I had the most gorgeous time seeing Antonio! this past Thursday night at Basement Theatre. I am absolutely the exact target audience for this show—in an almost frightening way. As a pre-teen, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean every Sunday night for a year, and as a teenager, I once got marked down on an NCEA assessment for having too much to say about Portia in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
Antonio! is a queer pirate musical based on the premise that Shakespeare has a weirdly large number of characters called ‘Antonio’ across his collected works. Does that sound like something I’d be into or what? I’m pleased to say that it wasn’t just good marketing, the show definitely delivered on this extremely alluring premise.
The show features five incredibly talented performers who not only tell the story of the titular Antonio but also play a whole album’s worth of original songs together throughout. Part theatrical experience, part live concert; the show is a perfect hybrid of a Shakespeare play, the musical Six and devised theatre reminiscent of NZ theatre company A Slightly Isolated Dog. If you don’t have the time or ability to go see all of those things separately, go and see this if you ever have the opportunity.
Throughout the show I was impressed with the ensemble cast’s ability to work so well as a team. The show is constantly switching between modern language, direct Shakespeare extracts, really gay slang and live music. I haven’t seen the script but I assume it is dense and that each person’s copy is heavily annotated. It is a complex game they’re playing and this team didn’t once drop the ball. Even when one person accidentally flung a drumstick across the room in the middle of a song, they kept playing with one stick while they lunged across the floor for the other. This is why we come to live theatre.
“It is a complex game they’re playing and this team didn’t once drop the ball.”
The character of Antonio (played by William Duignan) is joined on stage by an ensemble of four ‘Fools’ who make up his band. Each of the four Fools (Henry Ashby, Emma Katene, Jthan Morgan, Ania Upstill) get a chance to shine with a musical solo, in addition to portraying many of Antonio’s exes. A few highlights were Bassanio from Merchant of Venice (Ashby), who was serving major Steve energy (this guy I knew at uni who would mooch off anyone that breathed), Don Pedro from Much Ado About Nothing (Katene) stole the stage, and amid a hectic super high energy show, Jthan Morgan shone as the sincere Sebastian from She’s The Man Twelfth Night.
Of course, the central character of the show is Antonio himself, and I was impressed with Duignan’s ability to energise the audience and connect with the other performers to sell the importance of each chapter of Antonio’s life. We were a pretty average Thursday night audience at the start of the show, but by the end, the cast had given us the energy of a much larger weekend audience which takes a lot of skill. Getting us to scream “fuck money!” early in the show probably helped.
It’s possible that when they were devising the show William Duignan, Andy Manning and Ania Upstill believed the queerest and/or most empowering parts of the show were the moments where a performer would deadeye an audience member with a sassy comment. Or perhaps Antonio’s sometimes almost painfully earnest addresses to the audience about love? For me, it was more just the fact that the show had dared to exist at all.
When I was in high school studying these Shakespeare plays, the only queer relationship I’d seen in media that was actually ‘canon’ was in Four Weddings and a Funeral—and spoiler alert but one of them dies. I distinctly remember reading The Merchant of Venice in Year 13 English class and thinking ‘this plot literally doesn’t make sense if it’s not gay’ and finding it challenging to discuss the relationships and motivations of the characters in my assignments without referencing this. My ability to get the NCEA grades I needed to study at university required me to provide a more traditional interpretation of their relationship.
Up until a few years ago, I had never seen a pair of characters that seemed so obviously, gayly, in love with each other. Let alone have that relationship confirmed as romantic by the text itself. This is why there’s so much incredible queer fan media out there, and I’m pretty sure Antonio! technically counts as a fanwork.
If I could tell a 17-year-old Rebecca that one day he’d be going to see a show where Antonio and Bassanio from Merchant of Venice sing a romantic duet called ‘Pound of Flesh’ it would have inspired and motivated her to give Shakespeare more of a chance.
Antonio! is goofy and fun and sexy and unapologetically queer. I’m pretty sure there’s no other show out there quite like it. Basement was the last stop on this tour of the show but check out Butch Mermaid productions on socials to find out where they’re performing next. If I could give double kudos I would.
