Annoying What Should I See Thread

Well whatever you do, have a great stay in Oxford! If the weather is good, there are plenty of lovely places to wander around.

So, in the end, we saw Victim at Oxford Fringe. It was quite good - although I didn't exactly get the point of the piece. We also arrived two minutes late (took a wrong turn) but since the back row was full, I managed to trip down a couple of steps. The performer was very nice about it. Victim is a one woman show where the performer basically plays (1) a female guard with marital trouble and (2) a murderess who is in jail for life. Along the way, the guard and the murderess channel other characters. The pieces intercut until they meet at the end.   That was the only play we saw.

Yes, after listing a bunch of plays, we ended up seeing only musicals.

In London, we saw Thrill Me. And first off, don't do the gallery seats in the studio. yes, they are comfortable, but the glass railing has a metal railing on top which blocks the view. Thrill Me is about the Leopold & Loeb murder in Chicago in the 1920s - a "thrill killing" one that was done for the thrill of committing the crime. The show builds to the murder - then quickly skips over it - to Leopold and Loeb trying to evade capture and ultimately how they are captured. The music is mostly ballad after ballad - I found the actor playing Nathan Leopold better than the actor playing Richard Loeb. But, the two have been playing the roles together for a while now. I found Loeb's character to be too much of a sociopath from the start - and so he lacked the charm that drew Leopold in.

Saturday afternoon, we saw Bat Out of Hell. Originally, we were going to just wait for the US Tour, but advice here seemed to suggest the staging at the Dominion would be unlikely to be the staging on the US tour. I found the show insane - I mean bonkers. I loved the music - couldn't really follow what story there was -loved the staging - loved the older audience rocking out while younger members seemed perplexed. There seem to be people who are multi-repeat attendees because there was a bit of audience talk-back/shout-outs during the show as well as singing along.  Here was the major audience participation:

Saturday night was Tina! - We ended up with two singles in the stalls. Spouse got Row D, Center. I was back and to the side. Spouse really loved the show. I really liked it. I found myself comparing the stage show to the film What's Love Got To Do With It - and frankly, I found the film superior, for one primary reason. In the film, Ike Turner has a charm to him - you can see why people adore and follow him while disliking him. The Ike Turner in this show is just a mean vile SOB from the first sequence. And I don't know what accent the actor was using - but it was a one note affected accent and really distracting. My favorite moment is the staging of the final concert - I found it imaginative and breath-taking. For the most part, the audience obeyed the admonition pre-show to not sing along until the end of the show. BTW, Adrienne Warren had a knee brace. The instant standing ovation made me think I was back in the US. I found Tina! to be a pretty standard bio-musical, although it used the songs for plot points rather than "And then I recorded this..and then I recorded this" as in Beautiful (which was in the same theatre).

And, then it was on to Iceland. We didn't attend any theatre in Iceland.