TGIFr!day

Week of Friday, May 3, 2019 | Vol. 7, No. 14

Check da Scene

Grinds & Da Kines For Your Weekend

‘SWEENEY TODD’

Kauai Community Players present an unusual love story

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2 | TGIFR!DAY | May 3, 2019

TOP PICKS FOR THE WEEK FRIDAY

“SWEENEY TODD — THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET” 7 p.m. Puhi Theatrical Warehouse.

Tickets: kauaicommunityplayers.org KAUAI CELEBRATION WITH WILL GRAHAM 6:30 p.m., Vidinha Stadium.

ST. CATHERINE SCHOOL CARNIVAL 5 to 11 p.m. 5021 Kawaihau Road, Kapaa Food, entertainment, horse rides, games, silent auction and more. Free entry and parking.

SIX KAUAI WOMEN AUTHORS BOOK SIGNING 5 to 8:30 p.m. Kauai Society of Artists gallery space at Kukui Grove Center.

The authors are Laurel McGraw, Carol Peacock Williams, S.J. Lehoven, Dawn Kawahara, Sally Jo Manea and Pam Varma. Music and pupus.

SATURDAY

COUNTDOWN TO CHARITY WALK 10 a.m. to noon Kukui Grove Center Entertainment, silent auction, Kauai Visitor Industry Charity Walk registration.

KAUAI CELEBRATION WITH WILL GRAHAM KIDZFEST 10:30 a.m. Vidinha Stadium.

HEALING ART SHOW 6 to 8 p.m. Ha Coffee Bar HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME” 2 p.m. Kauai War Memorial Convention Hall $12 general admission in advance, $15 at the door.

SUNDAY

KAUAI CELEBRATION WITH WILL GRAHAM 3:30 p.m. Vidinha Stadium.

“HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME” 2 p.m. Kauai War Memorial Convention Hall $12 general admission in advance, $15 at the door.

“SWEENEY TOOD — THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET” 4 p.m. Puhi Theatrical Warehouse.

AN UNUSUAL LOVE STORY Kauai Community Players brings “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” to the stage for three-week run BILL BULEY TGIFR!DAY

“S

weeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

Now, that doesn’t sound like a love story, does it?

There’s some killing. Some strange ingredients in meat pies.

Macabre comes to mind.

But love?

Absolutely, says Rebecca Hanson, who is directing the musical for Kauai Community Players that opens tonight at Puhi Theatrical Warehouse.

“As a theater person, we always like the dramatics, and this show has it,” she said.

“But what’s interesting about this play, when you dive into it, it’s really a show about love. You wouldn’t necessarily think it was associated with that.”

Here’s why she says it is.

The main character, Benjamin Barker, seems to have a good life with wife and daughter. But, wrongly accused of a crime, he spends some 15 to 20 years in prison. When he returns home, he hopes to find his wife and child. He doesn’t. He believes his wife is dead and his daughter is now the ward of Judge Turpin, the man who put him away.

“It’s how far are you willing to go for the person you love and we see this man break, we see him mentally break, out of the SEE LOVE, PAGE 3

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••• WANT TO GO?

Kauai Community Players is producing Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

It is directed Rebecca Hanson. Musical direction by Monica Chung.

Performances are 7 p.m.

Thursdays to Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, May 3 to May 26 at the Puhi Theatrical Warehouse.

Tonight’s and Saturday’s show are sold out. Tickets: kauaicommunityplayers.org TOP: John Galloway plays Beadle Bamford in KCP’s production of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” BOTTOM: Jessika Montoya-Cristobal, who plays Mrs. Lovett, and Jason Blake, who plays Sweeney Todd, are together in a scene.

Photos by Bill Buley / The Garden Island

TGIFR!DAY | May 3, 2019 | 3

Love

from his barber chair.

“He’s beyond redemption, but you get him,” Blake said.

There’s not exactly a happy ending to Sweeney Todd. The killer is eventually stopped and the people

Continued from page 2

pure love he has for his wife and his daughter,” Hanson said.

It’s about then we say goodbye to Benjamin Barker and hello to Sweeney Todd (played by Jason Blake), who goes on a bit of a killing spree as he seeks revenge.

But there is more love.

Mrs. Lovett (played by Jessika Montoya-Cristobal), who runs a pie shop, loves Sweeney Todd and offers an unusual way to get rid of the bodies. And there is young, love, too, between Anthony (played by Taj Guterrez) and Johanna.

“There is killing and eating of meat pies, but the underbelly of it all is love,” Hanson said. “Love can drive us crazy and we see it happen with Sweeney Todd.”

Sweeney Todd, which runs through May 26, is two acts, about two and a half hours and 29 songs. There is a 21-person cast and a four-person orchestra.

Monica Chung is the music director of the KCP production that is basically an opera. About 95 percent of the show is scored with music, which is rare.

“The music is incredible.

It’s haunting, it’s gorgeous,” she said. “It’s so complex, it really just grabs you from the beginning to the end, whether you want it to or not.”

Chung, a classically trained pianist, saw many musicals growing up in New York.

“This was the first one to really grab my attention,” she said.

At age 14, she asked her teacher if she could borrow the Sweeney Todd VHS at school.

who deserve some kind of justice get their justice.

“You gotta do it to how Stephen Sondheim wrote it,” Montoya-Cristobal said. “But it’s gorgeous. I love it.”

And, love does survive.

Hanson promises no one will go home disappointed.

“They are going to see top-notch performers give it all they have for the love of telling a story we need to tell,” she said.

Shops, Restaurants & Services at Ching Young Village: Bill Buley / The Garden Island

Morgan Liddell plays Judge Turpin in KCP’s production of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

“I must have listened to that thing over and over again,” Chung said.

Hanson loved it, too, growing up.

“This particular musical is in the back of the brain of musical theater kids. It’s kind of the holy grail, so to speak,” she said. “So when the opportunity to do Sweeney Todd comes along, we grab at it. It’s always been one of those shows that you just have to do.”

Hanson considers this long, complex musical with a story of twists and turns and close shaves the biggest challenges of her directing career.

“I feel that after the experience I’ve gained here, I was ready to take on something this large,” she said.

Another reason is her cast and crew. She believes she has some of the top vocalists and musicians on board.

“This whole team is the reason why I get to put it on,” she said. “It’s the people that I’m surrounded with.

We really have very talented

people coming together to make this work.”

Blake and Montoya-Cristobal are both playing what they consider the biggest roles of their acting careers.

Their chemistry and camaraderie comes to light in dialogue and dance. Both are expressive, with fine vocal range.

“We’re having fun,” Blake said, “it’s wonderfully offensive, too,” he added, laughing.

Montoya-Cristobal said there many layers to her character, including that she’s a bit demented.

“She’s being crazy because she’s in love with this person,” she said. “Definitely not my normal self. It’s fun to always do something that’s not yourself.”

Because it’s really an opera, they sing much of their stage time, which isn’t as easy as they make it look.

“It’s a stretch for everybody,” Blake said.

He enjoys the role of Sweeney Todd, who kills those who wronged him —

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4 | TGIFR!DAY | May 3, 2019

NA LEI HIWAHIWA

Celebrate spring, Hawaiian music, arts at Kauai Beach Resort

JESSICA ELSE TGIFR!DAY

H

ANAMAULU — Celebrate Hawaii with music, language, history and the arts at Kauai Beach Resort on tonight at the 11th annual Na Lei Hiwahiwa, “A Hawaiian Music Celebration of Spring.”

Featuring contemporary Hawaiian music and weaving stories centered around this year’s theme of “Na Mea Kanu Hawaii,” or “Plants of Hawaii,” the event will feature the Kauai High School May Day Court.

The master of ceremonies is kumu hula Troy Hinano Lazaro.

“It is a fundraiser to help with our 35th annual Kauai Mokihana Festival and the Malie Scholarship, which is used to help individuals and groups on Kauai for educational purposes with the focus on Hawaiian language, music and culture,” said organizer Maka Herrod.

Music this year will be provided

by Ahumanu, a group of musicians — Kekai Robinson, Marja Lehua Apisaloma and Liz Morales — that Herrod met while judging hula in Japan at Ku Mai Ka Hula and Jula O Na Keiki.

“They were musicians for a halau hula whose sensei (teacher) is a haumana (student) of kumu hula Hokulani Holt on Maui,” Herrod

Contributed

Ahumanu will perform at the Celebrate Hawaii concert Friday at the Kauai Beach Resort. From left are Kekai Robinson, Marja Lehua Apisaloma and Liz Morales.

said. “We are featuring them because of who they are, where they stand as women of Hawaii and the passion (they have) to fulfill the same mission as Malie Foundation.”

Ahumanu released their latest album, “In This Place of Love,” on April 20. It will be their first time performing on Kauai.

“Ahumanu are talented musicians, composers, and have been

raised with Hawaiian music all their lives,” Herrod said. “(They) are very excited to share their love for music and Hawaii.”

Dr. Holt, in an excerpt from “Kahi Aloha, In This Place of Love,” writes: “Ahumanu is a complex composite of three lives. A collection of shared experiences, an assemblage of remarkable talent, and a gathering together of musical passion.

“They are multifaceted yet combine into a sound that is only Ahumanu. Each facet brings together their love for a variety of music genre — R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, and a little bit of country,” she said.

“This offers a bold statement of who they are and what they love to do. And, like finely polished gold, their beautiful Hawaiian mele gleam with a brillance that

declares their love for our ‘olelo makuahine and its intracacies and nuances, which can only be expressed fully in the language of our homeland, the sands of our birth.”

The concert begins at 6 p.m.

Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. Get them at Vicky’s Fabrics, Scotty’s Music and Kauai Music and Sound, or at mailefoundation.org.

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TGIFR!DAY | May 3, 2019 | 5

review

A STRONG EFRON, BUT LITTLE ELSE NEW IN BUNDY BIOPIC

JOCELYN NOVECK ASSOCIATED PRESS

W

hen Ted Bundy died in the electric chair 30 years ago in Florida, a witness to the execution — a prosecutor in the case of a 12-year-old girl Bundy murdered — told the New York Times: “He probably could have done anything he set his mind to do, but something happened to him and we still don’t know what it was.”

Three decades later, we still don’t, and the aptly named “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile” doesn’t provide any new answers.

Instead, Joe Berlinger’s film, starring an impressively scary Zac Efron, tries with mixed success to address a different issue, namely how Bundy not only used his good looks and boyish demeanor to fool those closest to him, especially his longtime girlfriend, but how he managed to seduce some in

Brian Douglas / Netflix via AP

Zac Efron in a scene from “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile.”

the media and public — to the point where, revoltingly, he had actual groupies at his murder trial.

Berlinger’s film, based on Liz Kloepfer’s memoir “The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy,” happens to have coincided this year with his own docuseries on Bundy, also on Netflix. It’s clear that

By telling the story from the perspective of Kloepfer, who for years refused to believe that her handsome, law-student boyfriend could be a savage killer, Berlinger necessarily has to refrain from depicting Bundy’s crimes, so that perhaps we can fall under the same spell she does. We don’t witness his sickening violence until the film is nearly over.

The problem is that by then, the approach is distracting. We all know what Bundy did — he confessed to some 30 murders right before his death, blaming pornography for his demented fantasies, and is believed to

have committed many more.

Yes, Berlinger is interested in telling us more about Bundy the serial deceiver than Bundy the serial killer. But we don’t learn much revealing about the deception, either.

Except that women might be drawn to a guy who looks like, well, Zac Efron.

Speaking of Efron: The actor, with his ultra-clean “High School Musical” image still engraved in our pop-culture memories, might seem a counter-intuitive choice, but some of his later films in which he’s pure abs and sexy smiles, in the frat house or on SEE BUNDY, PAGE 6

the feature film benefits from a documentarian’s eye; in fact it’s the frequent snippets of real-life footage that give the movie some of its most interesting moments, and make for a chilling credits sequence in which we see Bundy in real-life scenes that we’ve just watched Efron perform.

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review

FINDING, AND STAYING, IN PARADISE instead of going back to the sometimes frantic life of the mainland.

Well … Andy Stennett and his family did just that!

Seventeen years ago, they arrived on Kauai, fell in love with the beauty, the culture, the people, and CYNTHIA LYNN & the spirit of the place, and ED JUSTUS started a new life’s advenSPECIAL TO TGIFR!DAY ture, eventually landing in their own patch of lush here are countless times visiting custom- Hawaiian jungle-forest.

In “Lost in Hawaii: Our ers in the bookstore 17-Year Family Vacation”, have said they wish they could just stay in the island we get to experience the

real-life tale of a family making an extraordinary choice and discovering what awaited them.

The predicaments in making such a change naturally bring questions: How do you adapt to an entirely new place? How do you create a new income, a place to live? How do you keep your family engaged in the totally different life that is upon them?

With humor, zest, and ingenuity, Mr. Stennett weaves a fun tale of his

NETFLIX ANNOUNCES DEAL FOR FILM ABOUT THAILAND’S CAVE BOYS

Bundy

T

N

etflix is joining with the production company for the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” to make a film about last July’s dramatic rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach who were trapped in a flooded cave in northern Thailand for more than two weeks.

Netflix and SK Global Entertainment said they acquired the rights to the story from 13 Thumluang Co. Ltd,, a company that Thailand’s government helped establish to represent the interests of the boys and their coach, who attended the news conference for the announcement Tuesday in Bangkok.

Thailand’s Culture Ministry in March first unveiled the deal, announced as a miniseries. Deputy government spokesman Weerachon Sukoondhapatipakat was quoted then as saying that the families of the cave survivors would each be paid 3 million baht ($94,000).

A date for the project to be released wasn’t disclosed.

The boys of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach became a center of world attention after they became trapped in the cave on June 23 last year, with doubts they were able to find shelter from rising flood waters that poured in after unexpected rain. They were found by two British divers and brought out by a crew of experienced cave divers who teamed up with Thai navy SEALs in a complicated mission that was concluded on July 10.

Jon M. Chu, who helmed “Crazy Rich Asians,” and Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya, a Thai filmmaker, will be directors on the cave project.

family’s efforts and enduring spirit as they gradually carved out a life for themselves on the Garden Island, culminating into the turning of a wily and unruly plot of land into a providential place to call home.

The bookstore has had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Stennet for a number of years.

Many know him as “The Rooster Guy”, the astute entrepreneur who turned

of these feathered fowl riding the waves, serving as mayor, and boarding the planes to Kauai.

If anything, “Lost in Hawaii” is a fun and touching reminder that anything is possible, so long as we act on the opportunities that present themselves to us to find happiness in life.

Kauai’s wild chickens into a magnet and greeting card business with clever jokes and humorous pictures

••• Ed Justus and Cynthia Lynn are owners of The Bookstore in Hanapepe.

Continued from page 5

the beach, are more apt. The actor makes a fine career leap into the dark side here, acquitting himself nicely in a role that could have veered into caricature.

Lily Collins, too, gives a sensitive and sympathetic turn as Liz, the vulnerable single mom who fell in love with Bundy and almost married him. But the actor who steals the show here is the dry and witty John Malkovich as Judge Edward Cowart, who uttered the words “extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile” in describing the crimes for which he was sentencing Bundy to death — but also was disturbingly friendly, calling him a “bright young man” and promising lawyer, and telling him to “take care of yourself.”

By this time, the film has become a courtroom drama, and we’ve almost forgotten about Liz. But it starts out as

Brian Douglas / Netflix via AP

Zac Efron, left, and Lily Collins in a scene from “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile.”

the story of a lonely young woman who meets a flirtatious guy in a bar. She thinks he may run away when he sees she’s got a toddler daughter, but he stays — and makes breakfast.

Meanwhile, news reports are surfacing of terrible crimes. We toggle between sweet and sexy domestic scenes and sobering news footage. As events close in on Bundy, we see him make not one but two dramatic escapes from jail. Then comes

his famous murder trial in front of TV cameras. In just one of its bizarre moments, Bundy asks his friend Carole Ann to marry him right there in the courtroom as she’s testifying on his behalf.

All these events are fascinating — but they’re public record. Suddenly our narrative film seems to lose its original focus and turn into a documentary — polished and absorbing, but telling us nothing new.

Some have argued that

the film glorifies its subject. It doesn’t, really. But it doesn’t explain him, either. And that leads to another question, which is, if there’s nothing really new to say about Ted Bundy, need we be saying anything?

“Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile,” a Netflix release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America “for disturbing/ violent content, some sexuality, nudity and language.”

Running time: 110 minutes.

CHECK DA SCENE

TGIFR!DAY | May 3, 2019 | 7

DENNIS FUJIMOTO TGIFR!DAY

Kamani Vidinha, Umi Adric

Frank Allen, Leslie Webb

Russlyn Morita, Kaira Kupihea, Ayden Gonsalves

HANAPA‘A FOR CHARITY

J Zachary Wood, Gabriel Balenzuela

Emi Rose Yoshimori, Stanton Yoshimori, Taj Yoshimori

Jimmy Yoshimoto, Jhayrmiyah Yoshimoto, Jona Yoshimoto

Denise Ventura, Elaine Leung, Edgar Sevilla

unior Fuimaono kept his secret very well Sunday during the weigh-in of the second Fishing for Charity Shoreline Challenge that benefits the Kauai Visitor Industry Charity Walk.

Fuimaono adjourned to the shade of the windbreak at the Sheraton Kauai Resort as fish after fish from the more than 100 fishermen registered crossed the scales set up among the field of bounce houses, free food, keiki activities, and the prize giveaway that swelled with prizes donated by community organizations.

When Fuimaono finally broke the silence, people gasped as the barracuda topping 49 pounds cleared the weigh bar, settling the scale beyond the 45-pound ulua brought in by Kevin Fune.

The Charity Walk hosts its Countdown to Charity Walk Saturday at the Kukui Grove Center, and the Charity Doubles Tennis Tournament at the Hanalei Bay Resort. The Charity Walk takes place May 11 at the Vidinha Stadium soccer fields.

Tracy Kupihea, Annette Wong, Cindy Abreu, Nalani Layosa-Ho‘okano

Renae Vicoy, Eliza Fuimaono, Noah Fuimaono, Junior Fuimaono

Elaine Leung, Asher Sarmiento, Stanley Sarmiento

8 | TGIFR!DAY | May 3, 2019

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