The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

I had lunch at the Good Pub Guide's 2011 pub of the year, the Tempest Arms, yesterday, and sigmonster didn't. Heeheehee.

(Actually, it was disappointing- it was perfectly OK, but I must have been into half-a-dozen just as nice that haven't won anything (and I'm not even a pub person), and surely a Pub! Of! The! Year! shouldn't just have bitter, stout and IPA on the hand-pulls? Surely you shouldn't order a medium plain steak and get a well done pepper steak? Ah well, it got us out of the snow, anyway.)

Also saw Love's Labours Lost yesterday, with a nice early-thirties, Noel Coward-ish setting. It's one of the very talky ones, where the aristocrats have some big fat chunks of clever wordplay to put across and the rustics have malapropisms, but most of the cast managed to make them interesting (the male lead, Berowne, was probably the best) and they'd put in enough physical comedy that it was a fun evening.

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 good) and Chris Addison (very good). Hardy and Addison made an interesting comparison, seeing both on a large empty stage at the Playhouse; both do a nice mix of political and personal stuff, Addison with more daftness included, but the styles are utterly different. Hardy pretty much stood behind the mike, occasionally moving one hand slightly or smiling wryly, while Addison ran around like a mad thing, waving his hands, sinking to his knees in dispair, demonstrating how he tore a ligament chasing a Sainsbury's delivery, or impersonating chickens.

Addison will have a DVD out for Xmas... 2011. Pout.

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.

(All right, it was taiko drummers who had apprenticed in Japan and created a troupe in Scotland; the dancer is American-Japanese specialising in Middle Eastern forms.)

I've seen taiko once before, and this was as good, I think, hypnotic and exciting. I liked the modernised improvisatory pieces a bit less than the traditional ones, but it was all engaging.
One dance in particular was memorable- the dancer had a demon mask on the back of her head. Very eerie effect.

Also, the first few autumn raspberries have appeared. Delicious.

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 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 rained in the second act. (The audience were mostly under a tree or bundled up in waterproofs, but the actors just got wet. Thisbe looked particularly bedraggled.)
It was fun, anyway, and the actors were great- I'll definitely try to catch Theatre of the Dales again.

Finally got to see Little Shop Of Horrors (the stage version)- it was massive fun, from the Thriller-esque opening to the final alien invasion. Sylvester McCoy was in it! Which was a nice surprise, and meant a New York Jewish character with a distinct Scots twang :-)
It's slightly spoiled me for watching the filmed version, of course, as this one is ruder, wittier and has a more morally correct ending.
Have finally cracked and ordered Beauty And The Beast because Menken and Ashman did the songs. (They also did Little Mermaid, but I'm not so mad about the storyline in that one.) So soon I will be able to revel again in the sheer ridiculousness of the transformation scene at the end, where the Beast gets the looks of quite an ugly Greek statue.

Also saw E., which is always nice, we chatted about a lot of stuff- her band has a new album out and her first PhD students are through; what it is to be multi-talented... and while wandering around the town, kept on bumping in to bits of a Spanish festival thing, notably a whole lot of bell-jangling dancers (the priest and the minotaur who popped in to Boots were quite amusing.)

Skin Deep (Operetta with book by Armando Iannucci): forgettable- as in, coming out of the theatre, I didn't have any hummable tunes in my head. Composer fail.
Plot, loopy to insane (the bit where two women come out of surgery and have had each other's faces put on? I had a programme and still found it massively confusing); characters, variously unpleasant, gormless or both (except the undercover journalist for Glamour TV, of all unlikely people); second act, entirely pointless. (Srsly, I think the whole of it could have been put across in a ten-minute Act One Scene Two.) I quite liked the ending- the actual end, I mean, not the daft bit with all the youth-seekers having an epiphany. Overall, 2.5/5.
It was being filmed for BBC 3, so at some point everyone will have the chance to massively disagree with me.

Sarah Brennan's being to-the-point and hilarious with it again- a post about not liking female characters.
("Yes, Sarah, you might say, but that was all in the olden days. We've wised up now, and I just tend to like male characters better, okay? Well, let's leave alone the fact that the world is not quite as wised up as I'd like it to be, because I tend to get obnoxious about that, and once a friend told me that she wasn't a feminist and I stole her credit card and wouldn't give it back because without feminism she wouldn't have had her own bank account, and I realise that was unacceptable behaviour.

"But let's talk a bit more about why.

"There's a reaction to the helpless heroine, the Heroine who is Made of Awesome, who is better than guys at everything, smarter, stronger, and often in a way that just builds on the traits of guy characters. And I at least don't tend to like that heroine any more than Little Miss Twit.")

Also, I went to see Bellini's I Capeletti E I Montecchi last night, and it was excellent (Opera North production, v. good singing, also interesting staging); the opera's based on Italian sources more than on Shakespeare, so there are some interesting differences, and also there isn't Mercutio or the Nurse- it just cuts straight to the tragic bits. Romeo's always played by a woman, and in this production, that led to the interesting problem of Romeo and Giulietta having no chemistry at all (until the death scene, for some reason), whereas Romeo and Teobaldo sizzled. They have a duel-cum-duet scene when they find that Giulietta has (supposedly) died and they're competing for who's most upset, and really if they'd had a recitative going "but actually, you know, we could run away and be warlords together," it would have been amazing. (And Giulietta could have married the doctor, who was sweet, and, you know, happy ending, not the point of a tragic opera.)

Saw Ruddigore last night.
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E.'s met a bloke, which is very nice for her.

I've got the cold from heck. Blast my nose. (That's a wish, not an imprecation.) And I forgot to take my hay-fever pill this morning, so all the trees having sex are just making it even more of a snot-fest around here. Why could this not have waited till next week??? Next Friday I don't have to have my ears and brain in full working order to go to the Most Fun Theatrical Experience Of The Year (Apart From The Other Ones).

OK, mard over. No, wait, there's more. Why do people not deliver stuff quickly? I thought this DVD was bound to arrive on Monday. Still not here. Oooh. Stomp stomp stomp. Scumbags.

Went to the Producers musical last night. Reece Shearsmith was good as Leo- a better dancer than I'd expected, and nicely twitchy. I think he was losing his voice by the end of the night, though (fellow-feeling here!). I don't know whether it was a good or bad idea to keep the more New York specific jokes- it wasn't watered down for us, but then there were lines that were clearly meant to be laugh points, if you knew who the New York theatre critics were or whatever. A good evening out, anyway. Lots of energy. Having seen the film, I was interested to see that it was actually slightly shocking to see the Springtime For Hitler bits on stage, when it hadn't been when seen at home. I wondered what the German couple next to me were making of it, a bit (not enough to overcome yer classic British reserve and ask them or anything, of course.)