What's On
Tickets now available
The show has nine performances running from Wednesday 18 th November to Saturday 21st November at 8pm with a matinee on Sunday 22nd November at 2pm. In the second week it runs from Wednesday 25th November to Saturday 28th November at 8pm. The play is presented with theatre style seating (general admission) not at tables as with some shows.
The ticket price is $30.00 and $15.00 for students. (Student tickets not available through eventfinda).
For bookings go to: eventfinda.co.nz, (booking fees apply when booking through eventfinda).
You can also book by emailing greytownlittletheatrenz@gmail.com or texting 0274 586 126.
‘Wheeler’s Luck’
A play about our town: how to prosper and remain unique?
Greytown Little Theatre is gearing up for its funniest offering yet at Studio 73, written by New Zealanders Nigel Collins, Toby Leach, and Damon Andrews as a tribute to the survival of our country’s staunch rural backbone.
The play is also an acknowledgement of the work of local people everywhere who keep making their own theatre shows from the ground up through collaboration, and developing their own local style and local audiences in the process.
The play Wheeler’s Luck is set in the ‘imaginary’ Wairarapa town of Bell End and follows events when the Mayor teams up with an Auckland developer, Richard Lush, to build a seven-storey gaming and entertainment facility. The difficulty is that the land he intends to build on (Cox Point) was gifted by Nora Cox into the collective ownership of the Bell End townsfolk.
Mayor Duncan Sanderson has a lot to deal with: neap tides, earthquakes, floods, and regurgitating sewage, for starters. Gumboots are essential. He’s trying to find a way to help Bell End prosper, but hasn’t bothered to mention to anyone who actually owns the land he’s promised to sell to the developer.
The term ‘wheeler’s luck’ refers to the fact that even when you’re doing your best, life can still smack you in the head. The Mayor is ‘smacked in the head’ by postie Murray Dickie, who makes public the information about who owns the land.
An endless thorn in the Mayor’s side, Murray has previously lobbied the Council to protect indigenous sparrows and endangered moss, as well as to eradicate an exotic cockatiel infestation, so he’s not always welcomed by the Mayor.
Murray is helped by Cilla Black, the Council’s receptionist. She’s described by Richard Lush as ‘the old bag in the office’, but is described by Cilla herself as a woman with a ‘firm hand and a supple body for my age’.
Five actors - Egan Tearle, Josh Cameron, Juanita McLellan, Lisa McLeod, and Alena-Rose Burt - play all 52 characters of the riotous and complex plot of Wheeler’s Luck that moves between 1882 and the present day. The common threads across the years include the Cox family, bareback horse riding on the beach, and a deep love for the town and its highly eccentric inhabitants.
All the characters are uniquely and hilariously themselves, with the actors seamlessly moving from one to the next as they quickly change a single item of clothing or bound across the stage to inhabit their next role. The ending is unexpected.
A play with a minimalist approach to set, props, and costumes, Wheeler’s Luck is highly reliant on technical tricks such as the use of audio-visuals, lighting, and sound.
Co-directors of this fast-paced, mad-cap play are the seasoned John Gilberthorpe and Victoria
Ross.
