An Occasional Brown Noise Behind the Gauze

About the time sausages were distributed amongst the crowd at the festival opening, the premiere of N.Z.'s latest 'Rock Opera' began at the V.U.W. Memorial Theatre.

It would be extremely satisfying to report that the audience of middle-class culture hounds seen baying at the heels of the trendy "Taniwha" fled in disarray before the sheer artistic grossness of what confronted it. Satisfying, but not true. In large part this clutch of rock opera afficianadoes (by now, one assumes, immunised by exposure to the worst Farquhar can produce) lapped up the seeping effluent deposited by this festering sore of a piece with avidity bordering on relish.

To say that "The Taniwha" is bad is to understate the case. No simple excuse can be found for such blithering incompetence on so broad and apparently heavy a front. Professor James Ritchie has produced a libretto rivalling in its monstrous banality "La Fanciulla Dell' West". Such a succession of rivetting cliches and "Whole Earth Catalogue" rejects has never been seriously presented to the accompaniment of cacophonous bleattngs and inept staging reminiscent of the last placed entry in the British Drama League One Act Play Festival of 1952.

The first half hour of action reveals the five principals removing and putting on their trousers. The males had some difficulty in doing up their flies, apparently because the 34" waist got the 30" pants. The dialogue was choked by self-conscious blasphemy and the odd daring "fuck"

The Blertas were stacked behind the staging, very [unclear: subdued] and unbalanced. Somewhere there was a string quartet — the most tasteful aspect of the music. One doesn't know what to expect from a Rock Opera. The elements of opera were evident in the banality of the words such as "Hit us with your truth Fill our jumbled minds ..." and "Rumble seat of your mind".

Perhaps if the libretto had been in Maori it would have both made the show much more "liberal" and saved many people the embarrassment of comprehending, thereby raising it to the esoteric.

Those who were drawn by the advertised Rock aspects were the victims of the large scale rip-off. "Taniwha" secured $1,000 from Q.E.I I Arts Council to produce this hybrid of genres. The sooner trendy producers like McDonald and Farquhar realise that rock music is something more than hiring an electric guitar, bass, and drums to play their own inferior brand of show tunes, the better for those rock musicians who have built their reputation on hard work and musical ability. It seems that as soon as this particular form of music had become respectable (which means profitable in the middle class mentality) these money hungry wankers crash in from their staid background of straight music and rip-off the musicians by scoring bread from such bodies as Q.E.II and gullible trendies who condescend to attend such shows after claiming their open minds in listening to "Sergeant Pepper" and sitting through the entire performance of "Hair".

McDonald's claim to represent rock music is as valid as Mantovani's adaption of Rolling Stones' songs to string orchestras.

The climax is the discovery of the Taniwha, the evil within ourselves, the only point that came across seemed to point to the evil in homosexuality or perhaps the Taniwha was a horrid realization of the clap.