KIWI CONCERT PARTY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 50, 2 March 1943, Page 3

KIWI CONCERT PARTY

NEW ZEALANDERS POPULAR IN TRIPOLI (Official War Correspondent N.Z.E.F.) Tripoli, Feb. 24. By far the most popular attraction for Eighth Army troops on leave in Tripoli is the Kiwi concert party's fifth revue—the first of the Dominion’s entertainment unit to play in the city’s big modern Miramar theatre. In a hurried overland trip of 12 days from Cairo the concert party reached Tripoli soon after it fell, and within a few days after its arrival began playing in the, theatre, which for so long it has been its ambition to reach. When the last tour of the New Zealand Division ended shortly before the big attack on El Alamein last October the Kiwis said their next show would be In Tripoli. Now they have arrived, and with a brilliant two-hour revue, generally acclaimed by crowded houses of soldiers, sailors and airmen, as "the best in the Middle East.” Unlike their four earlier revues, which they took to New Zealand camps in Egypt and Crete, and as far north as the Turkish border, this show includes a Milne one-act play, and two long musioal features, one of them a selection of unaccompanied Scottish part songs. Throughout the second hour of the revue, Sergeant-Major Terry Vaughan, Christchurch, and his everpopular orchestra of 12 N.Z.E.F. men are on the stage behind the non-stop programme of instrumental items and solos by Wally Prictor and Phil Jay, and the Auckland tenor, Tony Rex.