Nicole schreibt...

The snow chaos that the BBC had predicted on their website luckily failed to materialize when I arrived in town on Wednesday (Come on, Brits, not even you could call that little flurry of snow 'severe weather' - or could you?). I arrived at my hotel, the European, which was next door to the one I stayed in last time and which turned out to be much nicer and cleaner, with a cupboard for stuff and a telly that actually worked. At £50 per night including breakfast, I'd definitely recommend this to people who don't want to blow a fortune on staying in the West End. Having dumped my things there I headed for the bright lights of Soho for a bit of shopping and having dinner at a Vietnamese place which turned out to be across the street from the Palace Theatre stage door. Being much of a scaredy cat when it comes to food, I had been wary of local street food in Hong Kong and Bangkok, so this time round I want to familiarize myself with Vietnamese food before I fly there. I had the Pho soup which is apparently a staple in Vietnam and while I first thought that a big bowl of soup wouldn't fill me up well, it certainly did. Mission accomplished, I headed for the London Palladium to see "Sister Act - the Musical". I had been lukewarm when it opened, liking the film "okay" but nothing more. Some of the fun tunes on the CD then made me quite like it and with the tickets at £35 during the "Get into London Theatre" weeks, I was finally game. Having said that, for £35 it's worth a visit and quite entertaining, but I certainly wouldn't pay the prices Stage Entertainment will be charging people in Hamburg. Whoopi Goldberg's original movie was 90 minutes of fluff, that didn't take well to being expanded into a 160-minute musical. Especially the songs for the men that were added for padding did nothing at all to move the action forward and personally I found the added role of Eddie, the cop in love with Deloris, just boring and unnecessary, but judging by the audience reaction, he clearly became their favorite and Ako Mitchell was greeted with the biggest cheer during curtain calls. For me it were the women that made the show worth watching, understudies Allison Harding as Mary Lazarus, Amy Booth Steel as Mary Patrick, Katie Rowley-Jones as Mary Robert and Sheila Hancock as Mother Superior. And then of course Patina Miller as Deloris, a beautiful tall lady with one heck of a voice and great charisma, who did with the material what she could. Beyond the big shownumbers "Take me to heaven" and the magnificent "Raise your voice" the music from Alan Menken leaves quite a bit to be desired though and especially the second act drags some. Overall I am quite glad that I saw it, but I already know that I won't bother to go to Hamburg for it. If you want to see a good movie adaption for the stage, try the pink frothy fun of Legally Blonde or the even pinker Priscilla. Thursday morning was spent on a little shopping, first to Waterstone's, then to Oxford Street. For lunch I returned to this nice little Chinese restaurant in Chinatown (where people were gearing up for Chinese New Year) with their awesome all-you-can-eat-buffet for £5, then back to the hotel to chill a bit. I was lucky with my room, since the afternoon sun was shining right onto my bed, so I could lie in the sun and almost feel like I was back on a Caribbean beach instead of cold grey London town. Then it was time to be social and I went to Fulham first, to meet a friend who was rehearsing at the Dance Attic studios there. I had never been to Fulham and found it charmingly rural and nice. It always surprises me how different London can feel just a few tube stops outside the city. We had a coffee and then a glass of wine at a nice Irish pub then it was time to depart again to meet another friend at the Palace Theatre - well, he had already slunk off to the nearest pub but at least left me a message to tell me so. Show for the evening was "Priscilla". Again. It was the first time in ages that I returned to a show so quickly, so that should tell you something about how much I like it. Well, admittedly, I had planned to see "Legally Blonde" that evening, but they didn't take part in the Get into London Theatre-discount scheme, while Priscilla, where good discount are usually hard to come by, does. So row B on the Dress Circle for only £35 was just too good a chance to miss. The Palace Theatre was filled to the brim, unlike the Palladium on the previous evening and the show and atmosphere were just as great as I remembered them. The full first cast was on - Ladies Jason Donovan, Tony Sheldon and Oliver Thornton - and I was glad to see them again actually, especially Tony Sheldon who returns to Australia next month and who'll leave very large footsteps for anyone daring to tread into them. It's one of these few rare shows that let you leave the theatre with a big daft smile on your face and bopping all the way to the next tube station. And when existing music is so cleverly chosen and worked into the show, I don't even mind the recycling of pop music. I'm truly glad that it's doing so well and starting its second season now and y'know, I might just go back for a third visit sometime. Friday morning I didn't really know what to do with myself and since I was going to see "War Horse" in the evening, thought this might be a good time to finally visit the Imperial War Museum, where I'd never been before, partly because it's way out in Lambeth and partly because... well, I don't really need to see tanks, weapons, uniforms and the like too often. Not much I hadn't seen yet elsewhere indeed in Lambeth plus hordes of obnoxious school groups with their squawking and squeaking. Still it was good for one and half hour, then it was time to head over to Olympia for lunch with Lynda and having been nicely fed and watered, returned to the hotel for an hour of chilling. Returning to Covent Garden then, I did check out the original Uggs store to familiarize myself with the originals and noticed that the ones I had ordered on the internet and which turned out to be fakes, cost a whopping £190 in store. Um, I think I rather stick with my £75 fakes then, tyvm. Next stop was Dress Circle and finally on to Ed's Diner, one of those fake 50's American burger things for which I had a 20% off voucher. It was okay enough for a quick snack, but certainly not nice "dining out in peace" - sorry Rob, next time I'll drag you to that proper Mexican restaurant by the hair if necessary. Show for the evening was the National Theatre's muchly hyped "War Horse", which had by now transferred to the New London Theatre, which I hadn't visited since those glory days of "Cats". War Horse has been adapted from Michael Morpugo's book about Joey, a horse from a Devon farm who is sold to the army to fight in World War I in France and of his young owner Albert, who tries throughout the war to find him again. The book is told from Joey's very neutral view since a horse doesn't separate people in "English" and "German" but simply in good and bad and also manages to convey something of the naive panic these poor animals felt, being caught up in a war and having no idea what was going on. Now I agree it was a good idea to not make Joey speak in the play and reduce him to a silly panto horse. It's the humans who do the talking and while it's still very touching overall, the very individual idea of the book gets a bit lost. Parts of the story have been changed or simplified - overall it all still worked very well, but I admit that I liked the book a bit better. Stars of the play are of course the horses themselves, Joey and his pal Topthorn, who are each operated by three puppeteers and brought to life in a stunning realistic way. Though I could see the puppeteering very clearly from my front row seat, I was still able to see real horses on stage there with their movements and mannerisms. The humans were pretty good too, especially the kid who played Albert (but who wasn't the guy listed in the programme, I'm sure), Matthew Spencer as the nice Captain Nicholls (who dies at the first charge) and Patrick O'Kane as the "crazy" kindly German Friedrich who takes care of the horses after they've fallen into German hands. This is the kind of engaging moving play that makes you forget about time, pulls you in and makes you cry - the kind of play that makes live theatre stand out above other entertainment forms like cinema to me. Still, I hear Steven Spielberg wants to make a movie of "War Horse" (based on the book, not the play adaption), so look out for that! Saturday morning I decided to spend a while online - what better place than the 5th floor cafe at my favorite bookstore Waterstone in Piccadilly with its lovely views towards Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and the London Eye. Well, plenty, it turned out. You pay dearly for the view (and the free wifi) as a regular cup of latte/cappuccino costs three quid - and they go and simply add a 12% service charge to the bill without asking, knowing fully well that people don't dare to complain about it for fear of appearing stingy. So, sorry, Waterstone's, I love your bookstore, but your cafe is a rip off. I went to another famous museum/gallery then - the one I had always avoided like the Plague so far: Tate Modern on Bankside. Yea I'm one of the countless reactionary bores who think that most modern art is a heap of nonsensical trash any three year old could conceive. But hey, it's free, I had nothing else to do and it's just around the corner of the Menier Chocolate Factory. In the end it wasn't that bad really - sure, there's lots of crap, but some of it so mindbogglingy idiotic that it has to be seen to be believed. And amid the nonsense there are also a few gems to be found and I discovered the art that lies in the works of Dali, the late Picasso or Joan Miro, people whose work is so often (sadly) reduced to cheap posters adorning the walls of doctors' waiting rooms. Given the choice I'd still prefer a good old Rembrandt or a Raffael, but the trip to Tate Modern was definitely worth it for the gawp factor. I walked along the river then, past the Clink Prison, the Golden Hinde and Borough Market, then picked up my companion and my ticket for Sweet Charity at the Menier. To offer a compromise between Rob's addiction to greasy British pub food and my love for anything special, I had wanted to have lunch at the George Inn, a wonderfully crooked ancient pub that used to be a genuine Coaching Inn centuries ago. Sadly it was also crammed full, so we went elsewhere for fish & chips and the rugby on telly. I had seen "Sweet Charity" many years ago at Berlins Theater des Westens during the golden years of Helmut Baumann, but forgotten all about it later on. Considering the Menier's awesome track record with great revivals, I thought their newest offering would be a good way to both visit the venue again at last (I had been there only once in its early days, to see the awesome Neil Patrick Harris in Tick Tick Boom) and to see Sweet Charity again. To refresh myself, I recently watched the movie, which I didn't like at all. Especially Shirley MacLaine just annoyed me. Now Tamzin Outhwaite came with a nice hairdo (and not that awful red mess MacLaine sported) and generally a fresh-faced, sweet attitude that made her much more likeable and less dopey, aand she and the other cast members, especially Mark Umbers who played all the men in Charity's life, and Josefina Gabrielle and Tiffany Graves as her friends Helene and Nicky, really did what they could with the paper-thin story. The first act still flows along nicely and also has all the hits such as "Big Spender", "If my friends could see me now" and "There's gotta be something better than this", but the second act dragged quite alot. I think the Menier once more managed to max an old show and bring out the best in it, it's just that on the whole, Sweet Charity is not all that strong and it's hard to feel empathy for a dopey girl who just throws herself at one wrong man after the next. Thankfully at least some women have evolved beyond that. From the Menier it was straight back to Piccadilly and the last show of the trip, which was also meant to be the highlight - Moliere's "Misanthrope" starring Damian Lewis (who has emerged as one of my favorite actors in recent years, mostly thanks to "Band of Brothers" and "Life") and Keira Knightley, assuring a big hype and sell-out success. Even if Martin Crimp tried a very shy attempt at German Regietheater nonsense by updating the story to today's London, where Alceste is a cynic critic and Celimene (now Jennifer) an American actress. But since this is London where things are done carefully and with respect for the original, it actually worked very well - if anything one marvelled just how timeless Moliere's observation and cynic comments are and how well they translate from the French nobility of 17th century to today's vapid showbiz circles (which of course brings about the sad conclusion that mankind has learned nothing in the last centuries). As for the performers - this was clearly Damian Lewis' show and I'm not saying this out of bias, he had the audience on his side from the first line and carried the show perfectly well. I'm not so sure about Keira Knightley though, playing a vapid young Hollywood star didn't come too hard for her and in some way it worked so perfectly well to have an actual celebrity play this part and conjure up all the right images, but Moliere's verse and long monologues were clearly not her forte and maybe she bit off a bit more than she could chew for her stage debut. And talking of chewing - no, she isn't really all that skinny as the general perception goes. She's just flat as a pole and anything that requires female shapes make her look terrible, especially dresses. Poor thing looked so much better when she wore a plain T-shirt and workout pants in one act. Since the play was only two hours long and we were out on the street again by 9.40, I decided to get my arse in gear for once and trudged to the stage door. Luckily Damian Lewis was the first one and proved to be a perfect gentleman signing programmes and stuff for everyone. I even got a supersweet smile when he returned my programme to me *swoon*. After that I didn't bother to wait around in the icy cold for Keira Knightley, I just went back to my hotel with a happy grin on my face (yea, one's never too old to behave like a dork, I suppose).

And there my trip ended, a great time as always and with two more wonderful plays added to the mix (and two more new plays which I didn't get to see, but bought the texts of), I think I'm cutting the last lines to the German theatre world, except when duty calls me to review a new musical.