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Post by danielwhit on Dec 22, 2022 19:43:12 GMT
Cancelled tonight (22nd Dec 2022). Notice on Facebook cites cast illness.
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Post by danielwhit on Dec 3, 2022 20:05:07 GMT
I'm as full of superlatives for the film as I was when I first saw the musical back in Stratford.
That final song is a perfect, and unexpected, finale.
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Post by danielwhit on Nov 27, 2022 9:18:23 GMT
Thank you all for clearing up about the Netflix situation. Now I have decided I have to see it in the cinema again! (Even walking out of the cinema the idea of seeing their next screening crossed my mind) Interesting to read you say that, as that's the same thought process I had back in Stratford during the original run. Could have very easily turned around and gone back in for the evening performance. Need to get to the film at some stage..
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Post by danielwhit on Aug 19, 2022 1:38:36 GMT
Anyone have any idea why they decided to change Sweaty Eddie to Steady Eddie? I assumed it was a Broadway change, but the Broadway version also refers to Eddie as sweaty rather than steady. This show has been tinkered with so many times over the years it's almost impossible to keep up with. Not sure if it changed in the last UK tour? Either way, realistically there's no massive reason - perhaps to make the character seem more "dull" (which fits). The change I won't forgive is throwing a wrecking ball through Sister Mary Robert's plot line by getting rid of How I Got The Calling.
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Post by danielwhit on Aug 19, 2022 1:32:11 GMT
I mentioned it before on here, but I seen Laura in the role a few months ago and actually thought it was Lucy until I checked the board at the interval…which is quite embarrassing. I think it can be really hard to tell sometimes with the green makeup and also Laura and Lucy have quite similar facial features in my opinion. Yes that’s true. But surely Lucie should tell those people that it wasn’t her & actually was a different cast member on . You're assuming she was on social media at the time and spotted it or that she has the time to check all her mentions to see who praised her for which performance and then redirect people where appropriate. Personally, she can or can not as she fancies, social media management can be a full time job that performers are not paid for. On a separate note - where is the cast board at the AV these days?
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Post by danielwhit on Jul 28, 2022 10:29:42 GMT
I reckon on the strength it ticket sales that this will be back next year. Really? It was being papered pretty widely in the first couple of weeks. Maybe some bizarre word of mouth based on "you have to see this.." may have picked sales up drastically afterwards - but I'd be very surprised if it returned.
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Post by danielwhit on Jun 20, 2022 11:01:18 GMT
Yeah, seems a strange thing to do. I can imagine the Duchess might be a bit tight to film in, perhaps?
But they would always have done this with the original cast - there's virtually no point in doing it with others when this cast are so well established with the show and, without a doubt (and for obvious reasons), the strongest cast the show has had.
Doing it in Chicago feels odd though. There must be a reason for it.
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Post by danielwhit on Jun 11, 2022 7:48:15 GMT
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Post by danielwhit on May 30, 2022 11:30:19 GMT
I am there tonight. I am so excited. I have been waiting (nearly) 40 years to attend an ABBA concert. Currently, although working from home, I am talking at a pace that would put a greyhound to shame with excitement and at a pitch so high that all the neighbours dogs are howling! Enjoy! It's definitely worth the watch. Agree with previous poster that from the side blocks the illusion isn't quite as good but it's still very easy to forget you're watching a set of super HD screens. One thing I particularly liked was they had gone to the effort of having scuffs and imperfections on the digital stage.
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Post by danielwhit on May 21, 2022 16:37:09 GMT
I went to one of the rehearsals for the Olympic games opening ceremony which was really before the social media explosion. We were all asked to "keep the secret" and you know what, we all did. 80,000 people not sharing photos or videos. That was very impressive. Not to mention there were two rehearsals of the opening ceremony, so that's 160k of us keeping quiet. I was pleasantly surprised that generally everyone did what they were asked. I'm not sure you can say 2012 was before the social media explosion though, Facebook and twitter were both massive at the time. I doubt that'll be the case here so much, it's not as if the third performance is a big global event that they reveal everything at.
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Post by danielwhit on May 10, 2022 21:58:49 GMT
Anyone else feel that tonight just felt "lazy" from a production point of view? We're back to hosts flirting with each other, shots with steadicam operations running around and cameras doing weird pans and going out of focus mid shot.
Obviously the stage being broken did not do anyone any favours either.
Meanwhile the less said about Wall-e and Eve's drone lovechild and the dozens of Mount Rushmore-a-likes the better. It was interesting for the first few, then just got very dull.
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Post by danielwhit on May 2, 2022 18:45:11 GMT
This is one of those shows I had planned to get around to seeing, probably in the summer. Immediately after closing was announced I was thinking about seeing it in late May. Now - no chance. I get the fact this industry is flexible as all hell and closures get organised pretty swiftly, however this type of behaviour can't be rewarded with more money going into the production. If too many others take that view - which I fully understand - then the show will close even sooner which hurts the cast, crew and staff. Not an easy situation Not exactly - as I had no plans to book for the next 6 weeks before yesterday anyway. But yes, not an easy situation all round.
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Post by danielwhit on May 2, 2022 18:41:12 GMT
This is one of those shows I had planned to get around to seeing, probably in the summer. Immediately after closing was announced I was thinking about seeing it in late May.
Now - no chance. I get the fact this industry is flexible as all hell and closures get organised pretty swiftly, however this type of behaviour can't be rewarded with more money going into the production.
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Post by danielwhit on Apr 22, 2022 21:40:42 GMT
You can only get away with exploring the future of Trump in the run up to the 2024 election, after that (one imagines) he'll be long gone out of the political picture. I mean, he’s currently bookies favourite to win the 2024 election, so he could be around for a long while yet. Fair enough, however everything else in this is clearly rooted as the build up towards the 2024 electoral cycle.
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Post by danielwhit on Apr 21, 2022 17:31:43 GMT
I can't help but compare this to King Charles III for all the obvious reasons plus I directed a production of that play so Bartlett's words still now occasionally float around in my brain. The structures are very similar, but then it could be argued this is also true of Shakespeare, and the "lifts" from the Shakespearean canon are littered around in much the same way.
Story wise - it's a version of the future, which is why it needed to be done now. You can only get away with exploring the future of Trump in the run up to the 2024 election, after that (one imagines) he'll be long gone out of the political picture. Chances are this story will play out less true than KC3 has done so far, however it walks the "just about plausible but also pretty incredible" bridge well. The final scene however, felt like something of a cop out to try to tie some ends up. Does it mirror one of the History plays that I'm forgetting?
I don't think this will have a long life - King Charles III felt at the end of plausibility to product when I directed it in 2018 and The 47th is naturally limited by 2024. But future amateur staging potential was realistically not in Bartlett's mind when he sat down to write The 47th.
Very well staged and surely this has to be a candidate for video effect awards (with a special guest appearance yesterday afternoon by a fly who kept flying in the projector beam and on the lens by the seems of it for the final 20 minutes).
I was pleasantly shocked at just how good an impersonation of Trump Carvel was able to achieve. As I heard someone say when I was leaving "it felt weird to be cheering for Trump at the end".
This feels like a reasonable second album, but it doesn't live up to the heights of KC3.
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Post by danielwhit on Apr 21, 2022 17:21:55 GMT
The background for me is I read the script in mid-2010 and thought it flew off the page, could picture exactly how I imagined it to be staged and really wanted to see it. I then saw it on its third stint at the Apollo in 2012 from the balcony and couldn't really connect with the piece at all - the hype was too much, potentially, or perhaps my seat(bench?) was just too bum-numbing.
Last night, with more budget to my theatregoing these days, I splashed out on a mid-stalls seat and had a much better viewing and experience (pardon the tall head in front of me).
Somehow I think it works better with a ~60 year old Byron than a ~50 one, it allows the "I've lived like this all my life and have got all the legends and stories to tell of it" arc to be more powerful, it means Ginger is even more the tragic guy who never moved on like his peers, it means Rooster's ever changing gang feels even more strange than it did before.
Staging it in 2022 also means that the idea of uprooting someone who has lived through all the stuff in our last 10 years has more impact. In 2009 we just had the economic crash, since then we need not mention the chaos - but there's a lot more life to have worked through. We also, I think, have a greater public awareness of the possibility of young women being led astray and taken advantage of than we did a decade ago - so the Phaedra story has greater resonance.
This production felt much more like the one I read 12 years ago and, I'm convinced, this was a perfect time for a revival.
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 23, 2022 9:53:21 GMT
It is quite a way out into here-be-dragons territory if you aren't familiar with outer London and makes a big difference if you're coming as a day tripper. how many day trippers now come into London and spend a couple of hours watching an archive performance? It tends to be planned in advance, and depending on your London terminus this may well be closer when it reopens than its previous home.
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 22, 2022 15:03:23 GMT
I'm convinced audience standards have gone down significantly since Covid.
Are there many examples of actors playing both Eddie and Mickey? In slightly more planned circumstances, I mean!
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 15, 2022 22:58:03 GMT
When did she have it - couple of weeks ago, right? If so this isn't long Covid yet, just symptoms which haven't cleared.
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 9, 2022 17:44:50 GMT
At this point even if it is just "ticking over" financially that's the best option for all concerned, with the film due in a couple of years time that would revive audience numbers (if indeed it is needed). It's far cheaper to keep a show running than it is mount a new production, after all.
Who's the AD there at the moment? The calls about the show becoming stale/tired have become louder over the years (to my eyes), wonder if the show itself needs a new guardian. Of course, one problem is that this show is so tightly choreographed that there's zero room for flexibility in staging or (really) delivery, which won't help.
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 5, 2022 17:46:50 GMT
Moving swiftly on... Amy Webb is on as Elphaba, Charli Baptie is on as Glinda, Grace Chapman is on as Nessarose and Michael Colbourne is on as Fiyero - all for both shows today (5th February, 2022). All first covers who were already with the show last cast, right?
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 5, 2022 14:11:38 GMT
I bet the people that are complaining about how entitled it is to ask the performers why they’re off are the same people who felt entitled enough to go to the stage door last weekend and this Tuesday LOL Or maybe just people with a shred of awareness of what should be personal vs public information. We have no right to be asking about why someone is off, be that illness or otherwise. If performers wish to say what's going on, then that's their choice, but we should respect what they say and not pry when they decide not to.
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Post by danielwhit on Feb 5, 2022 8:10:08 GMT
And we're seeing the entitlement issue creeping in again. It seems to be easy to forget that we have no right to know why anyone is not performing on any particular performance.
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Post by danielwhit on Jan 27, 2022 21:57:22 GMT
January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day. I haven't seen the play but from a quick look at the Wikipedia page, I'd imagine that's why they chose that day. Ah, of course, that makes perfect sense. I'm just on my way home from cinema. Still very much in processing mode about the play itself however the filming itself I thought was first class.
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Post by danielwhit on Jan 24, 2022 21:36:13 GMT
I'm sure I've said it before but this is the first time I've genuinely been interested in a new Wicked cast for a very long time. May finally make a return trip to the AV.
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Post by danielwhit on Dec 30, 2021 9:46:31 GMT
if you think that's bad - look at the equivalent poster for after Sutton Foster left the production.
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Post by danielwhit on Dec 28, 2021 19:01:47 GMT
Dunno, the performance I attended was very well masked up.
To be honest though I don't think shots of the audience would have made any difference here, if they did that we'd be sat here complaining about seeing the audience rather than what's happening on stage!
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Post by danielwhit on Dec 28, 2021 15:44:12 GMT
They must have also done recordings of some songs outside of regular performances too, else that crane in front of the stage would have totally wound the audiences up.
Interestingly I found those shots the most distracting. Probably as you couldn't ever see the show from such a strangely moving angle.
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Post by danielwhit on Dec 26, 2021 20:08:34 GMT
Yeah, it's not flying as well as I thought it would - can't really place why.
Audience seems to be very quiet in the mix. Might well be the idea but I don't think it's helping the atmosphere carry across.
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Post by danielwhit on Dec 25, 2021 0:24:30 GMT
That (spoiler) incident certainly happened when I saw it last week. Yeah, neat little spin from the norm though. I enjoyed it, and more importantly 99% of the audience will think it's real and probably go away with it as a highlight of the show.
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