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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 28, 2023 16:11:43 GMT
Many reduce the number of daughters to three which was not something I was willing to countenance. I'm guessing Mary & Kitty are the ones who are cut? It feels like it would significantly reduce Mrs Bennet's desperation if she only had three daughters to offload rather than five!
I did see a stage adaptation of P&P about 15 years ago but I can't say I found it memorable. I believe it had the requisite number of daughters but the only cast member I can actually recall was Susan Hampshire as Mrs Bennet.
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 27, 2023 21:04:43 GMT
theatremiss Very sorry for you. The trains in the last few months have been a nightmare. If it's not strikes it's engineering and if it's not engineering it's lines down/broken rails/points failures/trees down/bodies on the line, etc. etc. It's got to the stage where it feels like a miracle if one's trains are actually running on time.
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 23, 2023 21:33:44 GMT
I’ve got 2 things on my list. First is to go to some different theatres in London. On my list to try and visit next year - Sadler’s Wells Soho Theatre Orange Tree Theatre Secondly, I’ve never been to an opera or a ballet before so I’d like to give them a watch as well. While Sadler's Wells is mostly contemporary dance, BRB are doing Sleeping Beauty there in April so you could tick off Sadler's Wells and ballet in one go!
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 22, 2023 18:53:22 GMT
2. See a show at the Royal Opera House. I've always wanted to go and tempted by Swan Lake next year. 3. Find more ways to get cheaper tickets. I looked at my Excel sheet today showing how much I paid for tickets in 2023 and had a mini heart attack. Really need to find better ways of securing cheaper seats and being more willing to sit outside the stalls.
You'll find these two points are mutually exclusive: Swan Lake has most expensive tickets of any Royal Ballet production this season!
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 9, 2023 18:22:46 GMT
I've recently got second row and third row for £55 through Official London Theatre, the advance sales not the TKTS ones. They're not available for every date going forward but might be worth checking out? Less scandalous than £100-125 anyway! Friends also grabbed a deal through seatplan for row C for £35 this week. Though I think they may have just gotten lucky on that one as I haven't been able to find anything similar with them. Thanks for the suggestions. I'll have a look at those website. Also thanks to all those who suggested rush tickets but as I don't live in London I don't really want to try to get a ticket on the day as it's stressful not knowing in advance whether or not I'll have to head down to London on only a few hours' notice.
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 8, 2023 21:24:15 GMT
Today Tix have a good deal on this until the end of today only, I believe. Just had a look. All I can say is if those are the offer prices then I don't want to know what the non-offer prices are. For the performance I looked at, everything forward of row M stalls is over £100. I can't afford that & there's no point in my going if I have to sit at the back as I'm too short sighted. Since there's now only a couple of dates when I could potentially see this, it looks like I won't be seeing it unless the offers get one heck of a lot better than they are at the moment.
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 7, 2023 18:46:57 GMT
D'oyly Carte, well G&S went out of fashion. Brum pulled their funding, they went to Wolverhampton for a season but funding wasnt secure. Then its main backer (the cheif exec of an airline loved G&S) got bored of bank rolling them and so stopped funding them also. I did see a handful of their productions and they served as a great introduction to opera for me, back in the day i loved Mikado, Fledermaus and Pinafore. The latter had a young Alfie Boe in, i wonder what happened to him ...
Was that the New D'Oyly Carte rather than the original one? Otherwise, given the original company closed in 1982, Alfie Boe is a lot older than I thought he was!
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 7, 2023 18:35:01 GMT
I thought Amour at Charing Cross worked equally well from both sides, having seen it twice, once from either side. Of course sometimes there were backs of heads but it seemed pretty equal on both sides. The only time I've seen a four-sided show from more than one side was Ayckbourn's Awakening Beauty at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, which I saw twice in one day from opposite sides of the square & I thought that was pretty evenly directed. Of course that theatre should be expert in square stagings as I gather it's always in that configuration. It also takes me out of the experience when I keep seeing the audience on the other side (or every side) and I can't lose myself in whatever world is presented on stage. I find this more of a problem than any issues about a show being directed more to one side, including if one is sat at the side for a thrust staging at e.g. Chichester & The Other Palace.
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 6, 2023 23:28:24 GMT
I wish they'd announce the cast before booking opens but they're not so I'll have to hope there are still tickets left by the time the cast is announced. I'm not travelling nearly 3 hours each way to Leeds unless there are going to be singers I like in the cast.
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Post by Dawnstar on Nov 29, 2023 22:40:54 GMT
TallPaul Non-existant! (Very few internationally-performed operas in Hungarian, opera listening being how I've picked up most of my limited knowledge of Italian & German.) I saw Jonathan Sayer tweet the other day that there's a production of The Play That Goes Wrong opening in Ukraine. Impressive for a country to tackle that while at war.
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Post by Dawnstar on Nov 29, 2023 17:01:36 GMT
A phrase from the article: "it’s for the lily-livered who can’t hack the gory bits in Titus Andronicus". I for one would never ever walk into a Titus Andronicus but I see nothing wrong with people leaving a performance if they find it too unpleasant. Far better to have people leaving than have them fainting, having panic attacks, maybe even being sick. I've left at the interval for two opera productions which, while not having Titus Andronicus levels of goryness, included things that I found unpleasant (and which were not in the libretto so I couldn't know in advance).
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Post by Dawnstar on Nov 6, 2023 16:57:17 GMT
In my experience, venues that have 15-minute intervals, unless they are really low capacity, invariably run to at least 20 minutes as they wait for the queues for the ladies toilets to clear. I can sort of understand a 15 minute interval over-running but I do find it really annoying that the ROH often has intervals that are 25 or 30 minutes yet they still over-run fairly frequently.
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Post by Dawnstar on Nov 3, 2023 22:24:42 GMT
It means I got it wrong, Dawnstar . I meant it when I said I wasn't an "expert" on the Royal Family lol. Thanks for setting me straight. It's especially helpful as it's too late to edit the original post. Thanks. As I haven't seen the play, I wondered if I had misunderstood something.
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Post by Dawnstar on Nov 3, 2023 18:03:09 GMT
The Queen mother was a Queen before she was a mother Is this meant as some sort of statement of philosophical importance? Because in a literal, chronological sense she certainly wasn't, as her daughters were born in 1926 and 1930 and she didn't become Queen until 1936.
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Post by Dawnstar on Oct 25, 2023 21:17:15 GMT
I was looking forward to Manon, not having seen it live, but it says the director is "fresh from a critically acclaimed Titus Andronicus" which makes me nervous!
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Post by Dawnstar on Oct 23, 2023 21:44:15 GMT
I haven't been since it was still on Shaftesbury Avenue, but I always thought it was a nice little place I was under the impression it was still on Shaftesbury Avenue! Not that I've ever been in it, as I never go into cafes in London.
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Post by Dawnstar on Oct 20, 2023 13:08:37 GMT
I'm quite shocked to read this. It seems so quick, considering she presumably must have been in reasonable health until just before she pulled out of Old Friends, & that was only a few weeks ago.
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Post by Dawnstar on Oct 4, 2023 12:18:42 GMT
The budgetary constraints mean the set is rather cheap looking How about the costumes? The only reason I'm potentially interested in seeing this is if there are lots of stunning recreated Dior frocks!
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Post by Dawnstar on Oct 2, 2023 19:08:24 GMT
And yes let's be pedantic - I don't class The Rivals, and such, as Restoration. Would we label them as Regency? I wouldn't personally, since Sheridan's plays were written before the start of the Regency period.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 29, 2023 15:52:59 GMT
Thank you. I find tweets in posts take a while to show up for me so I probably scrolled past without realising there was a tweet in that post. So A Little Priest does feature.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 28, 2023 23:01:38 GMT
Honestly, whilst it is semi-staged, it is not graphic at all. Depending on quite how easily triggered your reaction is, if otherwise you do really want to see this, why not get an aisle seat near an exit, you can always make a quick quiet getaway if you need to. Content description to help you decide if you can manage it: The Les Mis side set pieces are used to give the impression of Victorian London. Characters are dressed in costume Mrs Lovett chops a small piece of fake meat on a table (which doesn’t move or squish at all, and this is before she meets Sweeney so it’s not depicting human meat) and hits dough/the table a few times as well with some loud thumps. Sweeney flicks a blade around a bit in his hand, he also mimes shaving a customer with it, and mimes cutting the customer’s throat, but there is no blood at all, the customer just goes limp in the chair/closes his eyes. The Sweeney Todd section is towards the end of the first act, it starts after “Send In The Clowns” and there are only two songs after it - “Ladies Who Lunch” which provides a nice rapid change of mood, and then “Sunday” which is done very well, and then you have the interval. Thank you very much for the information. May I ask which songs from Sweeney Todd they perform? I remember watching the TV broadcast of a Sondheim Prom about a decade ago and they did A Little Priest, the lyrics of which I found quite unpleasant. (I have tried looking back through this thread for a number of pages for a list of songs but all I've found is a comment that it's the same as the concert last year, which isn't very helpful when I didn't see that.)
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 24, 2023 12:20:34 GMT
What fulfils that role today? Drunken audience members getting into fights at jukebox musicals?
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 23, 2023 20:35:03 GMT
It would hardly be fair on the rest of the paying audience if I was fleeing the auditorium a minute or two into the Sweeney Todd section though, would it? And yes, that has happened to me before, at a school (non-musical) Sweeney Todd performance. There is a lot to unpack there. It's a show involving murder & cannibalism. I'm extremely squeamish. It's hardly surprising that I can't cope with it. I'd never see Assassins either. Into The Woods is my limit of gruesomeness in terms of Sondheim.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 23, 2023 16:11:19 GMT
Do you know why they do this? Cos Avalon won’t let them announce covers 😒. Given three-fifths of the cast are also members of the creative team, I'm rather surprised they don't push back against the producers & insist on being allowed to post casting information if they want to do so. I mean, it's not like the umpteenth cast of Les Mis or Phantom who are just hired to perform & would have to obey the producers.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 23, 2023 15:56:59 GMT
I hadn't relised this was staged. I thought it was just a concert. Oh dear, that means I won't be going to see it. I can only cope with Sweeney Todd numbers done in concert, not when staged. Your loss then. What a shame to write off the whole thing as a result. It would hardly be fair on the rest of the paying audience if I was fleeing the auditorium a minute or two into the Sweeney Todd section though, would it? And yes, that has happened to me before, at a school (non-musical) Sweeney Todd performance.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 23, 2023 11:22:51 GMT
Productions shots have been posted. There are more photos in the Twitter thread if you click through and scroll down. I hadn't relised this was staged. I thought it was just a concert. Oh dear, that means I won't be going to see it. I can only cope with Sweeney Todd numbers done in concert, not when staged.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 23, 2023 11:09:06 GMT
I was a year out, it was 2015 rather than 2016. I didn't see the 2020 repeat. Likewise I saw the ALNM concert in 2015 but I was unable to see the repeat at Opera Holland Park in 2021.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 22, 2023 17:36:58 GMT
Where can I find out even a little in advance which performers will be on? I'm not sure you can, to be honest. Yes, in terms of publically available information it seems to usually just be West End Covers & sometimes the various cast members tweeting on the day. Sometimes WEC tweets that someone will be on all week, but with this show that's not as helpful as with other shows given the prices rising through the week! Personally I was lucky because I saw Holly at random & then when I spoke to Sean after that performance I asked him about future dates & he told me he had a scheduled week on a few weeks later. (I do know him from seeing him in Mischief shows so it wasn't some random stranger buttonholing him & demanding info!) In terms of wanting to see Natasha, all I can think is to keep checking her Twitter & hope she tweets when she returns to the show. I can also imagine she might make a gradual return, not doing 8 shows a week immediately, so it might be safer to wait for a bit after she returns.
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 22, 2023 17:09:18 GMT
Didn't he do a Herman, Styne & some other composer whose name I'm blanking on concert at the Palace in something like 2016? I think I remember going to it. (I'm on a train to London right now so I haven't got my theatregoing list to check.)
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Post by Dawnstar on Sept 21, 2023 20:23:30 GMT
I'm very over this now - they're just making it too difficult for people to get tickets that anyone can afford so I'm done 😂 I'm feeling the same after reading the latest ballot email. There's no point in me signing up because even if I win (which I probably won't, as I've only won the lottery once in the several months I've been signed up for it) I'm not prepared to book over 6 months in advance when understudy dates are certainly not being announced over 6 months in advance. I've seen the show once with the full cast & once each with the two understudies I like (Holly Sumpton in 1 of her 2 roles & Sean Carey) so that will have to do me, at least unless/until the producers move to a more reasonable ticketing strategy.
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