Nicole schreibt...

January is apparently a bad month for tourism when everyone is recovering from the annual christmas overspending and the weather is horrible in Olde London Town. To keep the West End afloat, producers have invented the "Get into London theatre"cscheme under which several theatres offer heavily discounted tickets for a certain period in January and February. Okay, it was sheer bloody luck that I had planned a trip in January - but all the better for I could get into two shows cheaply this way. The first port of call was "Lord of the Rings" at one of my favorite theatres, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where I had been able to get seats in row A of the stalls for only £25. Since we had arrived in the later afternoon only amid torrential rain, there was no way of enjoying a first leasurely stroll around the West End. Instead we hurried across Leicester Square where die-hard fans braved the downpours to catch a glimpse of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter who were in town for the big gala premiere of the "Sweeney Todd" movie and while I was tempted to get a glimpse of Captain Jack in the flesh myself, a nice pint of lager in the pub across from the theatre was the bigger temptation (sorry Johnny). "Lord of the Rings" was hyped as the largest and consequently most expensive musical ever when it first opened in Toronto but it didn't become the huge hit everyone had expected. Neither did it wow the crowds in London where cheap tickets have been available from day one. And it's not hard to see why. The show has great effects indeed (though rest assured that row A in the stalls is a BAD idea when you're an arachnophobic like me and a HUGE stage-filling spider crawls onto the stage to scare the shit out of Frodo), but was overall pretty lacklustre. The human males were tough guys, the hobbits cute, the Orcs shit-ugly and the female elves garbled esoteric nonsense and waved their arms about a lot. Peter Jackson did all that before and did it much better. But while it was clear that a three-hour stage musical could only rush through Tolkien's epic breathlessly, the really annoying part of this show was the music. I know that AR Rahman can write songs. I'm sure the Finnish band Varttina can write songs. So did they cancel each other out when writing the musical or what happened? There are hardly any nice songs at all, much less any real good memorable tune in the sense of a traditional musical theatre song. First we had lacklustre adaptions of literary classics, then we had jukebox musicals recycling old pop songs, followed by stage adaptions of popular movies. Is this now the last step, where we have neither original stories nor original music left? "Dirty Dancing" more or less put the movie on stage with no new music and the music of this "Lord of the Rings" felt like a second-rate imitation of Howard Shore's movie soundtracks (and how I wished for a song of "May it be" calibre to come along at least once!). The cast at least was pretty good, though nobody really stood out, except perhaps Michael Therriault's sufficiently creepy Gollum and Jerome Pradon, dashing as always as Aragorn (though with audible voice problems that night). The star of the show, former Mary Poppins Laura Michelle Kelly was absent and her understudy Stevie Tate-Bauer did nothing for me as Galadriel, though that may be the role's fault as much as the performer's, and the guy who played Gandalf lacked both the voice and stage presence to play the fearsome wizard. It was a little bit odd for me to have taken company along to London for the first time in ages and on Friday my friend and I agreed to go separate ways - she visited the British Museum and I first spent some time in my favorite bookshops, then went to meet my editor Lynda for lunch in Olympia, ending up with one glass Merlot too many as so often (ahem). After a break in our hotel in Bayswater, where I was reunited with my friend we had an early dinner at a lovely Persian restaurant on Queensway before returning to the West End for the second show "Fiddler on the Roof" at the Savoy Theatre, where I had got top price seats reduced to £27.50. "Fiddler" was one of those classic musicals I could just never take an interest in... until someone lent me the DVD of the movie and I got really sucked into the story of the Jewish milkman Tevje and his daughters, the clash of tradition and modern times in the little Russian village at the start of the 20th century. So after ditching the last chance to see "Mary Poppins" on stage and giving the new "remixed" version of "Rent" a wide berth after all the bad reviews, I decided that this was a good opportunity ot see a big-scale version of "Fiddler" live on stage with Henry Goodman as Tevje. The differences between this classic musical and the overblown LOTR on the previous evening couldn't be more glaring. Here was all a musical lover's heart needs to rejoice: Great timeless songs, nice choreographies and a warm heart at the core instead of huge effects. Not to mention an excellent cast with a star who had the audience in his hand from the first to the last minute. If I have one complaint it's that the first act is way too long at nearly two hours. More overblown spectacle followed on Saturday: The Star Wars movies are probably the biggest cult movies ever and have had a huge fan following for thirty years now. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first movie in 1977, a huge fan convention had been held in Los Angeles in 2007, which also spawned an exhibition of stuff from the movies. This exhibition came to London now and for a whopping £16.50 you could get a good look at props, costumes, models and other things to warm a geek's heart. There were also photo opportunities and a "jedi school" where kids could personally tackle Darth Vader and the Emperor. It was all fun and nice to see, but the entry price was ridiculous. Afterwards I took my friend to Camden Lock Market to show her around this favorite geek-watching ground of mine, before it was time for a break at the hotel. Following a nice Indian dinner in the West End it was time to see the hottest ticket in town (Okay. Second-hottest right now... Ewan McGregor in the Donmar's "Othello" is the hottest) - the stage version of "Hairspray" which started life as a movie in the 80's, became a musical on Broadway a few years ago and then a movie version of the musical was made. Confused yet? Add to this that one of the female leads, the heroine Tracy's mother Edna is played by a man. In this case, Britain's favorite crooner Michael Ball, a casting surprise but as it turned out the perfect choice. I had never thought that Michael Ball could be so funny and go against his own crooner-pretty boy-image so much, camping it up and obviously enjoying every second on stage. The rest of the cast was equally great and it was a great evening out - it's the kind of show that leaves you shimmying out of the theatre with a big grin on your face, recounting your favorite moments. And the show was over so early that we actually had time for a last drink at a pub on Cambridge Circus to end the trip on.