I wanted a tour of Auckland’s newest comedy venue, which is how I ended up there, with a camera, forcing comedians to eat pizza while I took pictures of them. If it sounds weird, that’s because it was. What I was left with though, was a general feeling of excitement about the good times I’m going to have at MonteCristo over the next three weeks, and a lot of hilarious/awkward pictures of comedians with their mouths full of pizza.
Brendon Green, Lara Fischel-Chisholm and Jesse Griffin
The Montecristo Room can be found beneath Toto’s. It’s a rabbit warren – all derelict and dusty, dimly lit, filled with shadowy nooks and creepy stairways. It seems the perfect place to set up a temporary comedy club, which is exactly what comic Jesse Griffin thought when he first stepped inside. This was last year, and he was at the after party for What We Do In the Shadows. It all flowed pretty easily after that, and now here we are.
You take the a flight of stairs downwards to enter MonteCristo, and end up in a bar with vines obscuring the windows, gilt-framed mirrors and marble tabletops. Through a metal-work archway there is MonteCristo “upstairs”, with red drapes and a bare wooden floor. If you take a right and head down an even dimmer flight of stairs, you’ll find yourself in the basement where the second venue awaits. Downstairs is my favourite, there is a bare concrete floor, leather booths and the occasional coloured light bulb. For the Festival, both venues will be set up with cabaret seating so that you can order metre-long pizzas and buckets of beer.
You probably won’t end up going to Montecristo for the delicious pizza or the amazing space though, you’ll be pulled their inexorably by the strength of its comedy line up, from past Billy T winners Guy Montgomery, Rose Matafeo, Guy Williams, Rhys Matthewson and Nick Gibb, to comedy legend Wilson Dixon and dance troupe Dynamotion. On weekends Brendon Green will be helping comedians to save the world in The Green Effect. On Saturday nights Joseph Moore will be hosting a Dope Joke Party with assorted guests, and on Sundays Jesse Griffin will take the stage with some other funny folk for Character Comedy.
The benefit of accidentally having a photoshoot in which three comedians ate pizza and laughed uncontrollably about it, is the photos. I’ll just leave them here.
Thanks to Brendon, Lara and Jesse for being such good sports, go and see their shows:
Brendon Green is appearing in It’s Not Easy Being Brendon and is also hosting The Green Effect.
Jesse Griffin is appearing as Wilson Dixon in For the First Time, Again and is also hosting Character Comedy.
Lara Fischel-Chisholm is the creator, choreographer and star of Dynamotion who are performing Terror Highway.
This led to a conversation about a “meaty dangler” between Brendon and Jesse that made Lara laugh a lot.
The MonteCristo Room can be found at 53 Nelson St. Check out the full programme here.