During our three June weeks in London we saw four shows, a play and three musicals, easily out-doing any previous records we might have claimed. The four were: The Play That Goes Wrong, SIX, Operation Mincemeat, and Hadestown. We agreed that SIX was best and that The Play That Goes Wrong was worst, and disagreed about the middle two, Mincemeat and Hadestown. See the comments below for further elaboration. The quality of staging, acting, singing, dancing, etc., was as good as anything you'd see anywhere else, and the array of shows was about the same as you'd see in New York or any other major theatrical center. Interestingly, the theaters in London are much smaller than what you'd see in the US, ranging mostly from 400 to 1300 seats...intimate to cozy, as the pix below will suggest. The show prices are a fraction of a fraction of what you'd pay in New York, and, if you were a serious theater-goer, you could finance a trip to London by taking in half a dozen shows or so. But I digress. There are rather few pix below--theaters don't permit photography or video, of course--but we got a few before and after shots, to which I'll add some comments. Oh, and our experience with SIX ended with a special theological or at least ecclesiastical experience too...
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All of our four shows were in the West End, presided over by this guy, whose own shows were mostly on the other side of the river |
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| The Duchess, just under 500 seats, where we saw The Play That Goes Wrong |
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| Part of the humor; more pix here |
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| Tiny stage; although one might learn a bit about stagecraft--all the things that can go wrong in a production--we thought The Play was about fifteen minutes of slapstick spread laboriously over two hours; London's longest-running show, nonetheless |
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| The Fortune, where we saw Operation Mincemeat |
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| All the conveniences |
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| Another tiny stage...blocking must be vastly simplified with so little space to cover |
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| Vicki ranked Mincemeat 2nd best of the four we saw |
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| I am still troubled by its making a comedy of a rather serious war undertaking; see the classic 1956 British film The Man Who Never Was for something closer to the truth, based on the book by the main figure in the real Operation Mincemeat; and including one of the most wrenching war-time grief scenes I know of...definitely not comedy |
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| The Lyric, where we saw Hadestown |
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| A bit of a nosebleed view, but, hey, the tickets were only £40 each |
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| I really enjoyed the classical focus; Vicki didn't like the non-happy ending |
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| Grand old theatre |
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| We saw SIX at the Vaudeville |
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| Overall best, we thought |
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| So after SIX we elected to walk back to the apartment and our route took us past Westminster Abbey, where the bells were peeling and much pomp and ecclesiastical circumstance were going on, and |
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| Vicki, who is up on these things, quickly discerned the new Archbishop of Canterbury (funny hat) was being welcomed to Westminster, officially, and got these pix... |
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| Since we'd just seen a musical about the Head of the Church of England, his six wives, that is, we thought seeing the new Archbishop, and the Dean of the Abbey, was pretty special too, especially the Church of England's first female archbishop... |
