Although I had doubts going into the theater, I left feeling certain that “Auana” is the best show in Hawaii right now. The costumes by designer Manaola Yap are elegant, detailed and worthy of a fashion show. The hula choreography by Hiwa Vaughan, who is an award-winning dancer, appropriately includes traditional and modern styles of hula throughout the performance.
The music grabbed me right away. It was incredible, like listening to a movie soundtrack that rivals even “Moana.” It’s an original score by Evan Duffy, an L.A. based composer, who has produced music for major films, such as “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and TV shows, like “Hawaii Five-0.” The vocals are also completely in the Hawaiian language. Duffy worked with the show’s Hawaiian language lyricist, Keao NeSmith. It’s so good, I would purchase the soundtrack if it were for sale.
Our show ended with a standing ovation; and I hear the performers get them night after night since “Auana” debuted in December 2024.
“Auana,” which is a Hawaiian word that means “to wander or veer off the beaten path,” takes the audience on a journey through different Hawaii stories in eight acts, utilizing hula, music, juggling, comedy and, of course, acrobatics in its storytelling. A character known as the Trickster helps weave the different acts together and provides comic relief in between scenes.
I thought the acrobatics would take away from the moolelo (stories) the show was trying to tell through the hula dancers, but I didn’t feel like one stole the spotlight from another. They enhanced each other.
“Aaron Sala was sending us many different moolelo, stories from sacred texts, so we were looking at stories, looking at acts and sort of slowly pairing them together,” said Neil Dorward, the show’s director and co-creator. He flew to Hawaii two and a half years ago after he finished creating a show for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. He immediately connected with Sala, the show’s cultural creative producer, who kept an eye on how the stories were portrayed.
“Some stories were quite easy to put together. You know, the goddess of the moon, and you’ve got that beautiful Lyra act [with an aerial hoop]. That was one of the easy ones, and then some of the others were more challenging,” Dorward said.
The opening act portrays Polynesian ocean voyaging to Hawaii, with a large canoe on stage and high-flying acrobats soaring into the air. In another story, the rise of surfing’s popularity was interpreted through a Rola Bola act, where an acrobat balances on multiple cylindrical rollers. The “Wheel of Life,” a large rotating apparatus with two hooped tracks, is brought out in the show’s finale about the Big Island of Hawaii’s Maunakea volcano. Two acrobats run on each end of the contraption while it spins, and it is powerful to watch.
“It’s a really great act that just is really death-defying, and the artists are incredible,” Dorward said. “So combining that with traditional kahiko hula dance itself is phenomenal. It’s a great scene.”
It really was. And unlike other shows I’ve seen in Waikiki and around Hawaii, Cirque du Soleil’s “Auana” is one I’d watch again and again.
###
Click, HERE, to read the article on Travel Weekly