Nicole schreibt...

Now that was a week of celebrity spotting - some expected and paid for, others rather unexpected. After British Airways tried to screw me over on a one-way ticket I opted for Easyjet instead, which meant getting up very early (ugh) and arriving in Gatwick, the last London Airport I hadn't seen yet. Good thing, too, because it was a grotty dump with endless walks and even longer queues at passport control. I took my baggage to Dolphin Square and headed for the West End to finally invade the London bookshops and stock up. After returning to Pimlico for a break and dressing up, I went to see the first show, Federico Garcia Lorca's drama "Blood Wedding" at the lovely Almeida Theatre in Islington, starring Mexico's hottest enchilada Gael Garcia Bernal amid a curiously international cast. I admit to feeling smug when I walked past the long queue for return tickets into the theatre and took my seat and the show proved well worth the fuss for a ticket. After the multiple disappointments with seeing favourite movie stars on stage I was a bit anxious, but at least Senor Garcia Bernal didn't disappoint me. "Blood Wedding" is a tale of Andalusian jealousy and hot temper - on her wedding night the Bride (played by a Dutch girl, Thekla Reuten) runs off with her ex-lover Leonardo (Gael), but the jilted Bridegroom (hunky Icelander Björn Hyldur Haraldsson) goes after them and the two rivals wind up killing each other. Spanish tempers and the mainly Northern cast didn't really go well together and the only scene steaming with emotion was the first confrontation between Leonardo and the Bride before the wedding. There was also the odd high-strung directorial brain-fart, but not so much that it became annoying. If I have anything to moan than the fact that slim, cute Gael with his slightly effeminate look that suited him so well in Almodovar's "Mala Education" seemed too boyish and cute to play a hot-blooded Andalusian peasant boy and with the hunky Viking as his rival, it was hard to understand why the Bride went for Leonardo rather than him. But even so it was a great night out! Thursday was my social day - I slept long and then immediately went to Olympia to meet my editor Lynda for lunch at her home. We had a good chat and some very good bottles of Chilean Merlot (thanks for the suggestion) and eventually I had to leave because I was meeting up with my Aussie friend Sherry in Leicester Square. Having met in Melbourne one and a half year ago it was great to see her again on this side of the world. We first had a cup of coffee in Covent Garden before taking the tube down to Southwark in search of the Menier Chocolate Factory, a new fringe venue that was showing Jonathan Larson's only other show apart from his masterpiece "Rent", the small three-person-musical "Tick, Tick, Boom!" We found it easily, only a short walk away from the London Bridge tube and had a nice fish and chips-dinner at a pub before going to see the small, but brilliant show. On the eve of his 30th birthday Jonathan, a struggling young musical composer in New York City (Neil Patrick Harris) takes stock of his life and achievements. His life-long friend Michael (Tee Jaye) has become a successful business type, his girlfriend Susan (Cassidy Janson) is making a career as a dancer. He himself wonders whether he should go on pursueing his dream of writing (and staging) a musical or grow up and become "respectable" too. In the course of the evening questions are raised that all of us have asked or will ask ourselves at some point: Where is my life going, have I achieved what I wanted, am I at least on the way to achieving what I want, could I take a different road? The show is sometimes hilariously funny, but also has very touching, intimate moments that leave you close to tears and with "Come to your senses"and the fabulous finale "Louder than words" it boasts two wonderful showstoppers. The three performers were all fantastic and this show has once more proven that if you have something intelligent to say and good songs with great lyrics you really don't need a big production with lavish stage sets to touch and move your audience. A wonderful evening and a very promising start for this new venue! Having Friday entirely to myself I decided to do some sightseeing again at last and went out to visit Hampton Court Palace, the huge royal palace outside of London first built by Henry VIII. (he of the six wives) and later expanded and refurbished. It became quite an expensive venture - the entrance alone costs a mind-boggling £12 and the train fare to Hampton Court another £8.70. There is little left of the Tudor period apart from Henry's big hall and the enormous kitchens, the rest dates from the Stuart and Georgian periods and with the gorgeous French-style rooms in Sweden's beautiful Drottningholm castle fresh on my mind, I found them rather dull. The whole castle is more difficult to navigate than its famous maze in the gardens (which was very small, judging from outside, I didn't go in) and overall I felt a bit ripped-off by the discrepancy of cost and value. This feeling continued for the rest of the day as well. If there's an Olivier Award for "disappointment of the year" the new revival of "Guys and Dolls"should win it hands down. They had everything going for them, hadn't they? A stellar cast led by Ewan McGregor and Broadway-import Jane Krakowski, the large and gorgeous (albeit cramped and uncomfortable) Piccadilly Theatre in the heart of the West End and one of the best Broadway shows ever written with immortal songs and many witty one-liners. So what went wrong? Well, firstly shoot the designer, Christopher Oram, who has created one of the blandest, dullest, ugliest stage sets I've seen in years, ressembling some garbarge dump in the outskirts of an industrial town rather than glitzy, bright Times Square. Did I pay a whopping £55 for these drab sets any AmDram company could do better or does the money go into Mr. McGregor's pockets? If so, please tell him to spend at least some of it on singing lessons. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Ewan McGregor, otherwise I hadn't gone to see this production. But if his singing was passable in "Moulin Rouge", he must have had a lot of help from the sound designer because he really couldn't hack it live. This became most obvious in the second act when his Sky Masterson sings the show-stopping "Luck be a lady"soon followed by Nicely-Nicely's "Sit down, you're rocking the boat" done here by musical theatre-pro Andrew Playfoot (the understudy). Guess which one brought the house down? It wasn't Ewan's "Luck be a lady"... Some shows can be saved by the supporting cast if the leading man is a disappointment, but here the show failed, too. Jenna Russell, certainly a great performer who proved in the "Havana" scene (the highlight of the evening) that she is also a great comedian, was simply too old to play the young naive Sarah and often looked older than Ewan. The second couple, Douglas Hodge as Nathan and Jane Krakowski as Adelaide had no chemistry either, especially Hodge was extremly dull. I do believe that Miss Krakowski is a great performer (after all she won the Tony for "Nine"), but she left me just as cold as everyone else. The show will sure please the droves of Ewan-fans (who were out in full force that evening), but as a musical lover who's seen hundreds of shows (and the excellent revival of "Guys and Dolls" at the National Theatre a few years ago), I found this production rather disappointing. If the name Ewan McGregor brings so many new people to the West End, it's a shame that they don't get a chance to see just how fabulous an old classic can be. On Saturday morning I took a long walk from Pimlico to the West End (via the Easy Internetcafe on Trafalger Square) and browsed in the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road for a while until it was time to meet Erika for lunch in Leicester Square. A few years ago I had pestered her to read my all-time favourite book "The Far Pavilions", so naturally we went to see the musical together now. Its location in the "theatre of doom" - the Shaftesbury Theatre, where many a good show died a premature death in recent years and many negative voices boded no good, but I found myself pleasantly surprised by the show. Yes, perhaps you must have read the epic novel by M.M.Kaye to be able to fully grasp the plot and in my opinion the book could have done with some tweaking, but after the disappointment of "Guys and Dolls";, this was finally a big, lavish show with gorgeous stage sets and costumes and a big cast that also did right what "Bombay Dreams" failed to do - bring the glitz and pomp of a Bollywood movie on stage in the fantastic scenes at the Maharajah's court. I can't recount the full tale here (go and buy the book, it's worth it!), basically it's the story of Ashton Pelham-Martyn, an English officer in Colonial India and his love for his childhood sweetheart, the Indian princess Anjuli. Playmates when they were young, she must now become second wife to a horrible old Maharajah and Ashton marry a snooty English memsahib called Belinda, but of course love conquers all. The musical feels rushed at two and a half hours and I think they should have dared to make it three hours long to explain the story better and cut down on Belinda who thoroughly annoyed me, though I'm not sure how much the role is to blame and how much Dianne Pilkington who kept the same whiny crybaby expression on her face throughout the show, even when Belinda was bitchy and picked fights with Ashton. But she was the only let down in an otherwise excellent cast - the dishy Hadley Fraser as Ashton, the cute Gayatri Irya as Anjuli and the formidable Sophiya Haque as manipulating super-bitch Janoo Rani. Also in the cast were Bollywood legend Kabir Bedi in the non-singing part of Ashton's father figure Koda Dad and "Goodness Gracious me"-star Kulvinder Ghir as the evil Rana of Bhitor. The show has many great songs and while it isn't perfect, it is certainly the best new big sweeping romantic epic I have seen on stage for long. I hope it'll escape the curse of the Shaftesbury Theatre and live for some time - I'd love to see it again. But although I really enjoyed "The Far Pavilions", the true highlight of this trip was still to come, the stage adaption of the wonderful movie "Billy Elliot" the story of a young boy in the Northern England of the early 80's, who wants to become a ballet dancer. The libretto has been written by Lee Hall who had also written the screenplay and once more Stephen Daldry directed, while Elton John supplied the music. The musical reminded me of why I had fallen in love with English movies and shows in the first place: This fabulous mix of great comedy and tragedy that makes you cry in one scene and laugh out loud in the next. More emphasis was here put on the children's interaction, especially the friendship between Billy and his best friend Michael who brought the house down with their boyish hymn to cross-dressing "Expressing yourself". The other big show-stopper was "Born to Boogie" for Billy, his dance-teacher Mrs Wilkington and the hilarious chubby rehearsal pianist Mr Braithwaite. But there are also wonderfully moving quiet scenes, especially Billy's Dream, when he seems himself dancing as a grown up. Much fuss had been made around the search for young boys to play Billy. I saw George Maguire, who is more hiphop-orientated than the other two Billys (the choreography has been adapted for each boy to suit him) which seemed a little bit weird for a show set in 1984, but he was really fabulous. I hadn't thought I would be able to enjoy anyone but the fabulous Julie Walters as the resolute dance teacher, but Haydn Gwynne was excellent, too. The only little niggle I have is that Billy's Dad (Tim Healy) and his brother Tony (Joe Caffrey) seemed a bit too old in relation to his age, certainly older than their movie counterparts. I also got more celebrity than I had bargained for, because two rows behind me sat Roger Moore. I caught his eye when I left for the loos in the interval and was still puzzling Is that him or is that not him, but when I returned I saw people around him asking for autographs, so it must have been him indeed. Poor Bond has aged, too. Another note about the show I enjoyed: The movie doesn't really make clear where in Northern England the Elliots live, but the musical is set in Easington. That won't mean much to most of the world but Easington is the English twin town of my home town Baesweiler and I was there twice for the school exchange programme. So that was funny for me, but also felt a little awkward, realizing that we were there only three-four years after the Miners' Strike and totally clueless of what had been going on in this area (why did no one at school ever bother to give us a bit of background on where we were going? But then, when did school ever teach us something useful about real life?). And there my trip to London ended. I didn't go home yet, though, but went on to Mallorca for a few days of sun and found myself close to more (well, ex-)celebrity, for standing in the queue to board the Easyjet plane to Palma right in front of me was ex-pop star Chesney Hawkes, whom I remember vaguely from the late 80's. Granted, I wouldn't have recognized him, I only noticed the rather cute blonde guy in front of me and then spotted his name on his boarding pass...