Last night's Academy Award ceremony garnered the lowest viewing figures for 20 years in the USA.
Congratulations to Marion Cotillard who has just won the Best Actress Academy Award for her tour-de-force performance as Edith Piaf in LA MOME (LA VIE EN ROSE). I feared she would lose to the favourite Julie Christie for AWAY FROM HER but as fine as Christie was I was disappointed in the film which suggested that the depth of her character's Alzheimer's Disease was little more than a sweet bafflement.
Owen and I spent a few hours this afternoon with some of the famous people of the 20th Century. I didn't know who to spend the most time with... these people have some serious egos innit? Yes Constant Reader we went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Vanity Fair Portraits Exhibition and I enjoyed it a lot. 
Vanity Fair was initially published from 1913 to 1936 when it closed partly due to the Great Depression and in it's time sought to combine the written word with the work of the finest contemporary portrait photographers Edward Steichen, Baron De Meyer, Man Ray and George Hoyningen-Huene. 
When you consider the phenomenal talents who were either established or coming through in the first VF 23 year period it's no wonder that the exhibition, as Owen pointed out, starts with innovators, trailblazers and genuine legends and ends with celebrity - a telling tale of our times. Indeed it is rather jaw-dropping that the biggest-seller in VF's history is the edition with Jennifer Aniston on the cover.
Saturday: GYPSY - Patti LuPone takes on one of the greatest roles in musical theatre as Momma Rose.
Sunday: SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE - from London's Menier Chocolate Factory, this has just opened to a rave review from the NY Times
Monday: CRY BABY - the new musical based on a John Waters film and hoping to duplicate the massive success of HAIRSPRAY.
I have just booked CRY BABY... so excited as the J centre stalls tickets were only $54 as it's in preview and it's also the year the show is set.
On Saturday Owen and I saw Gabrielle at the Royal Festival Hall.
On the whole I enjoyed it but there was something missing... that all-important wow factor. The fact she was obviously battling against a throat problem I guess was part of it. But I think the major contributing factor is that she doesn't really have a lot of stage presence. Certainly not enough to remove the dour feeling the Festival Hall always projects. Owen said afterwards that the set didn't seem to be sequenced right and I think that might also be true. She certainly has enough great songs but they didn't really seem to work well against each other so occasionally I thought "Ah another finely crafted mid-tempo pop/soul ballad... so soon after the last one". Oh and it didn't help having my view blocked for about three songs by some tall carthorse in a hidjus frock who stayed dancing in her aisle seat despite her friends going down to dance by the stage - cheers.
Sadly no room for two huge favourites of mine "If You Really Cared" and "If You Ever" (I am sure she could have managed without East 17!) but it was good to bounce about in my seat to "When A Woman" and "Falling". Now here's the thing... I have just listened to those songs while typing and had to stop to sing along and do full Supremes/Vandellas/Marvellettes/Velvelettes moves... but in the gig... no. Singing and bouncing in seat. I put it down to being in a section of seated punters allied to the Festival Hall's lack of atmo and maybe a touch of underwhelming stage presence.
From the Broadway World website:
I am a
sucker for aerial daredevelling and we got two great acts - the first was Hungarian Mark Halasi as Icarus circling and tumbling above our heads with only a white mesh net wrapped around his arms and even more thrilling England's Andrew and Kevin Atherton on the aeriel straps... but who were quickly dubbed by myself the two gay flyers!
The weekend saw a trip to the Streatham Odeon to see NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS. It made me realise how the Hollywood writers' strike might actually have been a good thing - if it stopped them writing shit like this. The - for want of a better word - script is credited to The Wibberleys. It gave me the fucking wibberleys just watching it.
My Blog Brother David Daily-Drama (one of the Brighton Daily-Dramas I believe) has discovered an online questionaire which I think I'll have a go at. It is primarily aimed for Broadway audiences - amazingly I have only seen 14 musicals there but here goes...
The Archbishop of Canterbury today said that it was "inevitable" that parts of Muslim Shariah law would be made legal in this country.
Live ones, disparate rare tracks that have since been released commercially, remixes and track running times to be checked, live tracks listened to for a tell-tale giveaway to identify it against others... It's a tough job but someone has to do it.
Notable for being the album containing her hit single THERE'S A GUY WORKS DOWN THE CHIP SHOP SWEARS HE'S ELVIS, the other tracks while not matching CHIP SHOP's obvious appeal are all worth a listen and await rediscovery. Personal favourites are the racing CLOCK GOES ROUND, SEE THAT GIRL, HARD TO BELIEVE, HE THINKS I STILL CARE and TEENAGER IN LOVE.
The theatre-going wagon trundles on... tonight stopping outside the Theatre Royal Haymarket where Jonathan Kent's inaugural season as Artistic Director has now reached it's second production, Edward Bond's 1973 savage black comedy THE SEA.
When she learns from the friend of the dead man that Hatch refused to help them she confronts him with this and also refuses to pay for the large velvet order she placed with him which has left him near bankrupt. The scene escalates as Hatch - torn between grovelling and fury - slowly loses the plot and ends with him maniacally cutting the bolts of material and cutting her with his shears. Eventually Hatch sinks into insanity, the scattering of the dead man's ashes ends farcically and the play ends with the vague promise of a new start for the niece and her dead fiance's friend.
There is a lot going on in the play and it's certainly brave to stage it but it seemed strangely - um.. - becalmed. I am not sure whether it can work in a theatre of this calibre. It just about worked at the National Theatre where Judi Dench and Ken Stott played the forces of "discipline and madness" but here an air of bafflement hung over the audience for a lot of the time who were eager to laugh at the Wildean excesses of Mrs Rafi and the Basil Fawltyesque rages of Hatch but the laughter petered out especially when Hatch is seen to be genuinely insane. It's an odd audience that would continue laughing when Hatch finding the washed-up body of the fiance starts to stab it again and again with his shears eventually cutting it's throat.
ramblings and insanity in Sam Mendes' National Theatre production seemed to flow easier. Here the gears shift so wrenchingly that it's difficult to stay focused, there was also alarming longeurs - there is a scene at Mrs. Rafi's where they are rehearsing amateur theatricals which seemed to last for hours.
David Haig was as usual wonderfully splenetic as Hatch, breaking down under the internal and external pressures on him but I have seen him now in three productions back-to-back which have seen him hurtling around the stage going into meltdown and as great as he is playing these roles it is developing into a shtick. Marcia Warren brought her fluffy daftness to the role as Rafi's companion but it was a performance that probably belonged to a different play. Russell Tovey again proved an actor to watch as the young villager who comes under the crazed wing of Hatch and David Burke was ok as the beachcomber, despised by the townfolk but - of course - is the one person who is sane enough to see into the future pre-figured by the booming guns. It's just a shame his final speech was so - wordy.
