclosed domestic location with an unseen woman shouting in a distant room.

The powerful one-woman performance from Genoveva Reverte centres on intimate monologues about a fatherless childhood that created her self-confessed daddy issues, bad relationships with men steeped in patriarchy and misogyny, a brush with religion, and other relatable life experiences that range from the amusing to the deeply traumatic.

Genoveva’s excellent writing could easily engage an audience for an hour by itself. The extended metaphor of a woman as a house speaks strongly of female oppression and elicits murmurs of agreement from the audience.

As presented in this performance, the spoken narrative is interspersed with physical comedy, clowning, and Epic theatre techniques that force the audience to engage with the confronting shape of Genoveva’s addiction to fish flakes – a stand-in for destructive human coping mechanisms such as drink, drugs, and sex – in novel ways. We are treated to a mimed display of developing alcoholism through a comedic rendition of the song A Horse With No Name that is simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and painfully sad.

This could all be doom and gloom, but Genoveva comes to understand that no matter how hard she tries, she’ll always be a fish because she is the sum of her experiences. And that’s okay.

The minimal staging consists mainly of filmed material projected onto the back wall. This is largely effective in supporting the narrative, although the Apple toolbar that lurks at the top of the screen when the AV elements are inactive is a distraction. The placement of lighting was also a little off so that Genoveva sometimes struggled to find her light. With a little more spit and polish on the production side, this has the potential to be a great show.

A word to the wise: Spitz & Crumple is an entirely improvised concert. The banter, the stories, the songs, even the choreography are all made up on the spot. In the first 10 minutes I sat dumbfounded, thinking it had to be one of the strangest and worst shows ever. When it clicked, I did a full 180. “This is one of the strangest and best shows ever”, I whispered to my friend. 

Eleanor Spitz (Liz Butler) and Barney Crumple (Ben Jardine) are a married couple from Florida who have been in love and making music for 50 years. Together with The Captain (Matt Hutton) on keys, the famous lounge band is celebrating the release of their Greatest Hits album with us, their adoring fans, who are dotted about in stylish cabaret seating.

We begin with tracks Diamonds In Your Eyes and You Are Like Candy, where Jardine pulls off an incredible trumpet solo sans trumpet. We’re then treated to a taste of Spitz and Crumple’s number one LP Gift Giving (1983), which started Pitchfork as the first album to ever be reviewed on the site. It earned 17 pitchforks and reached heights that all the greats still aspire to.

More show highlights – although the whole thing is a highlight and a half – include The Bond Song (James Bond Under the Sea) (I’ve made that title up, but the song tracks the time James Bond went nautical and sees a stroke of red-lit genius from lighting designer Nino Raphael). Let’s not forget the highly niche and experimental Before the Grease Wars; Citrus Baby One More Time (yes Brit did steal that one, but thankfully she didn’t get her mitts on the citrus part); and the minimal-lyrics, maximum-impact Cha Cha Wow.

Butler and Jardine are two masters of musical improv whose chemistry and cleverness leap off the stage. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an improv show more, and I’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? live.