Saturday, 30 December 2017
Hashtag Still Smug
Saturday, 23 December 2017
God Bless Us, Everyone
A tale of three plays:
Let's start with The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was a big ol' daft Shakespeare farce. Pretty silly, pretty fun. Nice idea making it a sixties juke box musical but ultimately that was... Who am I kidding? It was a terrible idea making it a sixties juke box musical. There isn't very much intersection on the rocknroll-Shakespeare Venn diagram, especially not if you throw a suburban am-dram circle into the graph.
I also saw Glengarry Glen Ross. When you see one of the big, shiny London shows with a big, shiny Hollywood star in the centre it does make you realise how spoilt you are. It also emphasises how bad the idea of staging an amateur, rocknroll shakespeare in a provincial market town is.
And then there's a Christmas Carol. Yeah, you know the story. No, it's not even a real play. But gee whizz was it feelgood. Snow, satsumas, sprouts, clapping, turkeys on ziplines - all the festive main ones. It even got my sleighbells jingling, and they don't jingle easy. I feel like it's limbered me right up for Christmas. Bring it.
Tuesday, 5 December 2017
Brum, They Told Me
Had to check up on the Second City last weekend. Don't worry, it's still there (which is a tenuous description for the train service - although "still there" might be apt for the train we were due to get) and it's got its Christmas on. The Birmingham Christmas markets are insane. Peoples and Christmases everywhere.
I'm finding it a bit weird that bands I like are doing twentieth anniversary sets as standard nowadays. It means that you have a crowd of tired looking 40-somethings punctuated by grinning idiots thinking they can hit the high notes of Lava. I was one of those. Silversun were ace. Sleeper were ace. And that's me sucked into a Britpop sinkhole.
Oh and as I'm feeling strangely festive and it's the season of goodwill, let's celebrate people trying to do something nice. Go and visit Counter Culture it's above Dark Side comics under Chelmsford Viaduct. Go and get your geek on. You know you want to.