Valley of the Trolley Dollies

Pre-theatre cocktails tonight at the Yard, an infamous section of the Twilight World of the Homosexual (hereinafter to be referred to as TWOTH), followed by a group booking at the new London production of KandernEbbs Cabaret.

Yay! Chorus boys dressed as Nazis! Nudity! Butch femmes!! Overtly predatory homosexuals!!! Faintly disturbing hints of fascism fornication and frottage, all served up with lashings of camp show tunes and alcohol.

Then, we’ll move on to the theatre…

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, the joys of being ever so slightly Bi-Polar. Or, as people of my parent’s generation would have referred to it, ‘Miserable as sin’. Everything is ticking along nicely then, creeeeeeeeeek, crash, BOOM, and it’s all dark and it’s all too much to deal with, and everything - even words of kindness - are met with a snarl and a sneer that just provides more fuel for the festival of self-hatred that will follow either just before the end of the depression or just after it.

 Whatever… The weekend was great: Friday with Toby turned out to be less than successful. His trip to see his first ever Rock Concert (McFly! at Wembley!!!) had to be abandoned when he went ever so slightly hysterical during the period between the support act and the main band. Too much - too dark, waaaaaaaaay too loud, too many flashing lights, too crowded, too noisy. But you know what? We still spent time together. We still had the most fun on the way home playing flick hockey with a lid from a carton of M&M’s (and for future reference, T, I let you win), and the whole thing - including his remorse that I was missing ‘the best concert ever’ because of him (”No, you’re alright, Tobe. It’s so not my scene anyway!!”) was so sweet I could have wept.

Saturday was productivity on ice: Finished sorting out the unofficial wedding photies (expect to see them here very soon. No, really. What?) did lots of chores at home, fixed the car. Yes! I, the reknowned homosexualist FIXED. THE. CAR. Well, I fixed the windscreen wash, not exactly a full strip down and rebuild, but still an achievement for me… put stuff on the iPOD, read, relaxed, felt great.

Saturday night, The Uber Dollies called from Barcelona, where they were seeing the opening night of George Michael’s 25live tour. Was I jealous? Is the pope an old Nazi? Does the Ayatollah have nary a trace of foreskin? What do you think? I was g-r-e-e-n with e-n-v-y. I grew up with George Michael. Not literally - we didn’t go to the same school, or anything. But his music was a big part of my life. Clarify that - HIS music: I wasn’t wild about early WHAM! Really started to like them when the second album came out and I heard stuff like ‘Everything She Wants’ and ‘ Credit Card Baby’ shiny, glossy, magpie pop with ice cold synths or brittle horn arrangements and lyrics about the futility of consumerism and the desperate things that men will do to keep the object of their desire within range. It sounded grown up and cosmopolitan and compassionate and glamorous and a million other things that I wasn’t and didn’t ever think I’d get to be.

Sunday, seemed fine, then, late afternoon, it happened: Just a little sadness. But by yesterday, in the palace of earhtly delights known as Capitalist Bastard Bank, the first tinkling notes of the overture had turned into a symphony of doom and darkness.  Like Toby in the arena, I felt like everything was tooo much: The world, my life, everything, was too dark, too loud, too many flashing lights, too crowded, too noisy. I started looking for reasons to be fed up. A dreadful thought hit me: What if nothing else comes along? What if I’m stuck here in a job I am beginning to hate for ever? And then I realised that, in the grand scheme of things, It doesn’t really matter: I have my health, my loved ones, and I can survive this - it’s hardly a concentration camp. But something will come along, because something always does.

That said, my headhunter tells me that CitiBank (whilst keen) are in the middle of a hiring freeze (as mentioned by Captain Canuck a week ago), but I’m still in with three of my preferred houses, (Merrill Streep, The People who financed the Anschluss, and La Maison du Cuckoo clock makers).

And the things that are coming along soon(ish) include: A trip to see ‘Cabaret’ tomorrow night. A honeymoon to New Zealand and Australia next February. An all-gay cruise of the Baltics (More Ball, one hopes, and less Tics) next July (my 39th birthday). A trip to see Will Young this coming Sunday. A trip to a Feis (If you’re not Irish, look it up), the International Sushi Awards on October 24th (That, I assure you, is not a pisstake. They give awards. For Sushi. Forget a Blog Post, there’s got to be a book proposal in that).Spamalot. Wells carnival (If you’re not from the West Country, look it up. It’s like Disney’s nighttime parade. But with more lightbulbs. And temperatures below zero). The Scissor Sisters and Elaine Paige (not on the same stage. How gay would that be?) Christmas Chez Nous. The Royal Variety Performance, the German’s trip to the UK with Theatre and Ballet excursions already booked, my parent’s trip to stay with us for at least one of those concerts, and, as of an hour ago, BEST. SEATS. IN. THE. HOUSE. FOR. GEORGE. MICHAEL. IN. LONDON.

And a promise that, after I get home from the gym tonight, and we watch the last two episodes of ROME on dvd, D and I can play my favourite game: ‘The Rough Gladiator and the naughty slave’…

Am I excited? Is this the opposite side of Bi-Polar? Am I, maybe, tring to buy my way out of a complex chemical neurological sequence?

Probably. But I’m happy. Can we just focus on that for now? Now, where did I leave me trident?

So what, exactly, does the term ‘musical’ even mean anymore? Flying cars? Flying Nannies? Flying Witches? Reality-TV-Hyped revivals? Crashing chandeliers? It didn’t used to be like that. But, in London, as the cost of production has skyrocketed, the producers want lots of full-fare-paying bums on seats. That means group bookings, families, kids parties, and that means, ultimately, spectacle over story telling, sets (sometimes) over songs, and more work being spent on the bar than on the book.

There are some notable exceptions: Billy Elliot has tried hard to keep itself as removed from the “stunts and setpieces” mentality as it can. The stunts and setpieces are there (it’s called theatrical, so they’d better be there), but they’re not the selling point: You go to see the show and only then find out it features giant inflatables and cross-dressing chorus boys. But, by and large, it seems that anything that tries to be purely musical theatre had better be doable on a budget of fifty quid. Love him or hate him, ALW’s last ‘The Woman in White’ was the closest thing to a musical I’d seen in a big West End house for some time. It was as much character as plot driven (even if the characters were a little, shall we say, Victorian Melodrama. But that’s what you get when you adapt an, erm, Victorian Melodrama). It had songs that were distinct from each other, yet tied together with a style and a set of orchestrations, to create something that felt like a unified whole as opposed to a series of Big Rock Hits strung together with a feeble book.

It had a huge cast, and cost a fortune to put on in a huge theatre. It, needless to say, went down like Paris Hilton in a Frat House. Opening night to closing night in, I think a little over two years. Not a flop, but not likely to have made it’s backers huge amounts of moolah.

And so, last night, we went to see ‘The Last Five Years’ at the Menier Chocolate Factory London. Was it any good? See it. It’s wonderful.

TL5Y is the story of two people - Cathy (Lara Pulver) and Jamie (Damien Humbley). It’s the story of their courtship and marriage. But here’s the twist: Its told, in her case, backwards, and in his, forwards. So, we first see Cathy lying almost catatonic on a slowly revolving bed. Next to her is the typical ‘Dear John’ letter. Jamie has left her. The marriage is over. And over the course of the next 80 minutes, we trace slowly backwards from this terrible scene of devastation to the final scene, where Cathy has just met the man she is going to marry. The ending, her sparkling, bubbling joy at being so much in love, while on the same stage, but in another world, Jamie sits brooding at his failed marriage, is even more devastating than the opening, or it was for me. Because we know, as we see her sigh happily, and stare soppily into the middle distance, how it ends up.

Lara Pulver was fantastic. Cathy is not the most likeable heroine in a musical. In fact (and I know I’m going to be slaughtered by certain people for saying this), she’s a neurotic and, at times, rather selfish young woman. An actress who’s trying and trying to get a start, but who can’t get the first break. Married to a man who writes one book and sees his star shoot to the heavens. And guess what? She doesn’t like it. ‘It’s all bout you,’ she complains, ‘Miles and miles of you.’ As opposed, perhaps to “Miles and miles of me?” As Jamie says when the marriage begins to collapse, “I won’t lose just ‘cos you can’t win”.

Quite. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that Cathy is a bad person - she’s human. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, self-centred, and which one of us hasn’t found ourself looking enviously at the successes of friends and loved ones, and thinking ‘That should be me’?

But it’s a tribute to Ms Pulver that, with a character as self-centred and jealous as Cathy, she still keeps our sympathy. It’s a tribute to Damien Humbley that, with a character as lightly sketched as Jamie (apart from the fact that his grandfather will roll in his grave at the thought of his grandson marrying a gentile, we get nothing of his personal life or makeup outside of the slowly crumbling marriage), we still care enough to watch him, and actually share a little of his sadness when he, inevitably, commits adultery.

The show has great orchestrations, some clever points on an otherwise relatively bland set (the budget was clearly closer to the magical Fifty Quid than The Woman in White’s), and some truly wonderful songs. And it touches you emotionally as well as intellectually. And that’s something that no amount of Flying cars / Nannies / Witches, Reality-TV-Hyped revivals or Crashing chandeliers can do quite so easily.

It’s running to the end of September, so see it now, while you can.