Nicole schreibt...

While it’s become quite standard for me to meet lovely people in London, it’s highly unusual to actually travel with someone AND meet people as well, so cue a rather unusual trip with some very rewarding pay-offs. The initial plan for this had been to spend Thursday to Sunday in London with my Croatian friend to introduce her to my world of musical theatre geeking and share a very special show with her after her patiently listening to my obsession for two years. But then the one and only Stephanie J. Block, one of my favourite Broadway leading ladies, was announced to star in "Kiss me Kate" at the Barbican and I decided to arrive a day earlier to catch her in this. Since I also had to add another hotel night and prices had gone even further insane, I decided to finally give the St. Giles Hotel behind the Dominion Theatre a try for one night as I had heard good things about it and it was marginally cheaper even than adding another night at the Premier Inn I had booked with my friend. It was decent enough, though had the usual London problem of not really offering value for money in a fairly tiny room, so I don’t know if I would recommend it to others or go back. And the irony of course was that I had no immediate use of a hotel in the West End since I had to treck out to the Barbican by tube anyway, which I did after a walk along Charing Cross Road to some of my usual places. "Kiss me Kate" is one of the classics I had somehow never managed to see live, so this was another bonus, especially since it was another feather in Bartlett Sher’s cap after his lavish revivals of "South Pacific", "The King and I" and "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center in New York. And with Stephanie J. Block involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if this one crossed the pond into the opposite direction sooner or later. She had won my heart way back during the first pre-Broadway tryout of "9 to 5" in Los Angeles and her fabulous solo "Get out and stay out" and she’s gone from strength to strength since, establishing herself as one of Broadway's foremost leading ladies. And the role of sassy Lilli Vanessi, who plays Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew" opposite ex-husband Fred Graham as Petrucchio, was just another perfect choice for her, giving her a chance to knock "I hate men" out of the park in splendid fashion. Another highlight were the great dance numbers such as "Too Darn Hot", here mostly delivered by Jack Butterworth and Charlie Stemp, while Georgina Onuorah got a chance to shine as Lois Lane with "Always true to you in my fashion". The elephant in the room was the oddball casting of Adrian Dunbar, best known for playing Sergeant Ted "Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey" Hastings on "Line of Duty" but not really a musical theatre leading man and rather too old for Stephanie's Kate. I didn't mind him and I can see the need for a recognizable name to shift tickets, but I can easily imagine that the show works much better with a stronger Fred and stronger chemistry between him and Lilli. That said, it was still a very enjoyable evening and a much better production than the underpowered "Anything Goes" I saw in the same theatre not too long ago with a far worse cast. At least Stephanie gave it her all, as I knew she would, unlike Sutton "dead behind the eyes" Foster as Reno back then. On Thursday morning I used a few free hours to actually work (good thing I did because my laptop decided to give up the ghost a bit later, which is the second time this has happened in London!) before moving from the St. Giles Hotel to the Premier Inn Blackfriars, chosen for its strategic location as much as its reasonable price at the time of booking. And then it was onwards to Doggett’s Coat and Badge, a lovely riverside pub just beside Blackfriars Bridge to meet the first friend, who had come from the Midlands specifically to meet me as he, while a born Brit, has been living in the USA for several years now and it just so happened we were both in England at the same time. He had become a dear friend thanks to our shared hobby of online gaming and it was wonderful to put a face to a name after many shared virtual adventures. He, too, knew our Croatian lady from the game, so he stuck with me until she had arrived at Blackfriars from Gatwick Airport and we could all have a coffee together. And I can hardly put in words how happy it made me that a shared hobby like this had brought three people from wildly different corners of the world and backgrounds together like this. We parted ways with him then and got ready for a first walk into the West End and then onwards to Wembley for the first show of the trip – "Starlight Express". I had already booked it with another friend for Saturday afternoon, when my Croatian had decided she would quite like to see it, after hearing me go on about the Bochum version, but I honestly didn’t mind seeing it twice to begin with – and it turned out to be a very good decision indeed, because this first trip was so mentally overwhelming with such a vast and wild departure from all previous incarnations. So we’ll come back to this later when it comes to a review. Since it was my friend's first time ever in London and she had given me such an amazing tour around Dubrovnik last year, I was determined to do the same for her on Friday. Since the Sky Garden reservation system had been borked, I booked us a slot to go up to the observation deck of a new skyscraper in 22 Bishopsgate, which was even a great deal taller and on par with the overpriced Shard. Not that the view was all that amazing, because English summer was doing its predictable English summer thing, being grey, rainy and awful (see above), but it was still a nice way to start a tour around the City. We made a honorary pitstop at the Jamaica Wine House, which now stands in the space of the coffee house where her homie from Dubrovnik (then Ragusa) opened England’s first coffee house in 1652 and I took her to some sights which I personally love, such as the peaceful ruins of St.-Dunstan-in-the-East and Leadenhall Market. Finally I dropped her off at the Tower to take a look around, while I returned to the hotel for a break. Among the typical English experiences I wanted to give her was Afternoon Tea and I chose "The Lane", which is really the interval lounge of the recently refurbished Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which I had been curious about myself. Frankly, for the price it didn't match grander affairs like the Ritz or the Café Royal and the atmosphere in the room with its huge ceiling never felt quite cosy, but it was still pleasant enough. After a stroll around Covent Garden we made it to the first show, we had been very keen to see together thanks to a shared love for Japanese anime in general and Studio Ghibli's movies in particular: The stage adaption of Hayao Miyazaki's biggest hit "Spirited Away". Released in 2001 it remained the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history for 19 years and was the first Japanese anime to win the Oscar for "best animated feature" in 2003. Unlike "My Neighbour Totoro", which the RSC had so masterfully adapted at the Barbican, "Spirited Away" has a fairly dense plot, in which little Chihiro must save her parents who have been turned into pigs by evil witch Yubaba before forgetting her own true identity. She gets some help by beautiful kind Haku, who’s really a dragon also trapped by the witch and other supernatural creatures who roam an otherworldly bath house, such as the unhappy friendless "No Name" spirit and spidery Kamaji, who runs the boiler room where Chihiro finds refuge. The stage adaption had been commissioned by Toho Company in Tokyo and directed and written by Englishman John Caird and after a very successful run in Japan now came to London's Coliseum with its original cast (and in Japanese with English subtitles). As with Totoro, half the fun is finding out how the animations from the movie have been turned into stage magic and the show didn’t disappoint at all. The ever-shifting bath house took centre stage with various locations and every character including Haku in his dragon form had been wonderfully brought to life. While ticket prices were Japan-level high, it was easy to see where all the money had gone into the stage sets, the costumes, the large cast and the full orchestra that played the music of the movie in the pit. The fantastic Japanese cast was led d by Mone Kamishiraishi as Chihiro, Atsuki Mashiko as Haku, Ryo Sawamura as "No Name" and no one less than Mari Natsuki as Yubaba, who had already voiced the evil witch and her twin sister Zeniba in the movie. The three hours flew by and while Totoro had perhaps been the bigger surprise in how it was convincingly adapted, this lavish production was definitely worth seeing as well. Saturday morning started with another sightseeing walk, this one along the Thames all the way to Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Where I hadn’t left my friend alone for more than five minutes to head back to Wembley, when the King himself was driven past on his way to the palace – a royal welcome to London I haven’t had in all of thirty years! Instead I met up with yet another friend from the online game, who’s become a firm theatre-going-partner in England by now (and appointed my official companion!) and who had been interested in seeing Starlight Express as well. After lunch at the nice White Horse Pub we went to the Troubadour Theatre, where we met up with yet another friend (this one not from the gaming world for a change, but from the musical theatre realm and my chief enabler, without whom I had gone neither to New York nor Marseille) who happened to be at the same performance. When i had seen the lacklustre Newsies at the Troubadour a few years ago, I kept thinking how this large multi-purpose box would be a great venue for a Starlight Express revival, so I’d like to think that I truly did manifest this production! For the longest time assumptions had been it would be very similar to the 30th anniversary production in Bochum which had been workshopped in London before, but ultimately this has been a completely new version with two-thirds of the characters getting new names and some even new identities, plus completely new costumes by Gabriella Slade who had done "Six" (which showed very much in these designs), new choreography by Ashley Nottingham and new direction by Luke Sheppard who had created the surprisingly good "&Juliet". As I said before, the whole thing had bowled me over so much on Thursday that I was glad I got a second chance to see and digest this (with the added bonus of seeing the understudy Greaseball debut after the first cast and another engine crashed on Friday evening), because it really was too much to take in within one visit. And having sat fairy close on Thursday in the Platform section, I was also glad to get a better overview over proceedings from the Locomotive section this time. Let’s begin with what works: The new sets by Tim Hatley had a very "computer games" vibe to them which I think makes perfect sense for todays’ kids, even when playing with three-dimensional toy trains. And while I personally thought the new costumes were awful, they, too, made sense in this context: If the old ones by John Napier had been carefully crafted expensive Märklin model trains, these were garishly bright plastic toys made in China. If one thing bothered me about them, it was that Electra’s components and the engines (no longer national engines, but identified by colour only) were hardly distinguishable and had absolutely zero personality. The music had been jazzed up as well and luckily, after too many questionable choices in previous tweakings, this time they made the right cut and finally got rid of "Right place, right time" which had always killed the momentum stone-dead. There were some gorgeous effects as well, most notably in "Starlight Sequence" with its beautiful three-dimensionally starlit auditorium and while the races made no sense at all, they where so daft with the trains skating into various different direction, they were actually a lot of fun in their own bonkers way. Another thing that worked very well was the massively talented young cast. First and foremost Jeevan Braich as Rusty with a golden voice, and at merely seventeen years old a true star in the making. He was ably supported by Kayna Montecillo as "K-Pop Pearl" with a strong rock voice she didn’t get enough of a chance to show off. Standing out for all the wrong reasons was Jaydon Vijn as Hydra, however – the only one of the cast who seemed to be truly confident on skates and whose charisma outshone everyone else (what a Greaseball he would have made!). And here we may come to the things that did not work for me: First and foremost the dreadful to non-existant choreography. While I can understand to some extent that modern Health & Safety would not allow the kind of fast and borderline acrobatic skating of yesteryear, far too many scenes were simply thrown away by the singers standing nearly stationary while doing their solos in "park and bark" fashion. And how utterly ludicrous to have Rusty and Pearl stand still on a turning turntable during the final duet "I do" (heard in English for the first time after being sung as schlageresque "Für Immer" in Bochum for years) rather than actually have them MOVE on their skates! Secondly, yea, I get it, the original version was rather sexist in that all engines were male, while the females were relegated to being dependant coaches and followers. They had already started to tweak things in Bochum, but went all out here and in my opinion made exactly the wrong choices. Bisexual enby Electra would have been the obvious choice to have one of the leading engines played by a female performer, so of course instead they went with a female Greaseball and to me it was an utterly ridiculous choice. Sure, Al Knott, and even more so her understudy Lara Vina Uzcatia, who had the better deeper rock voice, played some fun tough-ass rock chick with a 80s style mullet, but Greaseball, the dumb brawny and yet sexy "Pumping Iron" bodybuilder had always been the poster child for toxic masculinity, who was brought down a few pegs and sought Dinah’s forgiveness and all of that has been erased now. Similarly, I never really understood the change from Poppa to Momma and it seems even sillier here where Control is an actual child on stage and Momma is their real life mother who transforms into the mother figure steam train. To my mind it would be far more progressive if that was actually a single Dad raising a child than the cliché caring momma type. And lastly, in another thing making little sense, Rusty gets help from Hydra and hydrogen power, which might come across as very contemporary but also completely nixes the central message of the entire show "Believe in yourself and you can do anything". Sure, "Starlight Express" has never been a show that invited deep thinking but if they make changes, then I’d like to see changes that actually make sense and improve on the show – but none of these did for me. But I’ve been wrestling with the fact that "my" Starlight Express, the one that first got me hooked on musical theatre in the late 80s and early 90s had been dead and gone for 20 years now anyway and now almost all traces that were left of it in Bochum have been erased in Wembley. But I saw many delighted kids in the audience, so if this updated version will create another generation of new musical theatre lovers then I am absolutely here for it – and ultimately I rather have them going overboard with trying to adapt to modern sensibilities than to fully ignore them by continuing to peddle deeply problematic female characters in shows that belong on the dustheap of MT history. Will I be back in Wembley? Perhaps, perhaps not. But I’m definitely happy for this to exist and hope it will enjoy a long healthy run! Speaking of returning to shows, we said goodbye to my MT friend in Baker Street tube and continued to Soho to reunite with our Croatian friend and went to give her that other quintessential English experience, a proper English meal at a pub, the Duke of Argyll, which seems to have become something of a local. My Scottish friend then went on her merry way to see Mean Girls (wild horses couldn’t drag me into it) and I took my Croatian friend to what should have been the highlight of the trip and a shared obsession for two years: Hadestown. But boy oh boy. I had been very much peeved that Dónal "Orpheus" Finn had been off in March, a few days after the show had opened and I was even more peeved now when he was off again and Simon Oskarsson would be playing the lead again. But while I had quite liked him in March (despite having had massive trepidations about finally having to face another Orpheus), I was utterly baffled by the trajectory he’s taken with the part. I had fallen so much in love with Orpheus specifically because of Reeve Carney's portrayal of him as a mildly autistic awkward dreamer, who has not least his own limitations to overcome in his quest to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. In Simon's portrayal there was nothing soft or dreamy left, he seemed almost back to the first incarnation of the earlier workshops and pretty much an all-out ass in how he treats Eurydice and a super-aggressive "Is it true" so at odds with the character’s personality. Almost everything else paled in comparison to such a gobsmacking terrible performance and as I had already noticed in March, on the whole the English cast just can’t stand up to their American counterparts – Grace Hodgett Young’s Eurydice is still mostly sulky and not vulnerable and Zachary James’ Hades more panto villain than broken King of the Underworld, although he had improved some. We had two more understudies, Waylon Jacobs as Hermes, who with his long silver-blueish rasta wig looked like a very weedy Aquaman and the one who truly saved the show for me, the wonderful Lauren Azaria as Persephone who was right up there with Amber and Jewelle for me and so much better than the wildly overacting first cast. Right now I really don't know whether I should try for a third time to see Dónal Finn or whether to cut my losses and just cherish the memories of those incredible trips to New York and the joy they brought me. At least my friend loved it as much as I had always hoped she would and ultimately that mattered more to me on this trip, which will linger less in the memory for the shows than for the wonderful people I was able to spend time with as it will never happen again in this crazy configuration.