Who are we?
We are restless performers by nature — always looking for the next story to tell and another excuse to create something new.
Charlotte Graf and Margaret O’Hanlon (pictured) are the creative minds behind Tiny Room Concerts, a series born, quite literally, out of having a tiny room. What began as a solution to a practical problem developed into a distinctive format: short, themed performances combining music, storytelling and the unexpected connections between the two.
These are not tribute shows. We’re interested in what lies behind the music — the strange stories, unlikely connections, people and events that shaped the artists and songs we love. Sometimes we begin with the artist and uncover the story; sometimes we begin with a real-life experience and discover the music that belongs to it.
Living in a resort town has one enormous creative advantage: extraordinarily talented musicians continually find their way here, bringing with them a wealth of experience, influences and musical lives lived elsewhere. Tiny Room Concerts gives those artists a place to share the music they love, tell the stories they want to tell, and create something audiences won’t see anywhere else.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
MARGARET O'HANLON:
Moving from New York City to a small tourist town in the South Island of New Zealand might have seemed like a slow creative death for me. I’m Margaret O’Hanlon, founder, producer, writer and director of Whirlwind Productions — and, as it turned out, Queenstown was anything but.
Queenstown is an international community, full of expatriate entertainers, musicians and artists drawn here by an extraordinary landscape. There is something about living amongst all this space and beauty — a freedom from the mental noise — that gives us room to think, experiment and create.
In 2010, over a plate of Eggs Benedict in a small café, the idea for Tom Waits For No Man was born: gather some of the best performers in the district, give them the songs of Tom Waits and see what happened. The sheer pleasure of watching such a loose idea take on a life of its own gave me the confidence to attempt something I had dreamed about for years — creating a rock opera around the music of David Bowie. That became Rock and Roll Suicide, and gaining the rights to create and stage that production remains one of the highlights of Whirlwind’s history.
Since then, I’ve been drawn to subjects that contain a story worth digging into: mental illness, the tragedy and complexity of friendship, the demise of local radio, a changing Britain, the social upheaval of 1969, and that perennial artistic dilemma — commercial success versus creative integrity. The subject changes; the curiosity behind it doesn’t.
And because Queenstown has no dedicated theatre in which to make this work, every production brings another creative challenge: we have to invent the theatre as well as the show. Oddly enough, I think that limitation has become part of what Whirlwind is.
