Steve Wrigley is a one-man musical master in his latest comedic venture. Jacqueline Smith talks to him about the story behind Kevin.
After three years of performing stand-up routines about his relationship with his fiancee, Steve Wrigley wanted his next comedy show to be more of a creative release.
A grant from the New Zealand International Comedy Festival Trust gave the green light to his dream project: a musical called Kevin, with Wrigley playing all the roles.
It's not your average show-offy one-man play, he says.
"I saw this one-man show once and this guy was jumping around on stage playing three different characters - and he did a really good job - but part of me was like, what is the point of this being a one-man thing because the scene would have more impact if it was just three actors. All you are really saying is look 'how awesome I am, I can play all these characters'.
"So I thought what would be really good, rather than a one-man musical, would be one man trying to do a musical, so the audience are watching the chaos of one guy trying to do it," Wrigley explains, as he clamours around a bedroom set which has taken over his living room.
The musical was a concept he came up with a few years back, dreaming of turning his love of singalongs, drawing and the bog-standard Kiwi name "Kevin" into a theatrical extravaganza.
All that had been holding him back was his inability to write music, he says.
But a $10,000 grant from the comedy festival helped him employ a professional, Mark Dennison, who Wrigley had worked with for a spoof-like Glee episode of the Jono Project.
With the score down, he was away. His fiancee Cyan, who has a degree in set design, came up with an ingenious way of operating ten sets within a 55-minute performance.
On the night, Wrigley will have just 10 minutes to assemble and deconstruct his backdrops. Cyan will help him - giving Wrigley's audience their first glimpse of the elusive woman.
Adding the finishing touches to the set, Wrigley proudly shows off his tool-belt, which has solved their domestic arguments around the location of pliers and hammers as well as giving him the air of a handyman.
He's determined Kevin will prove to his stand-up fans that he has more strings to his bow - theatre had always been his first choice, but comedy presented a steadier income. And he's been writing sketches for years.
Kevin was Wrigley's default name for his characters so was a natural title for the show.
Wrigley even gets to play Kevin, the janitor of a theatre in the town of Kevin, which is doing a special performance of Kevin, a retro production.
"The idea is that it's a musical from the 1980s that was made in New Zealand but never did well but that grew a cult following," he explains. Kevin, the janitor, has watched every rehearsal and is an original fan.
When the audience arrive in the Herald Theatre for the comedy festival performance, they will learn that the entire cast, orchestra and technical people who were supposed to put the show on, have died in a horrible bus accident on the way to the venue.
"It's a mangled mess, everyone's dead. But this guy Kevin believes in the 'show must go on' philosophy and says to the audience that he has seen every rehearsal, and knows how everything works, so if they are cool with it he has the karaoke version of the 1980s musical that he can put on the CD player, to recreate the whole thing for the audience," Wrigley says.
Kevin will only show at the Comedy Festival, he says, as he has no time in his schedule for the rest of the year.
"If you would like to see me do stand-up comedy, you can see me at the Classic, or watch 7 Days."
Actually, he thanks the popularity of the late-night Friday comedy panel show, on which he is a regular, for building the profile of New Zealand comedians.
"Lord knows, if I had put this show together four years ago I would have performed it for three people in the Classic on a Friday night, while everyone was out watching Wilson Dixon."
Wrigley has performed solo shows since winning the Billy T award three years ago, and before that appeared in late-night group shows at the Classic.
Going down the musical path this way meant he could avoid re-hashing old jokes, but he has to admit he kind of regrets having such lofty ambitions, "because an hour of comedy is so much easier than having to build heaps of shit".
Still, this is a performance that has been brewing since he was a kid.
He has always been a fan of musicals, "in the biggest way", and as the comedy festival is generally a forum in which to admit to one's most embarrassing traits, he's happy to front up to it this year.
"I grew up watching Disney movies, like Aladdin.
"There was actually an episode of 7 Days where I sang A Whole New World, during a round of Caption That, and I got a whole lot of messages from people going, how do you know all the lyrics, and I was like, 'do I tell people that I used to dress as Aladdin and sit on the carpet at my parents' house and put the Disney CD on and do that when I was 15-years-old?'"
LOWDOWN
Who: Steve Wrigley
What: Stars in the one-man musical Kevin at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival
When and where: Herald Theatre from May 10-14 at 8.30pm.
-TimeOut
