Hula show gives up Kodak label

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

It's kitsch. It's 1950s corny. And it touts itself as the place to capture Kodak moments.

The Kodak Hula Show, in which dancers perform to live music, has been referred to as kitsch. But many of the show's performers and its new owners see the performance as a Waikiki tradition worth continuing. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

Two years after the Hogan Family Foundation rescued the free show when the Eastman Kodak Co. pulled out of sponsorship, the family is sandblasting away the Kodak name at Waikiki Shell Amphitheater in Kapi'olani Park, replacing decades-old signs with banners for the Pleasant Hawaiian Hula Show, named for the Hogan family's Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays tour company.

"We're still very friendly with Kodak," said Gary Hogan, whose parents opened the travel service here in 1959, the year Hawai'i became the nation's 50th state.

Kodak film is still for sale in a kiosk beside the bleachers. Dancers wearing ti leaf skirts still call themselves the Kodak Hula Show girls. Performers still pause before the audience, giving camera-toting tourists a chance to snap colorful daytime shots of hula girls shaking their hips in a setting of thatched huts and palm trees, the photo op for which the show was created.

Kodak has been part of the transition since the Hogan family took over the nearly $600,000-a-year operational cost. The family agreed to keep Kodak's name because so many people identified with it. But the agreement became complicated each time the Hogans needed to ask Kodak's permission about the way it marketed a show that Kodak no longer ran.

Officially, this summer marks the end of the Kodak era.

"The name change was so we can control the marketing of the show," Hogan said. "Most importantly, it will always be free."

Change in name only

	Still performing three times a week
•	The Pleasant Hawaiian Hula Show, one of the longest-running and most popular free events in Honolulu, has performances at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at the Waikiki Shell, 2805 Monsarrat Ave., in Kapi'olani Park.

Brown, who directs the show, succeeded her aunt, Louise Akeo Silva, whose Royal Hawaiian Girls Glee Club still provides the dancers. Brown delights in her glory days on stage and the idea of her picture being in strangers' scrapbooks.

She never took offense when tour books called the show kitsch and touristy. She liked meeting foreigners and celebrities and found charm in the show's popularity.

To this day, she admires Fritz Herman, a Kodak Hawai'i vice president and manager, who created the show and gave her the opportunity to be part of it.

The show is what paid her way through school. It's where she danced her way through pregnancies because she was slim enough for ti leaves to hide her swelling belly. The show is what has kept her young.

Three mornings a week, she's backstage in her mu'umu'u and lei, ready for another performance.

"I can fill in as a dancer," she said. "But not in a ti leaf skirt anymore."

She leaves that to her daughter, who also is in the show, just as 69-year-old Leilani Nakamura leaves the dancing to her daughters and granddaughters.

Nakamura began dancing in 1955, when the show was still at Sans Souci, near the Natatorium.

"The feeling was sort of different then," Nakamura said. "It was more family togetherness. Today, it's more commercial."

Nakamura sticks around because she still likes the feeling of it. She works as a greeter now, typically filing 800 tourists a day into the audience of a show that has entertained more than 17 million spectators over its 64-year run.

Fellow greeter Frank Kiyabu said he's just getting a taste of the atmosphere.

"I'm just a baby here," said Kiyabu, a retired hotel worker. "I've been here just about a year."

Heyday to today

Aunty Nana Kahele, left, Erla Padilla, Aunty Pudgie Young, Mamo Wassman and Charlene Campbell rehearse for what is now called The Pleasant Hawaiian Hula Show. Despite the new name, the style of the show won't change. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

He would run into other entertainers when he performed in Waikiki hotels in the 1960s. But he never saw the Kodak show until he was asked to be the show's master of ceremonies 11 years ago.

Now he calls honeymooners and anniversary couples down to the lawn stage. He tells the audience tidbits about hula tunes. He has become part of the Waikiki institution.

"The show itself doesn't change. We just add to it," he said. "It's a tradition, and like all great traditions, it shouldn't change because it sets a standard of what that perfect time in Hawai'i was."

Gary Hogan and his wife, Nadine, who now run the show, are trying to make it more contemporary by adding new Hawaiian music and designers to the format. They want to audition new guests to keep it fresh.

Longtime fans will still find familiar faces, said "Auntie" Moana Chang, music coordinator for the show and for Aloha Boat Days, whose business card calls her "the voice that launched a thousand ships."

Chang was one of the show's dancers in the late 1940s and early '50s. She went on to teach hula around the country and in Germany, where she was a military wife. She's comfortable back on stage at the Waikiki Shell.

"I've been all over the world," she said. "I've sung all over the world promoting Hawai'i, but it's good to be home."

The Hogans say part of their mission is to keep the hula show part of the community. The Kodak connection may stick, but the deeper connection is more personal, Nadine Hogan said. It's still the kind of show that defines aloha for a lot of tourists.

It had the impromptu hula lesson Susan Munley of Glendale, Ariz., found amusing last week and the male dancers that "I even liked," said her husband, Paul.

Paul Munley used to work for Eastman Kodak in New York in 1940s, so he found it ironic to learn his former employer no longer underwrites it. He's just glad someone else is picking up the tab.

Reach Tanya Bricking at 525-8026 or tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com.