June 11, 2023

Dateline: London, England –

As I did not return to the hotel until sometime after 1 am last night, I was in no condition to write the usual travelogue. The two glasses of wine with dinner and the glass of champagne as an hors d’oeuvre likely did not help. Therefore, I need to condense the weekend into one entry. I hope you will bear with me. I do wonder sometimes who reads these things. The ASO Choir director Philip Copeland told me that he is an avid follower, and as he is the ringleader of this trip, I figure I owe it to him to not peter off just as things are getting interesting from his point of view. So I have at least one fan out there…

The weekend has been quite warm for London with temperatures yesterday and today both ascending into the 80s. It has been clouding over this evening so with luck it will be a bit lower tomorrow. It’s not that hot by either Alabama or even Central California standards but it’s quite warm for a climate that does not have air conditioning has a standard accoutrement. And those places that do have it, it’s not really keeping up with the temperature and the numbers of people occupying them. A few spaces have been sweatboxes. The same thing happens in Seattle when there’s the occasional summer heat wave. It’s likely these are going to become more common due to climate change and HVAC will become more standard in the northern temperate climes that have been able to avoid it in the past.

Saturday morning, I slept in. It had been a busy few days and I felt a bit of a need to recharge the batteries, especially as today was performance day. I did get up midmorning, wander a bit around Kensington, the part of London where our hotel is situated, and finally found some decent coffee at a local Starbucks. It certainly does not exist at the hotel. Vickie was off at the National Gallery and the National Theatre for a matinee of a new play about John Gielgud and Richard Burton and the interpersonal troubles they had creating Burton’s Broadway production of Hamlet in the 1960s. I put on my concert blacks, not the outfit I would have chosen for one of the hottest days of the year locally and eventually made my way to Southwark cathedral for our dress rehearsal with the orchestra.

After some milling around figuring out lineups (the bane of every choral concert – how do you get a hundred people on stage so they look professional and everyone is in their proper place), we were finally able to rehearse our piece with the full orchestra assembled for the occasion. The orchestration, which I had not previously heard, was exquisite and brought new power and nuance to the work. I wasn’t expecting it, but being in a Gothic church (dating back to the middle ages) which was constructed as part of a wealthy priory originally (until Henry VIII had other ideas) and singing the text of the Latin mass gave me a visceral feeling of connection to the space and all of the other people over centuries who have lifted their voices in song and celebration in that sanctuary. I hadn’t really expected to feel that.

Southwark cathedral has a long and varied history which I will not repeat in its entirety but its origins as a religious site go back as early as the 7th century and the original priory appears to have been under the control of William the Conqueror’s half brother Odo after the Norman Conquest. The current church was constructed in the 13th century sometime after the original was destroyed in the great fire of 1212. It was improved and enlarged in the centuries that followed but was falling into ruin by the early 1800s when there was a major restoration. It was damaged by bombs in the Blitz but not destroyed. There are shrapnel scars still visible on the exterior walls. Shakespeare’s brother is buried there and parishoners have included everyone from Geoffrey Chaucer to Charles Dickens over the years. It’s most famous current resident is Hodge, the cathedral cat, who made appearances both at rehearsal and the performance but wisely refrained from entering the stage area.

I can never judge how a performance I am involved with is perceived by an audience. The viewpoint from stage is so strange and your mind is so occupied with technical issues regarding vocalization, blocking, and being aware of other performers, that you can’t possibly just sit back and enjoy it. However, I was fortunate enough to have some friends turn up. Besides Vickie Rozell who has been my companion for the week, Richard Polley who was our tour guide when I was here six months ago came and then David Pohler and Sophia Priolo also made appearances. David had spent the day on the coast swimming in the English Channel and had quite the journey back to London as many trains kept getting canceled out from under him. But he did make it. Their feedback was that the piece we sang was marvelous and the acoustics of that centuries old nave were absolutely wonderful.

Afterwards, following a bit of a yackfest, Vickie and I headed off to the celebratory dinner for the concert participants. I thought the name of the restaurant sounded familiar and, when we arrived, I recognized it as being the same restaurant in which David and I and the rest of the Alabama seven had had our celebratory New Years Eve dinner six months ago. What are the chances… There is a story about that dinner, David, and a bottle of Dom Perignon but that one’s not my story to tell. You’ll have to ask him. Much drinking was had that night. Maybe not quite so much, but enough drinking was had last night.

This morning, Vickie and I got up and had a stroll up to Kensington Palace and through Kensington gardens. We found the memorial plaque to my great-great-uncle Maury Meiklejohn on the wall of the Hyde Park Barracks. He was a military officer who had won the Victoria Cross in the Boer War (and lost an arm in the process). He remained on active duty with the army. He was killed in 1913 when the horse he was riding in Hyde Park spooked and ran. He was having difficulty controlling in with only one arm and the horse was heading for a nanny with a pram and other small children. In order to save the children, he managed to turn the horse but in doing so, was thrown, suffered a head injury and lost his life. He was regarded as quite the hero in Edwardian London for that act. The family has a scrapbook with all the news clippings from the time.

From there, we headed to Regents Park to see the rose gardens but the day was becoming entirely too hot for that much walking so we cut that short and headed off to tea at Fortnum and Mason’s with David Pohler and his partner Jonathan Uday Ramteke. A lovely two hours of champagne, many pots of tea, finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream, petit fours in the elegant surroundings of Fortnum’s Jubilee tea room (completely redone for Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012). I hadn’t had a proper British tea in some years and it was tres elegante. The four of us then wandered through the West End for a while before catching a taxi for the other major event of the day.

We went out to the middle of nowhere East London where a prefabricated arena seating 3,000 people has been erected to host a show unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Entitled ABBA Voyage, it is a holographic recreation of the group in their heyday performing a concert mixed together with live music and enough technical wizardry to make us hardened theater geeks keep looking at each other going ‘How did they….?’ Most of the greatest hits are there (but each of us missed at least one favorite song that was not included). There was much dancing in the aisles. Many of the aging boomer attendees were dressed in ABBA 70s-80s garb. It was an experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it and sang along with thousands of my best friends. The entire arena can be dismantled and the show moved to other places. The original plan was for it to run in London for a year, and then move on, but it’s been so wildly successful here that it’s going to stay until at least next spring. In a few years, it may be coming to an industrial wasteland near you.

This is the first iteration of this sort of technology in entertainment. One wonders what will come in the future as it continues to be perfected and expanded. A Rolling Stones concert as it would have been in 1968? Elvis Presley with a first act of young Elvis and a second act of Vegas Elvis? Judy Garland singing her Carnegie Hall concert eight shows a week? As long as enough archival footage exists, they should be able to create something using current techniques. Is this a good thing or not? I haven’t made up my mind. It can let others experience the ephemeral moment of entertainers from the bast, but isn’t that what’s special about live performance? That it is never the same night after night. It always responds to the energy and cues from the audience and, if the entertainer is only so many bits and bytes, doesn’t that subvert all of that? It will be interesting to see what happens.