Nicole schreibt...

When I walked out of the Prince Edward Theatre on 4th January 2020, I didn’t have the faintest idea how long it would take me to return to my beloved West End. Sure, there had been some minor news about a new flu-like virus emerging in far-away China around Christmas, but who cared, right? Well, soon enough we all cared as the whole world crashed to a grinding halt with lockdowns everywhere. A grand total of four planned London trips were cancelled and tickets rebooked, exchanged or refunded, often more than once. I tried to keep up as well as I could with musicals in London thanks to various streams but of course it wasn’t the same.
Finally vaccinations brought Europe a massive step forward and England especially sprang to life again early thanks to Boris’ "Freedom Day" that would allow theatres to fully re-open. I spent a few weeks on edge in July 2021 as travel restrictions remained in place and although England opened the gates right on time for what should have been my first trip back in early August, I decided to postpone anyway after the English Pingdemic felled two of the shows I had booked to see.

But now I was finally back. Not on my beloved Eurostar because they aren’t operating on full schedule yet and I also wanted to cut travelling via a third country (Belgium) out of the complicated travel regulations. Unique to Europe, England demands not only a negative Covid-19-test to get in (even when you’re double-vaccinated) but another PCR-Test on the second day of being in England. Qui Bono? But let’s not go there. I love the West End enough to jump through these costly hoops, especially since I saved by being able to fly dirt-cheap with Ryanair at surprisingly great mid-day times. And of course after filling in and printing stacks of paperwork and forking out £70 for that Day-2-PCR-Test… nobody anywhere gave a fig. During boarding at Cologne airport, they cast a cursory glance at my Passenger Locator Form, but that was all. And at Stansted nobody checked anything apart from the standard passport control (and ‘lo, even the E-Gates worked for the first time in years). But I was far too happy to finally be back on English soil to get annoyed by this bizarre English policy. In fact I’d spend the whole rest of the afternoon walking around the so familiar streets with a big stupid grin on my face and when I entered the so familiar looking hotel room that felt like coming home, I’m not ashamed to amid I cried a little bit. God knows how much this town and my trips have come to mean to me over the years for so many reasons, not all of which I have reason to mention here.
With all the rebookings and rescheduldings and my planned trip in August going awry thanks to the pingdemic, that cancelled two of the shows I had booked to see, this trip gave me a chance to mop up limited summer runs and such rather before tackling all the new big shows later this month. My first port of call was the Haymarket Theatre, where Heathers had returned for a second summer season. My first visit two years had been a bit of a mess with me suffering an awful cold and getting a nosebleed during intermission, so between that and the fact that they cast no one less than two special Bat alumni in the leads, I thought I’d give it another go.
And of course Jordan Luke Gage continues to be a major pain in the ass. When I would have given my left arm to not suffer through another performance of him in Bat, he was always on stage, but when I was really curious to see his JD now, he was of course absent. What’s more, his understudy who was meant to go on, dropped out sick an hour before the show was due to begin, so we got a bit of the kind of drama that will always make live theatre so special. Swing Christopher Parkinson, who wasn’t even officially an understudy for the part, stepped to the mark to play JD and so instead of really getting into the show, I was mostly suffering with him, willing him not to flub his lines and admiring "20 ingenious ways to deal with the textbook in hand" (I guess it helped to play a high schooler who’d often have school books in hand). What a return to London – and say what you want about the crazy fans, I loved how supportive they were of him with a massive round of applause after "Freeze your Brain" and later at curtain calls.

What else can I say about the show? I love Heathers both for its fairly decent music and sharp lyrics compared to other dire "teenage musical" rubbish like the vastly overrated Dear Evan Hansen and for having a really strong female lead character in Veronica Sawyer. On the other hand the show is so over the top and cast with far too old performers across the board that it’s hard to take seriously. Some of the old cast had returned, including Jodie Steele as Heather Chandler who takes chewing the scenery to a whole new level (and doesn’t look a day under 30), while the other Heathers were now played by Bobbie Little and Frances Mayli McCann. I had hoped that Christina Bennington would prove to me that she could actually act (something she was rarely called upon to do in Bat after all), but I’m afraid I found her completely miscast as Veronica. She’s so pretty and slim that she almost automatically qualifies as a Heather while I think the juice of that particular story comes from Veronica NOT conforming to the usual high school beauty standards – Winona Ryder’s waifish cynical goth in the movie and chubby Carrie Hope Fletcher in the first London run being perfect examples. Oh well, at least she did sing well and it was still good to see the show again from a better seat in the stalls and without suffering from a major cold, so I’m glad I returned, especially for such a unique show.
And to top it all off, I spotted Charlie Stemp in the flesh when he waited for a green light along with me near Leicester Square tube and while I was far too chicken to say something to him, my little old heart beat a little faster from just having our eyes meet.

I didn’t have much to do on Friday, so I spent quite some time being lazy in the hotel and otherwise wandering around familiar streets just to check which shops and chains have survived the Covid mass culling and luckily I found that most of what I care for was still around. Show for the evening was Timothy Shearer’s re-located updated version of one of my all-time favourite musicals Carousel at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. The show had recently drawn the ire of the woke for seemingly approving of domestic violence as Billy is granted heavenly forgiveness for hitting Julie. So this production, apart from re-locating the show to the North of England and substituting the classic strings with a brass band, also tinkered with the script, going back to Ferenc Molnar’s original ending of Liliom (the play Carousel is based on) in which Billy receives no final forgiveness. The most controversial line, in which Julie tells Louise that “it’s possible for someone to hit you hard and not hurt at all” was also cut. Does this work? Yes and no.
As a feminist, I approve of Shearer’s attempt to focus on the victims of abuse and the moment Billy loses his rag when he approaches the stroppy Louise and hits her, thus messing his one chance of redemption, is very much the defining moment here in which we do not want to see him find forgiveness if he can’t learn from earlier mistakes. And the very final image, with the entire cast forming a circle on the turntable, with the women facing outward to the audience and singing “You never walk alone” (while the men remain facing inward) was perhaps the strongest and most heart-warming image I’ve seen on stage in a long while and made me tear up (again). At the same time, I don’t think Carousel needs to be tampered with (except perhaps to cut that one line that really doesn’t fly anymore). I’ve seen something go by on social media recently, which I can only paraphrase now, which said "if we eliminate everything even slightly controversial from the narrative, how can we have these things shock today’s audience and thus stir much needed discussions?" - I think that still holds very much true for Carousel and the sad fact that there is still an awful lot of domestic violence, but there are also still countless women who simply accept this (as manifested in Julie's song "What’s the use of wond’ring") or have no chance to walk away because they are economically dependant on the man (and there’s this ridiculous growing movement of women who embrace the role of passive 50’s style spouse/housekeeper while letting the man be the sole earner). So I think it is very important that Carousel gets staged and gets discussed still and girls get taught that they CAN live life without having a man glued to their side. And while wife-beating/being unable to control your temper is certainly a pretty bad thing, I’ll admit I also still like the central message of forgiveness and redemption that was now absent from this fairly bleak revival.
What else can I say? The relocation to England worked okay for me and I actually liked the brassy re-orchestration. Standouts among the cast were the lovely Carly Bawden as Julie (with who I had fallen in love in Romantics Anonymous, so was glad to see her in such a great part) and Joanna Riding as Nettie, singing a proper wonderful version of "You never walk alone" that was pure musical theatre bliss and not the ridiculous opera aria it’s sometimes turned into and who promptly reduced me to a tearful mess as it's so good to hear that done-to-death song in its proper context. I was less sold on Declan Bennett’s Billy – it IS a very hard part to get right and Bennett is a fine singer, but to me he lacked the handsomeness and sex appeal that’s Billy’s calling card, that makes him so popular with the girls at the carousel and explains why Julie falls for him hook, line and sinker (see that other godawful bastard with undeniable sexual magnetism, Stanley Kowalski driving Blanche Dubois nuts). This was just an average Joe with nothing special about him, which made it harder to see why Julie would just drop everything for this idiot. Overall this production wasn’t as ground-breakingly different and innovative as Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” on Broadway, but still a very interesting and lovely evening out and coming on the back of Heathers, proved once more how modern musicals just can’t hold a candle to these perfectly crafted classics and their gorgeous music.
Once again I hadn’t really planned much for Saturday, especially after a lunch meeting fell through, so I mostly just killed time, wandering from Caffe Nero to making a nice find at a second-hand bookshop to Pret and finally the Palladium for a very speecial matinee. The announcement that Linzi Hateley would return to play the Narrator in Joseph for a few performances this summer had thrilled Theatreland’s nerds far more than any announcement of a Hollywood A-lister’s arrival could ever have. I was one of the many young people who got hooked on musicals because of the 80s/90s blockbusters and the big Joseph revival in 1991 was one of the first big musicals I saw in London myself – though by then Jason Donovan (who I, like every other girl, fawned over in Neighbours) had departed. Nonetheless, I at least saw Linzi on stage (with Philipp Schofield), bought her first two solo albums and while I never really followed her career or tried to see her live in everything she would continue to do (and that was lot) she’d always have a special place in my heart. So the fact that I could not see her return now was quite a disappointment – until I shifted my travel plans from August to September and could actually see her very last performance, so I forked out £99 for the pleasure.
No regrets. The atmosphere in the sold-out Palladium was absolutely electric. When the show started, revealing the Narrator on stage, such massive applause started that Linzi finally broke the fourth wall to acknowledge it and this would repeat itself after "Pharaoh’s Story" and of course after the finale, when she cried in Jac Yarrow’s arms (sure, that’s a nice pair of arms to cry in, not that I’m jealous or anything...) and the audience went absolutely mad. Just like the unprepared swing stepping in on Thursday, this was another of those incredible moments that make live theatre so unique – and London especially because I couldn’t ever imagine such an outburst of love for a performer in Germany. Needless to say that a singer of Linzi’s calibre elevated the show to a new level after Sheridan Smith’s rather meh turn two years ago and I enjoyed it much more this time. She was funny without coming across as dotty and from a much better seat in the stalls I could also appreciate the stage sets, costumes and just about everything far more. I still don’t like the cheapskate idea of the Narrator and the bloody kids taking over various roles (especially the tiny Potiphar in the otherwise so funny and saucy scene of Mrs Potiphar going after Joseph) but in the end it’s a niggle in what’s still a massively joyous fun and entertaining show. Jac Yarrow has certainly grown into the part and Jason Donovan... is Jason Donovan. Though it WAS nice to have him on stage here again with Linzi as well, making me really feel like I had come full circle after 30 long years. Infinitely happy I was able to catch this, buzzing with joy and still a bit sniffly, I left the Palladium on a massive high.

Last show for this trip was Prince of Egypt, into which I dragged a friend along after a lovely Korean dinner together. It had been the last big new musical to open in London before everything broke down and so felt like the last "pre-Covid-show" I still needed to catch up on. My joy was a bit dampened when Liam Tamne, for who I had been so happy when he finally won a big leading part in the West End, announced his holidays just for this weekend, but what can you do. It was also slightly weird to be back at the Dominion Theatre after all the blood, sweat and tears I went through there during the far too short run of Bat and I often caught myself thinking back of those days. Prince of Egypt, based on the Dreamworks animation movie about Moses, was amusingly the perfect sequel to Joseph in the afternoon, but you could hardly find two more contrasting shows with one being silly joyous fun and the other taking itself very seriously. The staging, heavy on projections and with a chorus of dancers substituting all sorts of scenery like the Nile and the burning bush, had gotten some stick from others, but while I admittedly prefer proper stage sets myself, I do appreciate the attempt to do something different and fresh and the artistic modern dancing in scenes such as "Simcha" was fantastic, as was the parting of the Red Sea at the end. Performances were decent enough with Luke Brady leading the cast as Moses and the gorgeous Christine Allado as his wife Tzipporah. Understudy Felipe Bejarano seemed very young as Ramses (especially in contrast to his brother Moses) but worked well enough. The score by Stephen Schwartz ist also fairly decent, but apart from "When you believe" lacks some truly outstanding numbers and I found myself wistfully remembering the incredible finale of Les Dix Commandements in Paris with "L'envie d'aimer" which people were still singing at full volume on the metro back into Paris back then. But while Prince of Egypt couldn’t match the excitement of the three shows that had gone before it, I’m still glad I could catch it and think it's well worth seeing.

On Sunday morning I slogged back home via Stansted and despite the best of all possible worlds - perfect flight time, cabin luggage only and car waiting at the airport because of the idiotic railway strike in Germany - I made it home just half an hour earlier than I would have on my regular Eurostar journey, which is so much less hassle. Can't wait to be back on my beloved train. But at least I've been finally been back to the greatest city in the world where I feel so infinitely more at home than in the ludicrous German musical scene. And now I also feel caught up with all the stuff I hadn’t been able to see earlier... bring on the next trip in four weeks when I’ll get to see all the new stuff I’m beyond excited about!