By FRANCIS TILL
As a musical extravaganza, this adaptation of Alan Duff's iconographic work, Once Were Warriors, provides a richly textured treat for audiences already comfortable with the core material and interested in a new interpretation.
Brilliantly framed by the tattered elegance of the St James, Riwia Brown's script elevates several secondary
themes to central status and simplifies Jake Heke (Willy Craig) to a villain with only the lightest patina of charm and no hope for redemption.
Her Beth Heke (Tina Cross), too, is a simpler person, shown in a somewhat gauzy light as a profoundly sentimental co-dependent facilitator of a maelstrom that shatters her family and leads to the suicide of her promising daughter, the very movingly portrayed Grace (Maria Rose Macdonald).
The notion that redemption can be achieved through a return by disaffected urban Maori and their self-destructive children to marae-inspired values is brought forward largely through stories Grace tells her friends, which are recorded in a journal that stands out like a beacon as the production moves forward.
The ambivalent good that can be done by intelligent social workers is also given a nod as artistic director/actor Jim Moriarty, in the somewhat lacklustre guise of Kahu Bennett, rips young Nig Heke (Henry Perez) from the dysfunctional family and introduces him to ancestral warrior codes.
It is, however, the huge and captivatingly enthusiastic supporting cast of mostly very young actors and dancers that provide the high points of the production through group songs, stylised haka, hip-hop performances, breakdancing, and beautifully rendered episodes from classic Maori legends.
There are no really captivating original songs, unfortunately, something usually seen as the death knell for a musical, and the choreography is stimulating mostly by virtue of scale.
That said, the singing (especially the heartfelt ballads by Cross) and dancing are often exceptional, and while some of the poetry in this fable is lamentably sacrificed to polemics, substantial vitality has been added by scoring and recalibrating the story.
Ultimately, the importance of the material coupled with the zest so evident on stage make this a very worthwhile evening.
