Livi Reihana and Amanda Kennedy are two queer Kiwi women who shot to fame as musical comedy duo Fan Brigade. Having changed NZ comedy for the better they are now turning their talents to the world of opera, with a comedic take on the story of the unruly tourists who made headlines for stealing, littering, and threatening behaviour while holidaying here. They talk to Oliver Hall about their corporate jobs, creative process and knowing very little about opera.
“Nobody in the core creative team was straight. That would be a draw card for me to go and see it,” Amanda Kennedy tells us in her signature deadpan tone as we delve into the process of creating Unruly Tourists in a 6pm Zoom call on Thursday 9 February.
If an after-hours chat because both Amanda and Livi work full time in the construction industry, and when I ask what’s next on the horizon for Fan Brigade their response is surprisingly muted.
“It would have been very hard to write the opera if we were full-time doing Fan Brigade. There wouldn’t have been enough capacity to be there creative with two very different projects,” Livi, who is also a working mum tells us.
“Creative stuff on the side is a nice to have, not a need to have,” agrees Amanda. “We’re not full-time comedians. We cram a lot of creativity in when we can and when we’re extremely motivated to by deadlines, but it has been kind of a refreshing break to have, like bursts of creativity, instead of constant performances.”
Their construction nine to fives, plus the small matter of a global pandemic necessitated Unruly Tourists to be created over Zoom.
“We’ve only met our composer (Luke Di Somma) about five times. He lives in Melbourne. Over voice recordings and Facebook messages, we would send him song ideas, asking if he could make it sound like this, and he would come back nailing it every time. The whole opera has been done in our spare time, outside of our very busy full-time jobs,” confirms Amanda.
But this modern creative process is not nearly as surprising as the bombshell that Livi drops admitting that when NZ Opera approached Fan Brigade about writing Unruly Tourists, “I had never seen an opera before!”
Even Amanda’s Opera knowledge was limited to the influence of her parents’ fondness for classical music. “My mom dragged me to a couple as a kid,” she tells us, admitting, “but we don’t come from a background where there’s a big opera attendance, we’re not old money.”
As Opera novices, however, it was easy to distribute tasks for Unruly Tourists.
“We can write a tune but we can’t write music like Luke can. We got all the story and characters sorted – that’s what we are good at. Then Riley Spadaro our Dramaturg, helped us make it make sense as the story played out between songs.” Explains Amanda, who highlights, “We’d never done an hour and a half story before, let alone one that included songs and 20 opera singers!”
It sounds like an anxiety-inducing task for first-timers, but Livi credits their creative teams for helping them through it and credits their naivety for blinding them to the magnitude of the project they were undertaking.
“We didn’t feel intimidated until we realised the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra and Jennifer Ward Leland were getting involved. And by that stage it was pretty much written,” she tells us.
One of the big debates heading into Unruly Tourists’ World Premiere on Thursday 23 March, is whether is truly an opera.
“It’s been a massive discussion for us throughout the entire thing,” admits Amanda. “What is opera and what is a musical? The consensus seems to be with an opera, you have operatic singing and there’s no microphone. But other people point out if you have seen Pavarotti in concert, he’d have been miked and still singing opera.”
“It’s been contentious, which I didn’t realize it would be. We’ve also got opera singers and musical theatre performers on the same stage, which is apparently a big ‘no, no’ but we feel it works,” she tells, refusing to give too much away, while also revealing the opera will be presented in the round and characters include former Auckland Mayor Phil Goff who gets his own song.
Unruly Tourists is based on the international headlines caused when a family of Irish Travellers visited New Zealand on holiday, stole from various businesses and left vast quantities of litter on Takapuna Beach, and threatened to ‘knock the brains out’ of locals who told them to pick it up.
To get an understanding of why the family has behaved this way, the production employed a Cultural Advisor (Mary Bourke) who worked in outreach with the Traveller community.
“She gave us an insight into their culture and how the different characters in the family, became to be who they are, why they play the roles they play within the family. A lot of the information that we had, in the beginning, was just stereotypes, like ‘the women can’t read, they will leave school at 14 and will get married and have these big weddings that have their own reality TV show’. We wanted to get beneath that and find out who they were and why our treatment of them didn’t seem to affect them at all,” explains Amanda, adding, “That was really interesting to me. We hunted them. And they were just like, ‘fuck off.’”
“Not a single fuck given! Having a whole country stalk you. You’re aware of it, you’re on TV, and you still go and steal more things,” Livi emphasises with disbelief.
“I went from hating them. I was one of the people that followed all the Facebook pages. Then after we started this project I got more perspective and realise we might have gone overboard,” she says.
Amanda tells us their research highlighted that public scorn and hatred was likely just ‘business as usual’ for the family.
“There is a sense of ‘rejection of everything’ about them. In the countries they live in (England) and originate from (Ireland), everybody is against them. So they’ve become like a monster in a dream, it feels like nothing affects them,” she explains.
“They were not used to people really giving as much of a shit as we did and I think that was maybe shocking for them… there were reports they caused a huge ruckus on the plane coming over, but perhaps that wasn’t a big deal to them.”
So how does this unfazed family feel about an Opera being written bout them?
“We presume they know because the Daily Mail and The Guardian have reported on it,” Amanda tells us. “I imagine it’s gotten back to them but they certainly haven’t contacted us.”
“They’ll be too busy scamming people,” interjects Livi with a knowing laugh.
From its unusual inspiration to its modern creative process and avant-garde production, Unruly Tourists will be a uniquely Kiwi opera that could have massive implications for the genre if it’s successful.
Until then, Amanda and Livi are focused on their day jobs.
Unruly Tourists is presented by the Auckland Arts Festival and NZ Opera and plays from Thursday 23 to Sunday 26 March at Takapuna’s Bruce Mason Centre. For tickets and more information visit aaf.co.nz
