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Post by sf on Mar 20, 2024 19:31:35 GMT
good the cheap stalls ticket with the pillar so happy with that I got a cheap circle pillar seat, sat there for groundhog Day so know what I'm getting I did the same. I've sat in the seat I booked many times before.
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Post by sf on Mar 15, 2024 19:25:25 GMT
That's supposed to encourage me to book a ticket, isn't it?
Oh dear.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 22:58:34 GMT
How does Operation Mincemeat qualify as a new musical? I saw it 3.5 years ago and that was a revival. Same way that Next to Normal does. It's the first time it's played a West End house. in 1998 the Oliviers nominated the National Theatre production of Lady in the Dark as Best New Musical. The show was first produced in 1941.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 15:30:53 GMT
My theory on the cast recording: it will be the Broadway cast. The show is set to run for six months there. Maybe longer? But the sustained marketing opportunity is in New York. It would cost them a hell of a lot more to record the Broadway cast (for recording a Broadway cast album the actors in a show get a full week's pay for each day in the studio). If they've already recorded it in London and it's going to have the same lead(s) on Broadway, why would they go to the extra expense?
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 15:25:47 GMT
currently the Oliviers are intending the best new musical category to recognise the creatives, As I said, the Oliviers are magnificently clueless about music. It's insane that a set or lighting designer can get a nomination for their individual creative contribution to a new musical, but the composer cannot.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 14:41:37 GMT
Ridiculous/laughable that the orchestrator and MD of Operation Mincemeat get a nomination, but there's no category in which to give a nomination to the people who actually wrote the show's very clever score. But then, the 'musical achievement' category is always completely loopy, because the Oliviers are magnificently clueless when it comes to dealing with original music. At least this year the four nominees in that category are all nominated for doing more or less the same job - but it's pathetic that there's no category in which the Oliviers nominate composers this year. The nomination for best new musical specifically name checks all four members of Spit Lip for music, lyrics and book - they are nominated for their creative work as well as the acting noms three of them have. ...but - unlike the Tony Awards - there is no category in the Oliviers for Best Original Score. And there should be. There is no category in which the Oliviers recognise original music.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 14:18:42 GMT
Ridiculous/laughable that the orchestrator and MD of Operation Mincemeat get a nomination, but there's no category in which to give a nomination to the people who actually wrote the show's very clever score.
But then, the 'musical achievement' category is always completely loopy, because the Oliviers are magnificently clueless when it comes to dealing with original music. At least this year the four nominees in that category are all nominated for doing more or less the same job - but it's pathetic that there's no category in which the Oliviers nominate composers this year.
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Post by sf on Mar 11, 2024 14:43:14 GMT
The Gillian Lynne auditorium is very comfy, love the high backed gallery seats, but the FOH areas are a hot mess, with there being no toilets or bars upstairs There's a Gents' loo in the Gillian Lynne circle next to door 6. Presumably there's a Ladies up there somewhere too.
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Post by sf on Mar 9, 2024 13:52:53 GMT
That was my main problem here - just like Downtown, there is limited plausibility in an entire wealthy (if in this case uppermost middle class of the time rather than true landed upper class) family accepting what is basically a servant as one of them. A lady's companion is not a servant. An employee, yes, although that fact would never be discussed in front of anyone outside the household, but emphatically not a servant.
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Post by sf on Mar 9, 2024 0:30:17 GMT
Overheard in the lobby:
“I don’t really know anything about this play at all. Is there sex in it?”
So much of it is so good. Beth Steel knows the territory, she knows how to get big laughs, and she knows how to use family relationships to give a close-up on a bigger picture. It's cleverly directed and superbly performed, and Lorraine Ashbourne's Aunty Carol is a spectacular comic creation...
...and if you set out to write a play that is partly about latent racism, it's probably a good idea not to make your one non-English character a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, or to prove with his every line that you have no ear at all for the rhythms of Polish-accented English. It doesn't help, either, that Mark Wootton - who is otherwise very charming as Marek, and who does manage to transcend some of the bad writing - supplies such a bizarrely inconsistent accent, although the inconsistently-accented dialogue he has to deliver probably doesn't help.
It's a shame. This is a very entertaining evening, it's a play with a lot to say, it includes several memorable (female) characters and some raucously funny lines... and it shoots itself in the foot.
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Post by sf on Mar 5, 2024 12:34:35 GMT
Cheryl Baker said on BBC Breakfast today that the story of “Making Your Mind Up” is being written now and will be heading to the West End. (No doubt it tells the story of a woman who couldn’t make up her mind whether to pre-order one or two bottles of Bucks Fizz to drink in the interval) "Look at us now, our golden days are over..."
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Post by sf on Mar 5, 2024 0:30:15 GMT
Oh dear.
I saw it this evening.
It's never less than superficially entertaining, but it's totally superficial. It has a phenomenally talented, incredibly hard-working cast, a good set and great lighting and video projections, and no depth whatsoever. John O'Farrell's book features some buttock-clenchingly awful dialogue, and appears to be aimed at people who find flashcards too intellectually demanding. Matthew Brind's arrangements take an incredibly diverse selection of songs and compress them into the musical equivalent of a bargain-brand sausage. It's never painful to sit through when people are singing (when they're speaking, on the other hand...), and the singers are great, but it's as if Brind set out to sandpaper everything interesting out of this phemomenal stack of music. Particularly in the second act, far too much of it just all sounds the same - at least, if (as I am) you're old enough to have been an obsessive teenage pop fan in the mid-1980s. Very little of this music is bland on the original recordings, and that's a challenge Brind works very hard to overcome.
Nearly every significant moment is short-changed - most obviously I Don't Like Mondays, which loses impact by being given a more bombastic musical arrangement than the original single had. THAT pause during the concert was a heart-stopping moment, even on television; here, it's just yet another piece of bland sentimental uplift, partly because the dialogue surrounding the song is so painfully trite and partly because the song itself doesn't get space to breathe. One of the reasons it stood out during the original concert is that the song began small and was allowed to build, and it didn't sound at all like the song before it (the Style Council's Walls Come Tumbling Down). It was given space to breathe, and giving it that space paid off. Theatre can't precisely recreate what that moment looked like on the day, but it could give us some insight into how it felt and what it meant. That's what this show tries to do, but it fails at just about every hurdle. The show's attempt to discuss the very real issues with a) white saviour syndrome, b) the lyrics of Do They Know It's Christmas?, and c) the entire project's reductive understanding of the continent of Africa are so laughably simplistic that they would insult the intelligence of a seven-year-old. Throughout, the show has the same problem as The Little Big Things, which also didn't completely work but was vastly better than this: the creative team appear to be terrified of engaging with difficult emotional territory or morally complex ideas, to the point where everything is just dumbed down and pumped up into an endless stream of generic uplift.
And yet - as I said, when people are singing it isn't painful to sit through. The arrangements are bland, but the voices are great. It doesn't work - at all - as an examination of the event it's supposed to be about, but it does have some entertainment value as a mindless nostalgia trip. And bless Julie Atherton's Mrs. T for supplying the only moments of genuine wit in the entire evening.
It just could and should have been so, so, so much better than that.
Two stars - and one and three-quarters of them are for the voices, which are excellent.
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Post by sf on Feb 29, 2024 17:31:01 GMT
Saw it last night - from the (very) cheap seats off to the side in the circle.
It looks and sounds great in the Gillian Lynne. I can pick a couple of holes - I don't love the ending of the Poppy/Nikki storyline - but the overall effect of the show is so strong that it's a solid five stars from me. And Rachael Wooding's Rose just keeps getting better and better. Tom Deering's arrangement of 'After the Rain' is gorgeous, and she sings the hell out of it. It's a thrilling piece of theatre, and I'll be back to see it again.
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Post by sf on Feb 25, 2024 18:00:17 GMT
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Post by sf on Feb 21, 2024 22:58:15 GMT
Loved this at today's matinee. Subtle, bittersweet, full of nuance and subtext, flawlessly directed and designed and performed. Yes, it's a play that reflects a particular moment in time, but it's a richly textured examination of family dynamics, it's sharply observed and full of wonderful lines, and it's one of those productions where the whole is much, MUCH greater than the sum of the parts. There, um, may have been something in my eye for most of the last ten minutes. Don't go expecting fireworks - but it's as good as anything I've ever seen at the National, and there should certainly be space for plays like this in their repertoire.
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Post by sf on Jan 30, 2024 11:49:13 GMT
Expensive too. Most of the stalls is £90+ Very expensive. The royal circle seat that cost me £15 for Accidental Death of an Anarchist - at the back and off to the side, booked in advance, it wasn't an on-the-day special offer - is going for £90 for this.
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Post by sf on Jan 27, 2024 12:54:32 GMT
I saw it last night.
It's the first time I've seen the show since the ENO production (no of course you can't believe I'm that old). Beautiful production, beautifully designed, staged, and performed. Yes, a couple of the actors spoke/sang very heavily Japanese-accented English, but I didn't have any difficulty understanding them. 'Someone In A Tree', in particular, was stunning (and I think it's possibly the best thing Sondheim ever wrote). It's the best thing I've seen at the Menier in several years, and I regret that I'm probably not going to be able to go back and see it again before it closes.
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Post by sf on Jan 20, 2024 19:41:46 GMT
I think the last west end show that had a proper big cast was 42nd Street and An American In Paris. ...and An American In Paris had a tiny band. It did not sound good. You cannot do justice to that music with a band of 13.
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Post by sf on Jan 19, 2024 12:12:52 GMT
Now on sale.
The seat that cost me £20 for A Strange Loop last summer is priced at £60 plus a £4 booking fee.
The seat that cost me £29.50 for My Neighbour Totoro this coming March is also priced at £60 plus a £4 booking fee.
This pricing policy seems... optimistic.
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Post by sf on Jan 18, 2024 20:44:56 GMT
Typical. You wait ages for an Oedipus, and then two show up at once.
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Post by sf on Jan 17, 2024 20:36:15 GMT
Some of us might have seen Adrian Dunbar in the musical Lady in the Dark with Maria Friedman at the National Theatre in 1997... presuming it's the same person! I can't recall how much he sang in that - will have to dig the cast recording out later. He sang in it. That's why I find his casting in Kiss Me, Kate... questionable. Charley Johnson isn't a huge singing role, but he does sing, and Dunbar didn't - let's be kind - reveal the kind of voice that could easily negotiate a role like Fred in Kiss Me, Kate. You can talk-sing your way through his character's material in Lady in the Dark because the score is almost entirely made up of three mini-operas in which the chorus do a lot of the heavy lifting, but you can't take that approach to a song like Wunderbar and expect to get away with it. I suppose it's possible he's a much better singer now than he was twenty-five years ago, but it isn't very likely.
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Post by sf on Jan 8, 2024 15:13:43 GMT
I saw on Twitter (X) that Rishi Sunak was in the audience the other night. And nobody offered him any chocolate?
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Post by sf on Dec 30, 2023 19:48:38 GMT
Must be credited for the original SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM; original London cast of ALNM, founder of SHOW PEOPLE which brought several revue-style entertainments to the (old) Donmar Warehouse and elsewhere. A real gentleman. ...and a wonderful singer. His performance of a song called I Remember on the London cast recording of Side By Side By Sondheim is a masterclass in understatement. There's no grandstanding, no showing off, no extraneous adornments - he sings the melody precisely as written, delivers the lyrics simply and delicately, and finds every last scrap of yearning in the song. It's a very, very fine performance. RIP.
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Post by sf on Dec 21, 2023 10:57:11 GMT
It doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense for Nikki to have a northern accent, or for her to sound "authentic to Sheffield". She lived with Poppy in London, and one of the few things we know about her background is that she isn't from Sheffield.
I didn't love Ms. Redding's take on the song either. The riffing is just *too much*.
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Post by sf on Dec 20, 2023 20:37:37 GMT
I also saw it this afternoon, and I also liked it more than the film (and I liked the film). Very strong writing and direction, pitch-perfect performances, evocative designs, and Elvis Costello's songs are lovely, and absolutely in tune with the setting(s) and the period. It's a beautiful production, and it deserves a much longer life.
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Post by sf on Dec 13, 2023 20:18:25 GMT
There are actually 4. You’re missing ‘musicians with an axe to grind’. Two violins One viola One musician doubling violin/viola. That's not enough to provide the sound the score requires without electronic assistance.
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Post by sf on Dec 13, 2023 19:02:31 GMT
I struggle to see how anyone could rate this 1 or 2 stars. Even if you hated the concept, if you were being totally honest with yourself, you couldn’t deny the magnificent orchestra, the flawless vocals of all of the leads and just the care that this has been constructed with. You’d be looking from 3 stars upwards surely? "Magnificent orchestra"? They play very well. The sound design is excellent. The score leans heavily into a sound and a style that depends on a large, lush string section; there are two, sometimes three violins in place of seven in the band in the original production, and seven violins playing together produce a sound that you cannot recreate with just two or three. It sounds like what it is: a cut-down orchestra in which the strings are bolstered by synthesised string pads played on the keyboards. For what it is, there have been plenty worse, but it is not magnificent.
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Post by sf on Dec 13, 2023 4:03:00 GMT
Not in rank order:
Accidental Death of an Anarchist
Assassins
Guys and Dolls
Rose
Standing at the Sky's Edge
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Post by sf on Dec 12, 2023 18:26:04 GMT
Finally saw it last night.
It doesn't do a particularly deep dive into the Sondheim catalogue. It does what it says on the tin: it gives you a cast of spectacularly gifted singing actors (and Bernadette Peters) running through a selection of favourites. It's staged and packaged very nicely indeed, it's thoroughly entertaining, the cast obviously love doing the show, and a few of the more senior performers in it are clearly having a great time doing the kind of ensemble tracks that they haven't had to do in decades, because this is a show in which nearly everyone joins the chorus at some point.
Highlights: Bonnie Langford's 'I'm Still Here' Joanna Riding's 'Getting Married Today', which is possibly the best thing in the entire show Janie Dee's 'The Boy From...' Gavin Lee and Clare Burt's 'The Little Things You Do Together' Clare Burt's 'The Ladies Who Lunch' Lea Salonga's 'Loving You' and (particularly) 'Everything's Coming Up Roses'. One of these days she'll make one hell of a Rose. Lea Salonga and Jeremy Secombe's 'A Little Priest' The full company singing 'Sunday' at the end of Act One.
And while I'm far from Bernadette Peters' biggest fan, it's undeniably moving to hear her, almost forty years on, deliver the lines that lead into the beginning of 'Sunday' ("they are your words, George..."). Her 'Losing My Mind', too, is significantly better than her performance on the Broadway revival cast album of 'Follies', though it would pretty much have to be.
I could quibble with some of the song choices - giving Jason Pennycooke the Mandy Patinkin solo version of Buddy's Blues was not a great idea - and at £12 the programme is outrageously expensive even though it contains a lot of nice photographs (it's Sondheim, I bought it, this is just about the only show for which I'd ever contemplate paying that much for a programme), but it's a wonderful celebration of a peerless songwriter, it's clearly been put together with tremendous love and respect, and Julia McKenzie, who directed it, has the good sense to keep it moving very briskly, and to not let it drag on and on. There's a little bit of cheese around the edges (more than a little in the couple of places Ms. Peters is unfortunately allowed to speak), but that's inevitable in this kind of show; overall, as big, splashy tribute shows go, this is just about as good as it gets.
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Post by sf on Dec 9, 2023 18:32:12 GMT
...and also, one of the "delights" of seeing a family-oriented show from a seat on the end of a row: discovering just how few parents these days can be bothered to teach their children to say "excuse me".
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