Recent Shows

Ceiling at Albert Hall

We've managed to get out to a few shows recently, unfortunately "the show" does not lend itself to photos, what with the excessive number of "no recording device" signs around the place.

We managed to see the Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall, that was a highlight, though really everything we've seen has been good.

The bassist was fantastic, even though when it wasn't his turn to sing he sat slumped in his chair and appeared to nap.  He made up for it when he opened his mouth.

Going to the shows you do get to experience freaky humanity in all of it's glory too.  There were two wonderful freaky instances, one was at the Messiah. To be fair the Messiah is certainly something that you really have to concentrate on, to understand what they are singing, and these people didn't seem to speak much English, which would have made it a couple of orders of magnitude harder.  So within about 20 minutes at least two people in front of us had fallen asleep and then proceeded to doze throughout the performance.  At the very last minute of the performance, where everything is rising to the conclusion, one of them managed to rouse herself and then offered a mint to the person sitting next to her.  Apparently she couldn't wait 30 seconds for the show to end before freshening her breath.

An even better example of strange show behaviour was at a play we went to see, it was the Veil, a new gothic Irish play set in the 1800's.  It was at the Royal Theatre and the staging was unbelievable, seriously there was a full-blown tree on stage, as well as a working fireplace and dozens of candles, all of which were constantly being lit throughout the play.  This time sitting in front of us there were two incredibly drunk people, who found the tense moments hilarious.  At one point in the play one of the actors is screaming out "Who's there?!?!" over and over again, and I'm afraid the drunk people could not resist the call.  Luckily they didn't make it past intermission, and disappeared to polish off the bottle of wine they were carrying with them.  I am starting to appreciate why the boxes exist in these theatres, the rich people don't want to be mingling with the riff-raff.

Again though this play was fantastic, and even had an actor from the Vicar of Dibley, not Dawn French, the sullen farmer one, and he was really good, completely different from his character in the Vicar of Dibley :).

A small portion of the choir at the Messiah, with the orchestra yet to arrive

It being Christmas time we also couldn't resist a showing of the Nutcracker.  There were at least three different theatres showing it at the same time.  I think that really brought the difference with Australia home.  In Oz you would be lucky to get one showing, which would sell out weeks in advance.  Here we could still getting reasonably good seats the week before we wanted to go.

It was a Matthew Bourne production, apparently he did a version of Swan Lake in Sydney, which was an all-male production, so it seems that he's willing to try different things.  I really liked the Nutcracker, perhaps it wasn't true high-ballet, at some points it really seemed more like contemporary dance than ballet, but then I don't really know what the technical difference is sometimes.  I quite liked the opening scene, which was set in an orphanage, and though at the beginning you keep expecting them to open their mouths, the exaggerated facial expressions and body movements soon seem to be natural.