REVIEW: Hugo's Rainbow Show EP

Meet Archie the Rainbow, Ray the Sun, Misty the Clou- ... wait, what is that angry banging sound downstairs?

HUGO’S RAINBOW SHOW EP (released Feb 2025)
Hugo Grrl

Wellington-born performer Hugo Grrl has been around the drag scene for a while: starting in his home town, he created shows locally (including the enticingly titled ‘Naked Girls Reading’) before entering and eventually winning the first season of House Of Drag, a locally made (and far better) forerunner to RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under, hosted by local queens Kita Mean (who won the first season of Down Under) and Anita Wigl’it. Grrl competed as the first ever drag king (usually a female or trans-male performer in male drag) to compete on a drag reality television show.

For Pride 2025, Hugo Grrl set his sights on doing some thing bigger and more meaningful; Hugo’s Rainbow Show EP is the end result, a collection of the songs he wrote to accompany a live performance of music and reading intended for children to educate them on a bit of science and a bit of goodness. The songs here work as a set - after an intro track, we meet “Ray The Sun”, “Misty The Cloud” and “Wayne The Rain”, all singing in various genres (rock, ballad, rap respectively) about their scientific role in the day-night and water cycles.

You won’t hear many projects for kids using words like “precipitate”.

Lastly, we meet “Archie The Rainbow”, who ties it all together - Archie explains that he is a spectrum of colour (‘I’m a spectrum / and so are you’ he sings at one point) and only exists, can only come out, if Ray, Misty and Wayne are around. As you can imagine, the messaging here works on a number of levels: rainbows really can only emerge if there is sun, cloud and rain - but the idea of a spectrum, that nobody is simply black or white, that we exist on a number of spectrums (moral-immoral, healthy-unhealthy, introvert-extrovert, and, yes, straight-queer, and so many more) works for all ages.

My kids are obsessed with this EP and its basically on a loop at our place. Its a wonderful piece of work from a performer who isn’t just good at what they’re known for, but is potentially a broader cross-media star.

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Of course, the songs were written to accompany a live performance. Each character come with a bespoke outfit to go with their bespoke song, Grrl drawing on his long career in drag to put together a professional, and beautiful, show.

But this is where the story gets a little sad. And I start to get a little angry.

After premiering at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2024, the show held its Auckland premiere in early February for eight performances at The Button Factory, as part of Auckland Pride Festival 2025, before moving to a single performance at Te Atatū Peninsula Community Hub.

Members of Destiny Church interrupted that performance midway, forcing those in attendance - again, a show aimed at kids, so a lot of children - to lock themselves inside the performance space while waiting for police to arrive and clear out the protesters. Well, they like the word ‘protest’; I call it terrorism.

“I called the police from inside as did a couple of other parents. I really did feel like they were trying to get inside and it felt very violent,” said one person in attendance. The actions of the church were celebrated on Facebook by Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki, but heavily criticised by our prime minister, the leader of the opposition, and the mayor of Auckland. There are now calls to remove Destiny Church’s status as a charitable organisation; a church spokesperson responded saying it was ’funny’ watching people get worked up.

This past Saturday was the final performance of the show, held at Te Tuhi in Howick. My ex-wife took our kids and described to me the process she went through during the week, explaining to the kids that - even though they were going to a colourful, bright, joyful performance for kids - there may be people there who don’t want the event to go ahead. Yet, she was adamant that they attend (and I was completely in support of it too) and show that they aren’t going to be scared off things they love.

After the show yesterday, I asked how it was - there were no disruptions, fortunately, but she did mention there were at least five police officers and more than a dozen security guards in attendance as well.

For a kids show about rainbows and the water cycle.

That is a security force on par with what my good friend Chris Schulz has been decrying over at Boiler Room, where police have been mysteriously (and unnecessarily) arriving in force at R18 music festivals with attendees in the tens of thousands, many of whom are drinking on site. Again, at least five police officers and more than a dozen security guards were at Te Tuhi on Saturday.

For a kids show about rainbows with under a hundred attendees.

The protesters terrorists didn’t show up at Te Tuhi, which shows their real motivations in all this: if it was about getting their message across, they could have done that peacefully with security in attendance. They also could have done that at the queer-friendly Button Factory during the weeks earlier, but they didn’t. That’s because the whole point was scaring innocent people. Sorry, innocent children. The whole point was scaring innocent children. They protested the Pride Parade too, out in public where they were relatively safe. It’s kind of cowardly when you think about it.

But the Church, and its loser leader Brian Tamaki, did celebrate their actions from a week earlier within their church services, declaring a ‘war on woke’ as they took pride (ironically) in their behaviour at Te Atātu and a less effective protest at the Pride Parade the night before (which they refer to as ‘the parade of perversion’). They equate the Pride movement with child abuse and pornography, which is an equivalence that I hope I don’t need to explain is so far from the truth that it insults those who have suffered actual abuse.

Tamaki openly refers to himself as an ‘apostle’ even as he distorts the message of Jesus Christ, the supposed head of his church. Like, lets look at this from their perspective as Christians: “Those who love God will hate evil,” says Tamaki - except that isn’t anywhere in the bible. I may not be a church-goer these days but I picked up a few things when I was back in the 2000s; Christ called his followers to love sinners and avoid sin, not to hate it or to hate sinners. Further, in Luke 6, he explicitly says to ‘love your enemies’. Hatred of anything is a man-made edict; the only mentions of hating sin come from the book of Jude. And even then its in balance with loving the sinner, loving people, loving everyone.

Does forcing a group of young children to barricade themselves in fear sound like love to you? It sounds like an act of terrorism to me. Have a read of the links above and then compare them to the language used in reports following a school shooting in America or an unprovoked attack on Gaza.

We need to stop treating Destiny Church like a church, and start treating it like what it is: an extremist Christian Nationalism organisation that is willing to cause fear and commit terrorism to get its message across. And when they do shit like this, we need to charge them to the full extent of the law.

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We also need to celebrate heroes like Hugo Grrl who fearlessly went ahead with his performance at Te Tuhi even after what happened in Te Atātu, showed up with the energy of someone unaffected by all that, and who is out there doing a better job of instilling positive values like love and acceptance and community (and scientific terms like precipitation) than just about anyone you can name.

And how was the show? In my ex-wife’s own words:

“Effortlessly funny, comedically brilliant, freaking gorgeous and insanely clever content. I'm still blown away. Kid appropriate seating (cushions, couches, beanbags), plus Hugo personally introduced himself to every kid that came in, crouching down to their levels, asking questions, respecting those that didn't want to chat, offering high fives to those that seemed receptive … I've never seen a Pastor spend that much time or energy on kids before a sermon.”

My three youngest pose with Hugo Grrl at Te Tuhi. Photo: R Philpott.

Hugo’s Rainbow Show EP is out now on all major platforms.

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Be an ally, not a terrorist.
Chris xo