Erin Harrington reviews Showcuterie, from Pig Alien Productions, at Little Andromeda, Thursday 27 August 2026.
In praise of new work! Showcuterie, from new company Pig Alien Productions, is basically a high-quality souped-up scratch night, and a real joy. The evening comprises four new short works by professional actors and improvisers, who have worked collectively to devise and test concepts, stories and characters from the ground up. Between well-placed one liners, the night’s host, stand up Ben Kent, sings the praises of the short form. I agree – but even better is seeing performers support one another to build sustainable careers and creative practices while also having fun and acting like idiots.
In The Year 8 School Camp PTA Volunteer Meeting Caitlin Penhey is a jittery, flamboyant textiles teacher and Mackenzie Garner an ex-military PE coach. The pair, co-deans, are armed with some safety equipment, some horror stories, and a terrible powerpoint with all the whizzbang transitions you could ask for as they brief us on the upcoming school camp to “Hamminer Springs Forest Park”. The spectre of a previously lost kid hovers in the background – I want the gossip! It’s a very funny short – my companion is a teacher and finds it all maps onto her experience 1:1 – and it takes great advantage of the performers’ warmth, comic timing and sense of absurdity. I was left wanting more though, as it sets up some great provocations without entirely delivering on them. There’s the top-level story, or pretext – we’re here for a briefing, which is silly in its own right – but what’s the story that this makes room for? I was particularly curious about the relationship between the teachers, as the characters have a lot of potential – what more can be done with them?
Reylene Rose Hilaga’s Whiteface is a satirical performance work about colourism, performed with manic enthusiasm and a good drop of gallows humour. It opens with some excruciating real-life Filipino ads for skin whiteners. Hilaga’s character, an influencer dressed all in white, undertakes an increasingly unhinged skincare routine in the hope of nudging her brown skin tone towards the milky white end of a series of Pantone swatches. It’s a well-structured piece that begins with exaggeration and absurdity and ends with horror, as the character goes from clacking her fingernails on creams, to caking her face in talcum powder, and ultimately weighing up life-threatening options. It’s funny, and deeply uncomfortable, especially as it makes the cheering audience complicit in the character’s tilt towards potential self-harm. For my money, Hilaga is possibly the most versatile professional performer in Ōtautahi right now, and this is a fully realised work performed with real comic and dramatic precision.
Grace von Huben’s Sync or Swim is another character-driven vignette, this time combining voiceover narration and sound design with physical comedy. A year 7 girl is curious – and increasingly concerned – about why so many of her peers are behaving so strangely and secretively, and why people keep talking about blood and the moon. The obvious answer: werewolves. Von Huben gives a charming performance as the girl preps for a confrontation at the school’s swimming sports day. Montage: a relay race morphs into a John Wick-style fight sequence, complete with martial arts face offs and bullet time backbends, where tampons are shot like silver bullets. The combination of pre-recorded elements, character work, choreography and rapid sound and light cues bring us into the girl’s fantasy world with both humour and compassion before pulling us back down to earth. The final beats give a great pay off.
The night closes with a new improv concept – an improvised musical set from The Sad Cowboys. Vito Strati (on guitar) and Criss Grueber (on banjo) are Winchester and Clayton, a pair of farmers with depression-era clothes and sketchy American accents who look like they just blew in with the last tumbleweed. The set’s arc is satisfying. The first song is about a calamity that has ruined the farm, based on audience offers (tonight, a hole in the fence), and the second an emotional mea culpa in which one of the cowboys cops to having caused the issue, imperilling their relationship and livelihood. The third resolves the drama with a rousing and hopeful number that looks to a new future, all with extensive wordplay and some nice melodic and harmonic work. Musical improv is hard enough when you’re doing it on your own; it’s quite something to see pretty coherent songs performed by a duo, with extended commentary and banter, ending with an audience singalong and some uplifting homosocial bonding. It’s a nascent idea and is a bit slippery in parts, including in terms of framing and character / performance persona, all of which can be leveraged further. The act overall has serious potential, though, and is certainly worth developing; I can see it becoming a great fan favourite standalone act.
One of the unfortunate truths of the arts industry right now is that noone’s coming to save us, but new initiatives like this illustrate the importance of creatives working together to make new things, and to empower each other in their mahi. Each work is at a difference place, and might go further or might not, but each is also evidence of people making something from nothing – a magic trick, really. I don’t doubt that it’s taken a lot to get this off the ground, as theatre making is tough, but I hope there’s a second course of Showcuterie to come.
Showcuterie plays at Little Andromeda until Saturday 29 August.
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