Well... the best-laid plans and all that. Travelling has finally gone back to pre-Covid normal (at least as long as you avoid the on-going German panic mode) and I had been looking forward to a fairly long and unusual trip to London... until the last-minute upheavals. But I’ll get to that. For starters, everything was back to normal – an easy car ride across the border to Belgium and a mask-free Belgian intercity followed by an equally mask-free Eurostar. In January I had chosen the Premier Inn across the street from St. Pancras as the most convenient jail while I had to quarantine and wait for my test result, now it just became my comfortable first-night quarters where I could chill for a while before heading into town.
I can’t remember the last time I went to London on a Tuesday already. Probably never. The cause for this exception were the one and only John Barrowman and my friend who had talked me into joining him for his concert at the Adelphi Theatre. With him pushing sixty now and looking more and more like a televangelist who had too much botox (Barrowman, not my friend), it seemed a good chance to see this great entertainer one final time on stage. But then the concert was postponed to February at very short notice, leaving me in a flap. In the end though, I didn’t mind too terribly as the same friend’s review of the "new" version of Grease at the Dominion Theatre had intrigued me quite a bit and I jumped at the chance to see this instead – especially with a good last minute offer from TodayTix that (as irony would have it) put me into my favourite front row seat from the glory days of Bat out of Hell.
So what’s new about this version of Grease, you ask? Well, the fact that it is actually old. When Grease opened for the very first time in Chicago in 1971, Warren Casey and Jim Jacobs had very much written a dark rebellious teen musical about 50s "greasers" from the wrong end of town. Considered too dark and sweary for the mainstream, the edges were removed, songs exchanged and a somewhat blandified version hit Broadway one year later, where it ran for a sensational 3388 performances and more than seven years. Then of course came the movie version of 1978, softening Grease even further and introducing new hits that would later find their way into new stage versions because it seemed unfeasible to do the stage show without songs like "Hopelessly devoted to you" and "You’re the one that I want". Then in 2011 a small theatre in Chicago wanted to reclaim the musical and the setting and so the original version was excavated and staged in a small theatre as "The Original Grease". It is this version the new London production is now heavily leaning on, but without bothering to explain the background in the fairly pricey programme (that didn’t have a single article about the show and its development at all!) or adding "original" to the title.
Having owned a very old script of Grease from the 70s, I actually knew most of what was supposedly new in this version and it wasn’t half as different from the more recent stage productions than I had expected with the three big film songs still in and the only songs dredged up from ancient times (where they should have stayed) were another solo for Danny (How big I’m gonna be) and a song for the Burger Palace Boys (The T-Birds) called Tattoo Song. It was also still bright and fun overall and not half as dark as that other ode to the “greaser” street gangs of the 50s, my beloved Outsiders. The main problem in this iteration is, in my opinion, the cast and to some extent how they were directed.
I didn’t mind Sandy being a brunette, because there was never any reason for her to be blonde just because Olivia Newton-John was blonde in the movie. But this Sandy (Olivia Moore) came on pretty strong and self-assured from the start, so there was no real trajectory for her to change from this awkward uptight prissy Missy, who so badly wants to belong to the Pink Ladies and knows she had to change to become part of the cool group (No, I’ve never bought into that silly assumption that Grease is oh-so-sexist because Sandy changes herself just for Danny... she doesn’t, she strives for acceptance from the cool girls and this is a hill I will die on). Jocasta Almgill was certainly a capable Rizzo, singing the shit out of “There are worse things I could do”, but seemed ten years older than virtually every other Pink Lady or Burger Palace Boy and more like a cougar with the very teenaged-looking Kenickie. On the boys’ side, Danny was the other problem, because Dan Partridge sang very well and was very pretty but had all the charisma of a doorpost. Both Kenickie (the amazing Paul French) and Sonny (the really very sexy Damon Gould), who doesn’t even have a song to sing easily acted him off the stage with massive charisma. So what I think this version really needs is a softer and more insecure Sandy, a younger Rizzo and dear Gods, a more charismatic Danny. That said, I still enjoyed my trip back to Rydell High as Grease is one of those easy-going dance-heavy shows that are always fun to revisit. And while it stung a bit to be in my favourite seat in my beloved Bat Cave with all the memories, I also knew these Bats were only a short train ride away...
And so after a quiet morning at the hotel I took that train from Victoria to Eastbourne, where I had in very misguided optimism booked the only hotel with an outdoor pool. I had walked past the stately Eastbourne Grand when I went to Beachy Head a few years ago and I LOVE this kind of grand old pile, so when I knew I needed to stay overnight, I was quite willing to fork out for the pleasure. Then of course English weather did what English weather does best and... literally pissed on me. Luckily the hotel ALSO has an indoor pool, so since I couldn’t check into my room yet, I went to curl up in their jacuzzi for the next two hours. And as befits a five-star hotel, someone even came down there to bring me my keycard when my room was ready, so I sneak upstairs all soggy without having to detour to reception. And what a lovely room it was too, where I stayed until I nudged myself out into the windy grey late afternoon to walk to Eastbourne Pier and back to have dinner in a lovely old-fashioned English seaside joint by the theatre.
Here are a few pix of the hotel:
I love the quaint gilded West End theatres so much, entering a fairly modern English theatre that looks very much like every ugly shitty German Stadttheater built in the post-war years comes quite as a shock. Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre dates from the early 60s, but made up for its ugly look with a very large stage and a very civilized and mixed audience. Still makes me smile that Bat brings out so many fans wearing t-shirts or jackets from the show or even self-made gear.
For the first ever in England Rob Fowler was off, giving me the odd sensation to finally see another Falco and another Sloane as well with understudies Jamie Jukes and Laura Johnson stepping in capably. While Jamie was rather too young to convince, Laura had the most adorable facial expressions and I liked them both very much. Far more important though was of course that Glenn Adamson and Martha Kirby were both on and boy has Glenn grown into the part, being now almost as wildly over the top and all-out mad rocker as my boy Andrew. What a joy to experience these performances again and I still love Bat so much more than most of what clogs up the West End today. Bring on Liverpool, I say - and in the meantime here's finally a curtain call video with the new tour kids:
After a good night I had one of the fanciest breakfasts ever with a starched uniformed waiter wearing gloves bringing me my omelette under a cloche and a buffet that wasn’t self-service but had a lady putting together what you requested. I stayed in my room until check-out time and by then it had actually cleared up enough to sit by the seaside for an hour and read, before taking the train back into London (where it was much warmer!).
Meeting up with my friend in Kings Cross, we first went for a coffee and then for a delightful Burmese dinner in the newly pedestrianized and very lovely hideaway of Slingsby Place behind Long Acre. Show for the evening was My Fair Lady, which had come to the London Coliseum for a limited summer season from New York’s Lincoln Center and brought leading man Harry Hadden-Paton along, one of these actors who seem to have cornered the market for English toffs on television. He was joined by Amara Okereke as Eliza, Malcolm Sinclair as Pickering and movie legend Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs Higgins who was of course out, the part played by understudy Heather Jackson. What can I say, it was all very pretty to look at and the score sounded great played by a lush orchestra, but somehow it all didn’t gel for me. Despite sitting in the front row of the Dress Circle (once an utterly perfect seat to watch the ballet Giselle from) I felt removed from the action and there just didn’t seem to be any chemistry between the two leads and I didn’t really care all that much for them.
That said, though, I really loathed the new ending which has Eliza walk away from Higgins. Throughout the entire show we get the message loud and clear that Higgins is a bit of an idiot, Pickering says so and his mother is very vocal about it. It's not like the writers approved of his rudeness to Eliza. But we also get the sense through the last big dialogue between him and Eliza, followed by “I’ve grown accustomed to her face”, that he is becoming aware of his flaws and wanting to get better. Her not giving him this chance to redeem himself seems unnecessarily cruel, and in my opinion, making female heroines in classic shows cold and unforgiving has nothing whatsoever to do with a more "progressive" feminist approach to these shows. It was the same with Carousel last year, where Billy was being denied forgiveness and now it’s the same for Higgins and I'm really not keen on it because we are all, at some points in our lives, in need for forgiveness and another chance and it's so much nicer to see women being big-hearted, kind and forgiving. It’s also ridiculous that messing with classics (that have become beloved classics for a reason) supposedly constitutes feminism while new shows, that could be written differently, still get away with the tiresome trope that the girl needs to end up with the guy and can’t walk away into her own future (Cinderella and &Juliet being the two most obvious culprits here), never mind how many shows have the female lead(s) still only ever bleat about men and love instead of having another agenda or goal in life?
So anyway, this rather staid and unimaginative production of My Fair Lady felt more like a museum piece, nice to look at, but not really engaging me. And even before it was ruined by the ending I started spinning ideas of how to give this show a revamp the way Daniel Fish did with Oklahoma! and thought it may be nice to do it gender-swapped with some strict governess type taking on a scruffy guy from the streets. Any takers?
Friday marked the start of a regular time in London, which also meant I had nothing much to do in the morning. After a late lazy start I decided to check out the Elizabeth Line, aka Crossrail, the new tube line (that doesn’t strictly belong to the tube network but is yet another different spawn). I took the regular tube to Paddington and the Elizabeth Line back to Tottenham Court Road and there was something utterly amazing about sitting in a tube carriage that actually smelled new! Otherwise it didn’t feel all that new – more like the stuff I have seen commonly around Asia in the last years and which made me realize once more how backwards Europe is in some ways, never mind Germany with its antiquated systems. With a packed lunch (well salad) I went down to Embankment Gardens to spend some time reading in the sunshine until it was time to head for a very unusual performance, a Friday matinee, and funny enough for a show I had so much wanted to hate when it opened: &Juliet.
I still can’t stand the noisy bland pop trash Swedish composer Max Martin churns out most of the time (and which forms the backbone of this show), but he HAS also written some really good tunes and more importantly, &Juliet is a show that impossible not to love with its big-hearted message of inclusiveness and more feminism than most of the West End put together. One problem I had when seeing it first though was leading lady Miriam-Teak Lee’s way over the top performance that was grating rather than endearing and her Juliet far too mature to need any help from Anne Hathaway or to feasibly show any interest in juvenile dorky Romeo.
Then to my greatest delight, Zara McIntosh was hired as new alternate Juliet, a young lady I had hopelessly fallen in love with when I had seen her in Six (as Katherine Howard). So I was delighted she got such a chance to shine and it seemed the perfect opportunity to revisit the show – especially since the Friday matinee is her one fixed performance per week and a time slot I usually don’t do anything with. Add Keala Settle as Angelique (the Nurse) to that, the Broadway star now mostly known as the Bearded Lady from The Greatest Showman belting out “This is me” and Tom Francis, who I had totally loved as Roger in Hope Mill’s Rent in winter, taking over Romeo and it was an easy decision to return. Tom was alas out, but Carl Man was a capable understudy and old favourites like Cassidy Janson and Oliver Tompsett as Anne and Shakespeare were still around. Most of all though Zara did delight my heart with a kick-ass pop voice and overall wonderful performance that made it so much easier to root for Juliet this time and love her to bits.
And while I’d still wish that they would have let Juliet walk off into her own independent future, in the context of the show, with Anne and Shakespeare seeking to make up, it does make sense that she gives Romeo another chance. While Juliet’s music will never be anywhere remotely close to my favourite 80s music, the show’s joyous infectious fun is just something I could indeed watch again and again, too – Romeo’s re-entry into proceedings with “It’s my Life” is the second-best Act One closer after "Bat out of Hell" itself, in my book and there are also moments of quiet introspection among the disco pop noise such as "That’s the Way It Is" (originally by Celine Dion) and "I’m not a girl, not yet a woman" (Britney Spears) sung truly beautifully by Alex Thomas-Smith who annoyed me as hell as whiny Tink in Bat, but seems to really be at home here, playing May. Here's another curtain call video of this wonderful cast:
Following a wonderful afternoon, I met one friend for a quick coffee and then on to spend the evening with another friend, who happened to be in town during the same week and joined me for… Cock. Where, it turned out, the real life drama, was so much more interesting than what happened on stage. This had first been announced with movie star Taron Egerton (now perhaps best known for playing Elton John in Rocketman) and as I have a friend who’s a massive fan of him, I agreed to arrange for cheap front stalls tickets for us. Then my friend couldn’t make it on that particular date and then Egerton himself mysteriously dropped out of the play only a few weeks into the run.
My interest in Cock itself was very limited (ahem) and now close to zero, but having found another taker for my ticket I thought, might as well – especially considering the price I paid compared to the uproar the producers caused recently when they tried to flog the last available tickets at £400 (which they dropped to £175 after massive backlash and which is still far too much really for this short play now consisting of mostly no-names (although Jonathan Bailey may count as a name now that he’s in that puerile pile of juvenile bullshit Bridgerton on Netflix?). Anyway, I generally rather watch paint dry than listen to people bleat on about relationship crap, so 105 minutes of watching a guy (Bailey) oscillate between a male and a female lover (Joel Harper-Jackson who was promoted from understudy to first cast when Egerton dropped out, and Jade Anouka) was more like personal hell for me. Lesson learned, I guess, I’ll just keep embracing my love for trashy musicals and won’t even try to engage with high-brow plays any more… or book tickets for something I don’t care much for to begin with, just to do someone else a favour. At least it was a lovely evening spent with a dear old friend who I hadn’t seen for far too long.
Saturday morning I finally braved Oxford Street for a bit of a poke around the shops, then after lunch returned to another show I already knew... Back to the Future. Funny enough it had been the least favourite of the three new big shows I had seen last year, trailing Cinderella and Frozen, and yet it was the one I felt drawn back to. Why? Several reasons. For one I had sabotaged myself by booking front stalls despite knowing the Dress Circle would be much better for this, secondly I was really annoyed by my Mom when we saw it together and thirdly, I felt that I had spent the entire show just impatiently wanting to see what came next and how they had adapted it for the stage (most notably of course Marty’s return to 1985).
It was only after the album came out and I listened to it several times without the distraction of the show that I began to appreciate some of the songs not just for being surprisingly melodic but even quite deep. George’s "My Myopia" falls flat in the show, sung as it is by a gibbering wreck in a tree spying on a girl through her bedroom window (with high ick factor), but becomes a lovely ballad on the album expressing the desire to shut out the wider world and withdraw into their own introvert world – things every gamer geek and nerd I’ve met across the years will fully understand. Similarly Doc’s "For the Dreamers" is a beautiful ode to the scientists gone before him (often attempting things nobody thought ever possible) and to dreamers in general.
So yes, I felt like I wanted to go to back, see it from the Dress Circle at last and focus more on each individual scene rather than breathlessly wait for the end. The corner seat A33 was a steal at £59.50 with the handrail restricting very little and the show was indeed so much better for being able to see the full stage and effects. And while it’s still not a GREAT show, I did begin to appreciate it all more now as being well put together with some real amusing nerdery like the lightsaber and some great numbers. It was also nice to see the Adelphi still packed to the rafters and the audience still being as appreciative as last year when the show was new – greeting Marty and Doc with entrance applause and going wild for George when he punched Biff and then kissed Lorraine. Part of me still thinks that BTTF is one of those cult classics that really shouldn’t be a musical because you can’t change it without making the fans angry and such as it is, remains a lacklustre movie-slapped-on-stage thing. And yet there’s something lovable and wildly entertaining about it and I believe that in these dire times it’s just what people want and need.
After the show I rushed across the river to briefly meet another friend who had just come out of Daniel Fish’s new wildly inventive Oklahoma! at the Young Vic (and didn’t like it one bit), then back into the West End for my final show... Bonnie & Clyde. Now I’ve always had a complicated love-hate relationship with composer Frank Wildhorn, who has a gift for a) writing some of the most beautiful gorgeous power ballads in existence and b) making a godawful mess of European history and literature by just slapping half a dozen shows randomly onto the stage with exchangeable music and characters. My nadir was the godawful pile of excrement Rudolf in Vienna that cheapened the intriguing complex character of crown prince Rudolf to a cheap idiotic love story.
But I found that when Wildhorn sticks to Americana and takes the time to actually work on a show for a longer while, he can come up with pretty decent stuff and I had always enjoyed the music of Bonnie & Clyde. So I was up for seeing it live, especially since moving into the shoddy little Arts Theatre meant I could get my favourite seat for only £22.50. Then of course they had to exquisitely torture me by casting my Bête Noire Jordan Luke Gage as Clyde and to top it off, cast my beloved Barney Wilkinson as his understudy. And I still believe in earnest that Barney would have been the better choice for a rough juvenile delinquent (just as Barney was by miles a better Strat). Tall, strapping, beautiful Jordan would have been a great one for the holy trifecta of 90s leading parts (Marius, Raoul, Chris), but he did not convince me one bit as scruffy Clyde Barrow, so it was left to the other three – Frances Mayli McCann’s pretty sweet Bonnie, Natalie McQueen’s strong Blanche and George McGuire’s spineless Buck Barrow – to carry the show. Bonnie & Clyde was very well reviewed especially within the theatre community and sitting through it, this surprised me a little – until it dawned on me that since Germany has never ever evolved from the big weepicals of the 80s/90s (and even the trashiest Wildhorn shows are happily gobbled up by the German fandom), this ballad-heavy show seemed nothing special to me, while London hasn’t seen the like for a long time. And between all the "meta" pop shows like Hamilton and Six, the shows striving to tick as many woke boxes as they can, and the endless deluge of jukebox, a truly original musical with proper modern showtunes did seem refreshing indeed.
Initially I even thought this belonged onto a bigger West End stage, but then realized that the small Arts Theatre is just perfect for it as it’s a small show at heart, focusing on the interplay between the four main characters and satellite figures like their parents. And while Wildhorn stayed true to himself with overwrought power ballads about luuuurve like the beautiful duet "You love who you love" between Bonnie and Blanche, the show did manage to add some depth with both Bonnie and Clyde addressing their parents in a lovely song in which they declare that their little homely lives amid poverty in 1930s depression America isn’t good enough for them. So while overall I can’t join into the gushing that this show is GREAT, it certainly makes for a refreshing difference to most of what’s presently on and I can’t help wishing that it would get a second life after having to vacate the Arts Theatre.
And so an extremely long trip finally came to an end and truly wonderful it was, finally free from all Covid restrictions, catching up with friends at last and with a fabulous side trip to Eastbourne for my Bats as the icing on the cake...
