SHOW CELEBRATES UNIFYING POWER OF SONG - Otago Daily Times

Mum's Choir - Reviewed by Barbara Frame Friday June 22, 2007

The set immediately tells you where you are: a New Zealand living room (in Palmerston North, it turns out) with flowery wallpaper, an articulated chair with a crochet woollen throw, family photos on the wall, and a china cabinet displaying delicate cups and saucers. Some where, Dean Martin sings.

Old Mrs. O'Reilly has died, and three generations of her family have arrived to organise the funeral. As they watch the flowers pile up, scoff the neighbours baking, get stuck into the liquor, and squabble over the contents of Mum's house, they learn her dying wish.

So wants them to perform Faure's Requiem at her funeral. So it's just as well Mum brought them up to sing. And how they sing - breaking into song at the slightest opportunity, especially during the second act.

Apart from the funeral piece, the songs are mostly the mid-20th century standards, familiar to most people over a certain age. One of my favourites came from mid-mannered Noel (David McKenzie) and black-sheep Kevin (Richard Hanna): a lively and marginally corny rendition of That's Amore. Another was the show's closing Haere Mai, which the audience was invited to join for the final burst of feel-good warmth before everyone emerged into the falling snow.

Written by Alison Quigan, Mum's Choir is a comedy acting as a vehicle for music, rather than a full-fledged musical. Each of the seven actors (Clare Adams, Julie Edwards, Marama Grant, Richard Hanna, David McKenzie, Matu Ngaropo and Joy Smith) plays a significant part, so there are no 'stars'.

Director Lisa Warrington, musical director Stuart Walker, and musical arranger Laughton Pattrick have brought together a well-paced show celebrating ordinariness, family, humour, and the unifying power of song.

Mum's Choir will run until July 14.

DEATH BECOMES HER - SUNDAY STAR TIMES REVIEW

Reviewed by Helen Watson White - Sunday July 1, 2007

I thought with Robert Lloyd’s Joyful and Triumphant we had had the best that could be done with the subject of a New Zealand family celebrating milestones. This play stands up there with the best.

Quigan’s comic-sympathetic treatment of the period between a mother’s death and final farewell uncovers a lot about the family – and even more about the mother, Molly O’Reilly, whose open coffin dominates much of the action, as she, of course did when alive. This is (aptly named) her living room, with its family photos displayed beside the ever radiating Sacred Heart of Jesus, its clutter of whatnots on the china cabinet including a prototypical statue of the Virgin Mary. (Virgin and Son must have got their blue robes at the same shop, just as all the women can wear Molly’s Osti-frocks).

Kiwi-Catholic culture is fondly represented, as familiar as a funeral diet of half warmed savouries, the church not (this time) under fire.

Director Lisa Warrington bakes a rich theatrical cake, choosing top-shelf ingredients. The actors have well-seasoned singing as well as speaking voices, the characters’ old rivalries and resentments adding spice to the mix that is otherwise a very ordinary recipe, largely based on love. Half-warm this family is not; its passion for life overcomes even the younger son’s fear, gilt and embarrassment about death, especially the idea of his mother’s body being on view at home.

Richard Hanna plays this nearly black sheep of a son with an edginess that helps to drive the action and Matu Ngaropo as his nephew (Molly’s eldest grandchild) matches that energy, his unexpected arrival giving a tangible boost to the second part of the play. David McKenzie’s Noel (Molly’s eldest; single, gay) is, by contrast, an anchor part. Not meant to go skittering, he provides leadership from the piano stool, as instigator, conductor and bass-singer in the choir of the title – ordered by mum for her own funeral as she won’t (as it were) be there.

Molly’s personality is, however roundly drawn by her sister (Joy Smith as Aunty Nola) and three marvellously different daughters, played by the redoubtable Julie Edwards as Cathy (eldest girl, bold but not bossy) Marama Grant as the pregnant (youngest, lively and much less reliable) Terri, and Clare Adams as single-but-sexy Jean, a pianist like all her siblings and a throaty torch singer too.

Full marks to musical director Stuart Walker and arranger Laughton Pattrick for the gorgeous harmony-singing, which made a good show unforgettable. As for mum’s wish for Faure’s Requiem’ – an impossible ask – the bits we heard were only rehearsal; they would have done her proud.

TRUTH AND HUMOUR IN WELL OBSERVED RITUALS - Theatreview.org.nz

Reviewed by Terry MacTavish, 2 Jul 2007 for Theatreview

Yet another warble from Mum's Choir. Dunedin is the last of the centres to present it so there may not be too much left to say. It's safe to assume most people know the story: a musical family gathers to bury their mother, and find she expects them to cap their childhood von Trapp act by singing Fauré's Requiem at the service.

They squabble and reconcile, rehearse the music and go through the comfortingly tedious minutiae of arranging a funeral. Inevitably some skeletons are dragged from their closets and the siblings grow to understand each other a little better. The danger is that our empathy for a situation we have all dealt with or that awaits us will be rendered superficial as the characters burst spontaneously into song after song.

This production largely succeeds in avoiding the pitfall, thanks partly to the easy rapport between the actors, especially the women, which allows us to believe in them as a family; a family that, brought up by a mother who saw music as an expression of the soul and trotted her kids out to perform on every possible occasion, would naturally deal with life's vicissitudes through a bit of a sing-song. Of course the grandson knows The Good Ship Lollipop: "You lot do it all the time when you get drunk!" Of course they do.

Director Lisa Warrington has also avoided the 'and now stop everything and sing at the audience' trap by making excellent use of Peter King's realistic set.

The opening is quite spooky: tentative entry of the bereaved family, light spilling from the cautiously opened door into a darkened room, familiar to them but bereft of the spirit that gave it meaning. The lights go on and immediately we feel safe. We too know this comfortably middle-class home, from the rose-spattered burgundy wallpaper to the crocheted afghan. There is the hatch through to the kitchen, there is mum's special chair, there are the family photos on the wall; the veracity of it all enhanced by contributions from the cast.

And the characters really inhabit this space. Singers may seize a lampstand as an impromptu microphone, grab buns to spear with forks and use as tap-dancing feet, or just flop exhausted to croon Java Jive when they are simply too tired to talk. The highlight for me was the exuberant conclusion to the first act, when the sisters emerge ludicrously clad in mum's ghastly polyester Osti frocks to waggle their rears in a crackling version of Accentuate the Positive.

The long second act admittedly would gain from pruning; it is top-heavy with songs that the action struggles to support. Still it begins promisingly with the arrival of soldier grandson Matt and we never lose the sense that we are getting closer to D-Day and the performance of Fauré's challenging Requiem, which director Warrington romantically says puts her in mind of "the sound that angels' wings beating ought to make".

The acting and singing are as assured as the direction. The three sisters are fabulous together and each have their special moments alone: Clare Adams as the anxious eldest, doing an unforgettable number with a nun glove-puppet (yes, really!); Marama Grant as the outspoken and heavily pregnant youngest, exasperated by always missing out on the elder siblings' secrets; and especially Julie Edwards, also tuneful and funny as the middle sister, but at the same time immensely touching, from her soft sidelong glances at mum in the coffin to the splendid eulogy she has been bullied into delivering.

The brothers are similarly competent, and though I found David McKenzie (the elder) rather low-key and shadowy while Richard Hanna (the younger) tended to over-project, they were committed team players. They are less well-served by the script, the revelation of the secret that haunts the younger provoking surprisingly little response, while the elder's life is left unexplored.

Hunky Matu Ngaropo as the Māori grandson winningly provides a spiritual and unembarrassed response to death, from his entry saying to his grandmother, "Crazy Pakehas left you all alone, eh?" then singing her a tender waiata, to the poignant moment at the funeral when he steps up to support his mother (Edwards) when she falters. What a lovely son to have reared!

And what a pleasure to welcome Joy Smith back to the Fortune as equally lovable Aunty Nola, whose first act on arriving is matter-of-factly to claim her deceased sister's electronic chair. Smith's expression of bliss as she finally gets to operate this chair, the sort that inexorably propels you onto your feet, is simply delicious.

Alison Quigan has amassed a considerable body of work humorously representing the lives of ordinary New Zealanders, whom she understands very well. "I delight in the language of people I know," she says, "they make me laugh and they make me cry and that's what I try to capture." It seems a fairly simple aim; not one likely to lead to the lofty peaks of say, Renee's wonderful Wednesday To Come or Touch of the Sun which share some thematic interests with Mum's Choir.

Yet here the observed rituals are true as well as funny: the cups of tea round the coffin, the cheerful disjointed chat about recipes, sex lives, and tending to the corpse ("I plucked her chin too"), and if many deeper issues remain unexplored and the biggest laugh is scored by a fart, well, dealing with death is ordinary, even mundane, and often grief is released in hilarity.

So Quigan has a sure instinct for what works in a theatre. She provides plenty of performance opportunities for her actors as well as moments of recognition for her New Zealand audiences, and this confident and joyful production certainly makes the most of them all. Even a reserved Dunedin audience was charmed into joining a spirited encore rendition of Haere Mai with mum's triumphant choir.

Now that I am over my sulks about being the last reviewer for this play, I can concede there is something curiously satisfying about knowing that this play, like the rite of passage it celebrates, is an experience that has been shared by the whole country.

MUM'S CHOIR REVIEW by THE FORTUNE'S RESIDENT GHOST

MUM’S CHOIR – A Ghost Review

By Alison Quigan, directed by Lisa Warrington

It was a delight to see Mum’s Choir. A distinctly New Zealand story that will resonate with people from anywhere. A slice of life drama that all revolves around the lounge area of recently deceased Molly O’Reilly, as the children and grandchildren come to terms with her life and death and come together over the funeral arrangements and the choir that she wanted as her last request.

Lisa Warrington is to be congratulated on delivering a comprehensively complete package. The set, cast and technical aspects of this play all fit together. It is great to see all these aspects working off the same page and not trying to be too clever.

The set was simple but cluttered, precise but lived in. It reminded me of a great aunt’s place and that was perfect.

The lighting was effective but unobstrusive. Scene changes were indicated by the cast playing the piano onstage with quiet lighting changes to indicate the passing of time. (keep an eye out for the lighting as you leave the theatre – a piece-de-resistance)

The cast were uniformly great. I was a little concerned about Matu Ngaropo’s entrance at first but as I listened more intently to the script I realised where his character was coming from. I think that the 3 sisters managed to rise from great to wonderful. Their ease of being on stage, underplaying the emotions and complete naturalism, made them all easy to watch. Well done Julie Edwards, Clare Adams and Marama Grant.

This is a play that you should try and see. I can imagine it becoming a fixture of amateur theatre in the not too distant future, but I can’t imagine it with a better ensemble of cast, director, designers.

Thank you Fortune Theatre – this resident theatre ghost is very happy.