I had lunch at the Good Pub Guide's 2011 pub of the year, the Tempest Arms, yesterday, and
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So: sigmonster was here for the weekend and we did quite enough DIY for my liking, thank you very much. My ridiculously cheap giant swivelly chair works again, which is spiffing ( Read more... )

I have to accept that I'm not going to do a proper post, really... I've recently been to see Pirates of Penzance (fun, very small cast- one sister, one cousin, one aunt (aunt doubled by Dick Deadeye(!))- good staging mostly created from ropes by the cast at the beginning, good principals, choruses not brilliantly enunciated), Jeremy Hardy (very ( Read more... )

So now that Neil Gaiman's posted it, this is so five minutes ago, but anyway: Proud Of The BBC, which I saw Mitch Benn do live a couple of weeks ago (and he was delighted to get through it correctly as he'd only just written it and it's a massive tongue-twister). Out as a single on Nov 1st ( Read more... )

Went to see some English Japanese drummers from Scotland on Friday; they were touring with a Japanese Egyptian dancer, and it was an excellent evening ( Read more... )

Finally managed to see Spamalot- Marcus Brigstocke as the King, Todd Carty as Patsy. Suspect I would have gone mad over it as a teenager in the acute Python phase, but as it is I had a a whole lot of fun. It was over-amplified so I put earplugs in, which always gives a disconnected feeling, and then the mics were cutting out a bit in the first act ( Read more... )

If The 39 Steps or Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall come on tour to your town, I think you should see them.
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Went to see The Caucasian Chalk Circle last week; a new translation, but it still kept bringing back memories of when I was in it. It was excellent. Well staged, about 12 actor/singers, with intelligent doubling- one guy played all the would-be rapists and one all the bureaucrats and so on- and a large chorus. One of the people I went with had seen ( Read more... )

Went to a memorable outdoor Midsummer Night's Dream last night: memorable partly for the direction and staging, which set it in the sixties (all the songs set to classic tunes- worked very well, actually; bits of Puck's final speech go to Daydream Believer beautifully) and had lots of fairies hanging from tree branches, and partly from how much it ( Read more... )

Saw the His Dark Materials production that was sold out at the National a few years ago (well, the touring version, which has less staging FX, apparently); pleased to have finally seen it, well acted, the daemons worked spectacularly well (the polar bears even better), compressing three books into two plays makes the first half very full of ( Read more... )