January 2, 2025

Dateline – London, England

Today was another low key day. Most of my compatriots got up and made a journey to Stratford. I decided instead to loll around for a few hours, and then get up and head into the West End for some shopping – both window and for a few souvenirs for others. The only thing I’ve been on the lookout for me is for an actual deerstalker hat but I have yet to run across one in any of the shops I’ve entered. I know I can probably get one from Amazon if I really want one but it’s not the same as saying ‘I bought it on a trip to London’. I did some wandering up and down side streets, running across a few interesting restaurant and shop names. Leave it to the British to have a breakfast place called Eggslut.

After a nice walk, I headed to my first musical of my double show day: Musical edition. The choice was Moulin Rouge (which I have not yet seen and I decided, because of the set, I had better see it in either New York or London and figured the $60 it cost me in London was a much better deal than I would ever find in New York). I went to see the film on the big screen when it first came out. Steve was very ill and it was the first time I had been able to escape the house in some months. I had made it a self care priority as I had fallen for Baz Luhrman’s unique visual style on seeing Strictly Ballroom some years previously and I try to see everything he has a hand in on as big a screen as possible. Steve died a few weeks later so the story, borrowed from La Boheme, of love cut short by illness resonated with me. As I watched it originally, there was so much color and music and over the top everything, that it felt somewhat assaultive (I have similar feelings about the film version of Wicked) but it also stirred me on a basic emotional level in ways that few works of art can – well done opera is one of the few that does this for me reliably.

The stage version has a fantastic visual production – all color and light, and fancy costumes and frenetic choreography and mashups of power diva ballads – changed from the original score as there has been a whole generation of pop music since 2001 and we had to shoehorn in Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Beyonce and the like. But it’s oddly unmoving. The difference between film and stage medium is such that the whole things comes across as a series of moving postcards of stage pictures than any sort of emotional and involving story. It doesn’t help that the characters are wafer thin and the plot ain’t much. It wasn’t much when it was about Mimi and Rodolfo. And while it tries to revel in being naughty, it’s the kind of naughty you can take your grandmother to and not feel embarrassed. The cast in London is young, attractive, energetic, and charisma free. I can tick it off of the list of big shows that I have seen original productions of but have no need to ever see it again in this or any other production. When it is inevitably revived in thirty or forty years, I wonder if they will completely redo the score to contemporary pop hits? Will anyone in that future society even recognize Elton John once the demise of the Baby Boom lets the culture move on?

I treated myself to a very good dinner in a pan-Asian restaurant called Gilgamesh in St. Martin’s Lane. I apparently wandered in at the right time on the right night as it was two for one cocktails with my prawn dumplings, Thai green curry, and passionfruit cheesecake. Then up the hill a bit to Shaftesbury Avenue to the Gielgud theater for the evening show. My choice was Cameron Mackintosh’s new production of Oliver! directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne. (It’s been pretty much sold out for months but I was able to find one cheap seat on Today Tix by looking at just the right time). I don’t want to hear one word about my fondness for good productions of the old warhorses of the classic 1940-1965 period. They have strong books, melodic scores, and often deep thematic material that gets glossed over in most community productions where the director doesn’t really understand it and the cast is too busy trying to remember their lines and their steps.

It’s an excellent production. It stars no one you ever heard of and with some interesting twists on Fagin. He’s the first sexy Fagin I’ve ever seen and he’s styled Ottoman Middle Eastern – he could be Jewish or Muslim, or Alawite Syrian. Hard to say. His Reviewing the Situation is done more as a mental breakdown than as a comedy number. Nancy is a good belter (I still think they should rewrite the second act a bit so that Oom-pah-pah has the plot function it has in the film rather than just making it a second act curtain raiser). The lesser characters are all tightly sketched, directed to be as unique and Dickensian as possible, and sing the heck out of the score. As a nod to continuity, Widow Corney is played by Harry Secombe’s daughter, Katy. She nails all the laughs. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it helped clear my mind of the last major production of the show I saw some two decades ago which was one of the worst things I have ever seen on stage. How you manage to leach the joy out of Consider Yourself I don’t know, but that production managed it. I have a soft spot for Oliver. My parents took me to see the movie when it was first released. I was five. I remember being most upset when Fagin lost his jewels in the muck. That bothered me a lot more than Nancy’s murder.

Tomorrow is another double show day and then that will wrap up this visit to the sceptered isle. I really don’t feel like returning to work on Monday but needs must.