(Gen)-X rated Satire

HR The Musical

A Performance Revue

Created and directed by Amy Mansfield

Artsense Productions

Part of the 2024 NZ Comedy Festival

With Mika Austin, Zoe Triggs, Lizzie Buckton & Amy Mansfield

SM Simon Todd

Rangatira, Q Theatre

Review by Malcolm Calder

14 May 2024

This delightful little show had an outstanding run in the summer series at Q.  So much so that it has popped up again on the national 2024 Comedy Festival circuit.  HR The Musical has some very, very funny lines and lyrics and confirms Amy Mansfield as genuine talent in the field.  It has now finished its return run at Q in Auckland but Wellington and Christchurch audiences still have something to look forward to.

So if you are in either city, don’t miss it.

Despite the principal title, the subtitle is far more appropriate (and barely hides a satire on itself) –  HR is very much a contemporary and wickedly comedic Performance Revue.  And a good one too.  But you’re looking for a plot or story, then forget it.  This is a series of sketches …and it works.

Set in amorphously non-specific workplaces, the cast of four have a lot of fun with some delightful lyrics, at times bitingly so.  Mansfield has a genuine skill at finding rhymes and rhythms and then delivering them with a scattergun regularity.  Standout for me was undoubtedly the ‘Mansplaining’ scene, but only narrowly losing out to the ‘Coalition of Chaos’.

She takes aim at the meaninglessness that enshrouds many of today’s workplace practices.  Y’know … the term for ‘personnel’ (which used to be about employment) soon became ‘people operations’ in the cyborg workplaces that seem to have flowered in our endemic post neo-liberal economic era.  The audience got it, and got it well, as the term was morphed into ‘human resources’, ‘recruitment and selection’, ‘performance management’, ‘learning and development’, ‘succession planning’, ‘onboarding’ and a myriad of other clichaic terms – don’t get me started on teams and team-building.  Each is instantly recognisable to its target audience.  Couple that with a close familiarity with the attitudes and processes that underpin employment and you have an audience that relates to many of the painfully recognisable and satirically drawn characters, and they get it even more. And therein lies the principal reason for this production’s success.   Audiences relate.

In keeping with this, Mansfield’s music covers a range of styles, necessarily scattergun at times, but none are inappropriate.  It is held together by a keyboard supported by a couple of guitars and even a plastic flute or two.

It would seem to me that the southern venues for HR The Musical may be a tad on the small side.  In Wellington particularly !

However, it also struck me that HR The Musical is something of a work in progress.  Its final scene starts to hint at querying why the workplace is the way it is.  It would be fascinating to see Mansfield explore this further.

Christchurch 16-18 May, Little Andromeda

Wellington 21-22 May, Te Auaha