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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Economy taking toll on Calypso tents

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20170124

?Ca­lyp­so tents have been los­ing au­di­ences over the years, but the state of the econ­o­my is tak­ing a fur­ther toll on this Car­ni­val tra­di­tion.

This was ev­i­dent on Sun­day night as Kaiso House, the flag­ship tent of the Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so Or­gan­i­sa­tion (Tu­co), per­formed to a much small­er au­di­ence at what was billed as its grand pre­mier, held at the South­ern Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (SAPA), San Fer­nan­do.

Mem­ber of the man­age­ment team, ca­lyp­son­ian Twig­gy ad­mit­ted that au­di­ences had been wan­ing over the past two to three years, but Sun­day evening's show "was not as good as the year be­fore.

Nev­er­the­less, pa­trons were able to en­joy a mix­ture of satire, hu­mour, so­cial com­men­tary and po­lit­i­cal com­men­tary from the per­form­ers.

As ex­pect­ed, one of the more top­i­cal is­sues was crime, as new­com­er Lani K, who got the first en­core for the night, broached the sub­ject of wit­ness­es see­ing but say­ing noth­ing. Mar­val­ous Mar­va al­so com­ment­ed on the strange place T&T has be­come be­cause of crime.

Nee­sha Wat­t­ley, who be­came in­fa­mous for her "dat mak­ing any sense" com­ment in re­sponse to re­ceiv­ing keys to a house from the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) was al­so im­mor­talised in Ca­lyp­so by Du­ane O'Con­nor.

O'Con­nor ad­vised the HDC in the fu­ture they may have to present the keys to a car as well as keys to the house to re­cip­i­ents. One of the biggest acts in Ca­lyp­so, La­dy Aiesha earned a num­ber of en­cores as she sang about her ex­pe­ri­ence while shop­ping for an obeah man to find a male com­pan­ion.

But the night was not with­out some hic­cups as a num­ber of the big names ad­ver­tised, failed to show.

Twig­gy apol­o­gised to south au­di­ences, who up­on leav­ing the venue, ex­pressed dis­sat­is­fac­tion that ca­lyp­so­ni­ans such as Karen As­che, Mista Shak and Gyp­sy, were a no show.

Twig­gy, who was al­so un­able to per­form as she had to fill in for the stage man­ag­er who fell ill, promised to make amends be­fore the end of the Car­ni­val sea­son.

Twig­gy ex­plained that As­che ex­pe­ri­enced some prob­lems get­ting her mu­sic in time, and was still in the stu­dio on the evening. She said Gyp­sy was out of the coun­try and did not make it back on time. As for Mista Shak, she said he had a pre­vi­ous com­mit­ment and be­cause of the rain, was un­able to make it to the south­ern venue on time.


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