Honolulu Weekly

It’s the little kids who will enjoy this show the most. I mean, with a title like Maui vs. Hercules, it’s not meant to attract the same audiences as, say, Hedda Gabler or Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

On hearing the keiki laugh during this new Honolulu Theatre for Youth production, my thoughts raced back to my own childhood–a race inexorably becoming a marathon–and the hours I’d spent watching similar stuff at the Orpheum. The Orpheum? That was the local movie house where my mother deposited us for a whole Saturday morning of cartoons and kid flicks. It was at the Orpheum that I fell in love with Pia Zadora in that memorable 1964 film, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. (A confession: I married my first wife because she was a Pia Zadora look-alike; lately, I’ve begun to resemble Santa Claus. Life may not exactly imitate art, but it certainly mocks it.)

What a combination: Santa Claus, Martians, and Ö Pia Zadora!

As I recall, the films of the ’50s and ’60s provided many such epic encounters, and eventually all of them came to flicker, late at night, on our old black-and-white Motorola: classic comedies like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, or The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters; badly dubbed Italian beefcake flicks like Hercules vs. the Vampires, or Hercules vs. the Moon Monsters; plus my personal favorite, still fond in memory–The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, a classic.

So, after matching wits with vampires, moon monsters, Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe, Hercules finally meets Maui. Who’d've guessed?

Yokanaan Kearns did. According to the program notes, sudden inspiration struck the playwright during a coffee shop meeting two years ago with HTY artistic director Eric Johnson. He quickly scribbled the idea down on a napkin: Maui vs. Hercules. While Kearns admits that Alien vs. Predator was then on his mind, not Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, his play owes something to both. The show has a premise just as myth-busting and strange as aliens abducting St. Nick and as colossal and combative as monsters from two different film franchises grappling in a brand-new money bucket.

The confrontation starts when Hawaiian demigod Maui (Hermen Tesorio, Jr.) throws his mighty hook into the sea and raises a new island for himself, one where he will be free from the clutches of his Aunty Pele. Pele, it seems, wants to make Maui practice hula when he’d rather be doing something else. With glee, he declaims: ‘I, King Maui of this freshly fished island, make the following decree: this is a hula-free zone!’ The hoisting of the island, though, raises a wave big enough to throw mighty Hercules (Swaine Kaui) to shore. Thinking himself alone, Hercules stakes his own claim: ‘This is my island, the island of Herculanesia!’ and declares it an epic-poetry-free zone. It seems that he, too, has a problem with a domineering goddess–his stepmother, Hera. She nags him about … epic poetry.

In his script, Kearns rings the changes on what is essentially an extended battle for ‘King of the Hill’–both demigods vying for ownership of the new land. Under Eric Johnson’s direction, the two rapidly degenerate from powerful immortals to sandlot baseball players arguing over who was safe and who was out. For the kids in the audience, that’s pure delight. Both Tesoro and Kaui revel in taking their characters from boastful, bluffing big-shots to incessantly quarreling brats. Overall, the performance style owes much to Looney Tunes–one can’t help but think of Daffy and Bugs as the two leads constantly bicker. Or, considering their crested helmets, Marvin the Martian.

But then Britney appears. Yes, that’s right. Another character, named ‘Britney,’ arrives on stage, dressed like Holly Golightly replete with sunglasses, Chanel hat, Jimmy Choo shoes, and several shopping bags. She is looking for the mall–an unexpected turn of events, to say the least. Unexpected as much for the audience as for the two heroes who have no idea what a mall might be, much less a Neiman-Marcus.

‘Omigod!’ Britney exclaims. ‘Maybe this is one of those places that only has a Sears!’

To be fair, the appearance of a new character on the scene has been foreshadowed–Hera and Pele appeared briefly in the background when their names were mentioned. Actress Mary Wells plays them both, and … Britney. It is a testament to Wells’ verve and composure that, after some very uncomfortable minutes while the audience restructures its imagined world to include a ‘Britney,’ the play doesn’t lag more than it does. Why is Britney there at all? I’m guessing that Kearns needed a new conflict to move the plot forward. Along the way, he decided to make a philosophical point as well: the old gods are long gone. Instead of regal Hera or potent Pele, today we have Ö a Britney. Instead of Maui’s tricks and Hercules’ labors, today’s heroic exploits will occur Ö at Nordstrom. In a sense, we moderns have traded the eternal for the mundane, the magical for the mercantile. It’s a fair point, but it’s a flawed plot device–at least for us adults.

Fortunately, Britney is just a side-trip in the show. Both Pele and Hera reappear and eventually merge into an Ur-goddess who makes the boys play nice with each other. At least for a while. And the kids in the audience–well, as long as the two mighty heroes caper and quibble, who cares what the dippy woman wants?

Woulda been neat, though, to toss in Santa and a Martian or two.

And Pia Zadora.