Critical Corner: Bic Runga with Auckland Phil; The Paper

In this edition of Critical Corner, reviews of Bic Runga performing with Auckland Phil and The Office spinoff The Paper.

“Bic Runga” is an easy sell. There’s hardly a more consistent, and consistently excellent, New Zealand singer. “Auckland Phil” (rebranded from the APO) is also an easy sell; great music from the canon performed by world-class musicians. “Bic Runga performs with the Auckland Phil” is, therefore, perhaps the easiest sell. 

Judging from the packed out Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre on Saturday night, I’m not alone in that thinking. I’m always a bit wary about gigs that straddle the line between “pop” (how pop Bic Runga is might vary depending on your definition) and “classical”. As a child of the 90s, it brings up the likes of Vanessa Mae, The Three Tenors, and Sarah Brightman. The shadow of adult contemporary looms large. Never unpleasant but never thrilling.

A great pop song is a great pop song, a great orchestra is a great orchestra, and combining the two? Thrilling. Those guarantees combined with Runga’s stage presence – the perfect blend of chill and elegant – made for a great night. And, honestly, any night where you hear “Sway”, whether it’s on tinny laptop speakers or performed by an orchestra is a great night by itself.

For me, as a casually devoted Runga fan, the evening was a stark reminder that Runga is more than just her list of hits. “Get Some Sleep”, “Bursting Through”, “Drive”, “Something Good” and “Sway” by themselves would be the best songs of most artist’s careers, but even the deeper cuts resonated. I doubt I’ll ever hear “Say After Me” in concert again, and will never hear it performed with such lush backing.

Then, of course, there’s that inimitable voice. Crystal-clear yet deep, robust yet full of intimacy. Even in a space as cavernous as the Kiri Te Kanawa, it’s the kind of voice that carries right into your brain, as though you were listening to her on high quality headphones. As for the orchestra, I am the least qualified person in the world to speak on the performance on the night, but what I can say is they did what I imagine is the ideal for a gig like this; always elevating the headliner, never eclipsing them, and showing just how masterfully crafted these songs are.

Easy sells don’t always make for great nights. But sometimes something that sounds so obviously good, to mangle one of Runga’s song titles, turns out to be actually great.

Bic Runga performed with the Auckland Phil on Saturday September 6.

It’s pretty much well understood that The Office is one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time – which holds true whether you’re talking about the British original or the American remake. Any version of it, whether it’s last year’s Australian remake or The Paper, released this month, is going to be compared to that mammoth, probably unfavourable.

I’ve never been a massive fan of The Office, in all honesty, and I vastly prefer the American version to the British (yep, I can imagine that opinion will turn a bunch of people off my assessments on TV comedy in general). Even when the show found its footing in the second season, I never thought that it found the right balance between laughing at the characters and wanting us to love the characters. That’s a long way of saying that when it comes to 2000s era comedy, I’m a 30 Rock guy.

That’s baggage I bring into The Paper. Everybody will have their own. The show, ostensibly a spinoff but really somewhere in between a sequel and something set in the same universe, revolves around the Toledo Truth Teller, a struggling local paper trying to revive itself to whatever its former glory used to be. As with its grandfather show, a camera crew has been appointed to follow them around for some reason. Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) is the hapless editor-in-chief brought in to make it work, and the team is rounded out by journalist Mare (Chelsea Frei), managing editor Esmeralda (Sabrina Impacciotore), amongst others. The one returning character from The Office is accountant Oscar, dismayed to have to contend with a camera crew again.

The desire to map these characters and situations onto the archetypes we’ve become familiar with is easy. It’s jarring, at first, that none of The Paper’s ensemble is an exact match for anybody in The Office. Ned is a hybrid of Michael Scott and Jim Halpert, Esmeralda a blend of Kelly and Michael, Mare is one part Jim and one part Pam, so on and so forth. It takes a few episodes before the instinct to cast these characters as archetypes is shaken off, and it's a credit to the performers – especially Frei and Impacciotore – that they do it so well.

The main issue with The Paper is that it is a little bit too high concept, at least at the moment. Ned’s vision for fixing the paper’s reputation – essentially getting the staff they share an office with, a paper company, to act as volunteer reporters – is a little hard to get a handle on, and the opportunities for hijinks are worn out pretty thin. Additionally, the will-they-won’t-they that inevitably brews between Ned and Mare feels charged in a different way; less of a will-won’t and more of a should-shouldn’t

If you’re looking for more of The Office, The Paper is probably not what you’re looking for. There’s more of the DNA of the shows that came in its wake – Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine – than there is of the grandfather show itself. By the end of the first season, it hasn’t quite found its feet, but then again, pretty much everybody recommends that you skip the first season of all the aforementioned shows. Maybe hang out for the already confirmed season two?

You can watch The Paper on TVNZ if you live in New Zealand, and wherever it is streaming if you live elsewhere.

Other Things I’ve Enjoyed

• I’ve been gone for a while, apologies, but will be returning to weekly coverage as of this week!
• Unicorn Overlord is a game that won’t be new to many, but it missed me last year. If you have a Final Fantasy XII shaped hole in your heart, or a Fire Emblem shaped gap in your soul, this is the one to play. Low demand on time, high reward on investment. It’s available for pretty much every current generation platform.
• Bring The House Down by Charlotte Runcie is the perfect read for anybody who is in the media or arts (or if you’re unlucky like me, both). The concept is downright brilliant – a male reviewer gives a solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe a one star review, and ends up sleeping with the performer before it goes live. Revenge and hijinks ensue. It sounds a bit book-clubby, and occasionally it is, but Runcie has some beautiful observations about the similarities between artists and critics.

Self-Promo

• I’m teaching writing again across October and November! If you’re based in Tāmaki and want to learn some writing tips – generally for playwriting but I think a lot of the material is helpful across fiction – check out for details here.

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