Culture 101

Cabaret turns 60 this year and is closing out Auckland Theatre Company's season at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, running 22 September to 25 October. Nomi Cohen plays Sally Bowles, the role made famous by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film. Cohen has a Bachelor of Performing Arts in Musical Theatre, trained at the Actor's Programme. She joins Culture 101 to talk about inhabiting a character so embedded in pop culture and what it means to set your own version of Sally free.

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with the latest from the big screen.

Kate Rodger joins Culture 101 with the latest from the big screen.

Peter Salmon directed all six episodes of After the Party and came out the other side burnt out, so his next move was a comedy. Good Bones is a horror-comedy on ThreeNow and Neon starring Josh Thomson as a procrastinating husband whose marriage hinges on his ability to renovate a murder house. Salmon describes finding tone as the hardest and most instinctive part of directing, something he often doesn't identify until a few days into the shoot.

In(Visible) Stories is a new online archive tracking the history and current movements of Pan-Asian film, television and screen creators in Aotearoa, created by Dr Sarina Pearson and Dr Shuchi Kothari through their Asian New Zealanders on Screen Research Project, funded by the Royal Society Marsden Fund. The project maps work written, directed and produced by the Pan-Asian community, filling a gap that Pearson and Kothari say has meant these stories existed without a record.

Reo Journeys: Te Pou Herenga Tai is a new five-part RNZ podcast debuting this afternoon, following documentary makers Eugene Bingham and Adam Dudding as they cycle the 90km Twin Coast Cycle Trail in Northland, with sound recordist and composer James Dansey recording the land, the people and the korero along the way. Dansey came to the project through te reo Maori class with Eugene and Adam, and describes it as the first time two worlds he thought would never coexist, sound and music on one side, te reo and tikanga on the other, came together for him. He joins Culture 101 ahead of the first episode airing at 3pm.

Production designer Ashley Turner and costume, hair and makeup designer Lissy Turner are the pair who built the world of Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, the local body-horror comedy now in cinemas. They set the film in what they described internally as aspirational Invercargill, a deliberately familiar semi-rural New Zealand brick-and-tile apartment that makes the alien elements land harder when they arrive. They also took the alien foetus hero for a ride through the streets of Park City in a pushchair at Sundance, where the mounted police obligingly stopped for a photo. Ashley and Lissy join Culture 101 to talk about building the contrast between the mundane and the outlandish, and why every costume had to be made in multiple copies.

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: The Rivals of Azmiah King, Andrew Patterson's film with Matthew McConaughey as a beekeeper and bluegrass musician reconnecting with his former foster daughter while fending off threats to his honey business; The Weight, in which Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in a Great Depression survival story about smuggling gold through a hundred miles of wilderness; and Practical Magic 2, Susanne Bier's long-awaited sequel reuniting Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters trying to protect the next generation from the love curse that has followed their family for generations.

Michelle Langstone reviews three new releases: The Rivals of Azmiah King, Andrew Patterson's film with Matthew McConaughey as a beekeeper and bluegrass musician reconnecting with his former foster daughter while fending off threats to his honey business; The Weight, in which Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in a Great Depression survival story about smuggling gold through a hundred miles of wilderness; and Practical Magic 2, Susanne Bier's long-awaited sequel reuniting Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters trying to protect the next generation from the love curse that has followed their family for generations.

Auckland's City Rail Link opens today, and two of the artists whose work now fills the new underground stations joined Perlina for a guided walk-through. At Karanga-a-hape Station, Reuben Kirkwood designed a vaulted ceiling made from metal sections inspired by the pupurangi, a large snail that lives in the trees, alongside carved kauri lunar discs and a sun-and-moon installation tracking the tides. At Maungawhau Station in Mt Eden, Tessa Harris, who is Reuben's cousin, created a water wall installation shaped around the mountain, its triangle form representing strength, purity and the tupuna.