Nicole schreibt...

After the two big trips across the pond, it felt almost quaint to be flying to London within an hour now. Yes, flying, because Eurostar had held back tickets for just this weekend due to engineering works and an uncertain time table, so with Ryanair offering both perfect times and prices, I decided to give flying a go again – which offered a nice chance to compare door-to-door travelling times. Not that anyone cares, but the plane did win by 1 hr 45 mins in total, but ultimately it didn’t matter as I just ended up killing time until check-in anyway – in this case with lunch at Liverpool Street Station after arriving there and a stroll around Spitalfields Market nearby before I could check into a new Hub, this one right on Brick Lane, where Indian Diwali festivities were in full swing. I had booked this trip months ago for one performance on Saturday in the confident assumption that my dance card in London would as easily fill as always – only to be in for a sad disappointment when hardly anything was announced that tickled my fancy, let alone some exciting big shows. While I was clawing around for even concerts, ballet or opera, a newsletter dropped into my mailbox on the West End transfer of new musical “The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button” which had already made a stir at Southwark Playhouse and for once, the song samples on the website actually sold a show to me. It did help greatly of course to be able to book a good seat in the dress circle for only £20, placing it firmly in the “can’t go wrong at this price” category. So after a stroll around the shops and quick dinner I found myself at the cute Ambassador’s Theatre, which I had only visited once before for the godawful play C*ck. Benjamin Button was originally a short story by Scott F. Fitzgerald, but became widely famous for the movie adaptation with Brad Pitt and had now been relocated to Cornwall with beautiful Cornish folk music in an actor-muso production. Its main gimmick is that Benjamin is born an old man and ages backward, while everyone around him ages forward. Along the way he experiences some historical hallmarks like World War II and the moon landing but unlike Forrest Gump, where these are firmly tied to the hero, here they are only briefly mentioned in passing. Given all the praise I had read for this show online, I found it a bit of an underwhelming Nothingburger. Yes, I get that it’s about the passage of time and loving people and all of that, but these subjects have been done a million times before and better. On the whole it was just a bit of "and then this happened, and then that happened..." storytelling without proper dramatic tension. The production would also have benefitted (in my mind) from stronger make-up and other markers that tell the aging backwards and forwards of the characters and changes in clothing instead of having everyone wear “generic rural clothing” throughout. Kudos to John Dagliesh as Benjamin, who at least managed to show the aging backwards process through very convincing body language. The music, mostly Cornish folk music with a dose of sea shanty, was indeed lovely and I’m definitely here for the cast recording, but on the whole, sadly, it is yet another of those “nice, small, English shows” that I’d be happy seeing on a cheap ticket if it all it took is a tube ride to the theatre and back, but just not worth travelling a bigger distance and paying hotels for. Luckily there was Saturday to come and the main event, although sadly my trusty companion had been felled by the flu, leaving me alone for it. I still went to lunch at Sarastro, a very theatrical-looking restaurant just around the corner from the Fortune Theatre which had always interested me thanks to its appearance, even from outside. They would have taken a no-show fee after I had reserved a table, so might as well go on my own and it was lovely enough with it’s theatrical interior decor and delicious Turkish food. The main event was next door – the much-lauded and very popular new musical Operation Mincemeat, which was one of those where I felt I really needed to wait for a captioned perforance to fully appreciate the whip-smart lyrics and witty one-liners. Which also meant I missed the original cast, most of which came from the group SpitLip, that had created the show, but without comparison I thought this present cast was fantastic, too. Operation Mincemeat is one of these insane "you couldn't make it up" stories that was already turned into a (much more serious) movie some years ago, recounting one of the greatest deceptions of World War II, when the British MI5 engineered a ruse to lure Hitler and his troops away from Sicily in order to stage an invasion there by way of a corpse washing up in Spain with fake papers claiming the British were going to Sardinia. They didn’t. Once the Germans had moved on there, they invaded the now empty Sicily and European history took its course. A strange topic for a comedy musical, but it works fantastically well and more than that – it’s exactly the kind of thing that had made me fall in love with British writing and British movies way back in the 1990s – that unique mix of being very very funny and very touching at the same time. Here, after an half hour of high jinx and poking fun at the secret service and English public school boys, the atmosphere changes with the touching "Dear Bill", a memory of all those lost in the wars and the women they left behind and the juxtaposition between the champagne-swigging planners at MI5 in London and the submarine crew that has to deliver the corpse in Spain singing a shanty-like choral. Every line works, whether funny or moving and unlike with Benjamin Button, the five-strong cast easily pulled off changing between various characters and making us see those characters. Quite unusually, some female parts are played by men and male parts by women but even that works fantastically well – giving one woman, the marvellous Emily Barber, the chance to shine as eternally optimistic braggard Ewen Montagu who sets the plan into motion, and Chlöe Hart the grumpy Colonel Bevan who almost ruins the plan (as well as the out-of-his-depth English attaché in Spain, Haselden). Holly Sumpton finally played female Jean, a representation of a new generation of women no longer content to play second fiddle to the men, while Séan Casey played Charles Cholmondeley, the nerdy and always over-looked scientist who had come up with the plan. Finally there was Jonty Peach as repressed secretary Hester who sings the beautiful "Dear Bill" to the man she had lost in the previous war and he made it a truly lovely portray of a lonely elder woman rather than yet annoying "cock in a frock" role. There’s little more than I can say about this show than it’s a truly perfectly crafted little gem that makes you laugh and cry and really deserves all the praise it’s been getting and which I definitely wouldn't mind seeing again. With the lack of new great shows to see and a newly found interest in cabaret thanks to playing a cabaret owner online, I decided this was a good idea to revisit the Black Cat Cabaret whose show I had very much enjoyed at the historic Café de Paris in Leicester Square some years ago. It also gave me a chance to check out Crazy Coqs, the new(ish) cabaret venue at the Brasserie Zedel which is also used by many musical performers. Sadly, after the fantastic afternoon, this ended on something of a downer – with the tiny stage and the whole atmosphere not on par with the classy Cafe de Paris at all and the show itself dominated by a medium funny Emcee rather than the artistry and burlesque I had come for. I did get to see one guy doing cool stuff with chairs but even from the photo you can tell that the stage setup is really not conductive to a proper raunchy clubby atmosphere. In addition to that, £18 for a non-alcoholic small cocktail and a tiny cake were an absolute rip off and they started half an hour late, meaning it would have been nearly midnight until I’d get out, so I decided to leave at the intermission. I will be back at Crazy Coqs in February and well, I know now to not order anything there and hope a solo concert will be a nicer experience but I really wouldn’t recommend it for cabaret. So, ultimately it were the madcap MI5 agents from Operation Mincemeat who truly saved the day and trip for me, but I still feel stuck in this rut, where the small shows on offer don't really justify the expensive of travelling there from the continent and exciting announcements are far and few between. While the next one in late December should be better with what's booked already, I really don't know what will become of 2025 for the time being...