Constant Reader... I am in a peculiar position. To the best of my knowledge it has never happened before in all my blogging years. THAT momentous.

Constant Reader... I have to tell you about FOUR recent visits to the cinema.

Four.

In the past few years I have sometimes managed that in a year. Ok... better dive in... but don't panic... I won't do the full nine yards about them!

First one off the rank was NANNY McPHEE & THE BIG BANG. I had liked Emma's first incarnation as the magical Nanny who - Poppins stylee - appears seemingly out of nowhere JUST as a mother or father is at the end of their tether.

In the first film it was a widowed 19th Century Colin Firth unable to cope with a fractious brood, here the action moves forward to WWII and Maggie Gyllenhaal is attempting to run her husband's family farm while he is overseas while she also attempts to work in the local shop, hindered more than helped by the addled Mrs. Docherty (Maggie Smith).

Her three children are horrified when their posh nephews arrive, packed off from London by uncaring parents using air raids as an excuse. All Hell breaks loose as Gyllenhaal dangles from the end of her rope... thunder rolls, lightening flashes... and there's Nanny McPhee at the door.

The film starts a little overly-frantic, with screaming kids and an uneven pace that doesn't bode well for the film but with the arrival of Emma the film calms down as she teaches her five lessons for a happy household.

Director Susannah White then keeps the kid-friendly comedy going but also manages to allow in moments of touching humanity as when a pastoral picnic is interrupted with a dreaded telegram and when the posh boy (Eros Vlahos) confronts his emotionally cold military father (Ralph Fiennes).Emma of course gives an assured and witty performance and her script quietly builds to a moving climax when Maggie Smith's character reveals a charming link to the first film and a figure is seen walking towards the family as Nanny McPhee leaves them.

The film boasts quirky roles for Rhys Ifans, Sinead Matthews and Katy Brand as the agents of mean, charming comic turns by Sam Kelly and Bill Bailey, and White elicits strong performances from her child stars notably Vlahos, Rosie Taylor-Ritson and Asa Butterfield (building on his arresting performance in THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS).I have a feeling that one day NANNY McPHEE AND THE BIG BANG will be up there with THE RAILWAY CHILDREN as a classic British family film.

And now for something completely different...

Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND is his fourth film with Leonardo DiCaprio, much to the critics' chagrin. Leo gives a committed - no pun intended - multi-layered performance here and his casting as a Big Film Star is as important in this as to any qualities he has an actor.

Set in the repressive atmosphere of post-war 1950s America, the plot starts off as an intriguing film-noir thriller - Detective Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and a new partner (Mark Ruffalo) arrive at an asylum for the criminally insane on a bleak island off the Boston coast. They have been asked to investigate the disappearance of one of the inmates overnight who has literally vanished from her locked cell. The only clue he finds is a hidden scribbled note in her cell wondering who the 67th prisoner on the island is... Danels knows the island only holds 66.

The air of lowering oppression is exacerbated by the freak storm that breaks out that night forcing them to remain on the island and slowly DiCaprio's character begins to suspect that this most secretive of places holds a frightening secret. He views the silky head psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley) with suspicion and the psychiatrist's German associate (Max von Sydow) with ill-disguised contempt.Daniels - as with any film-noir hero - is a man with an unquiet soul: he witnessed the horrors of Dachau when his platoon liberated it and the personal horror of his wife being killed in an arson attack on their apartment building by a psychotic janitor.

The Detective confides in his sidekick that he has an ulterior motive for agreeing to take the case as he found out previously that his wife's killer is one of the prisoners held on the island. The film slowly changes into a full-blown horror film as Daniels realises that all the secrets are possibly held in the forbidding Civil War fort in the centre of the prison that holds the most dangerous inmates.Suspecting himself being drugged, he fights off visions of Dachau and of his dead wife alerting him that her killer is there somewhere and determines to get to the heart of this nightmarish situation.

There has been much critical debate as to the manner in which Scorsese has filmed Dennis Lehane's bestseller as he really does throw in everything but the kitchen sink into the nightmare world of SHUTTER ISLAND but I feel as if now that the Best Director Oscar of Damocles that has hung over his head has finally been won Scorsese is just having a ball, using all the tricks in the cinematic cupboard under the stairs to scare the bejeebus out of the audience.I suspect that the big plot twist - that is no real surprise when it comes - is another reason why it has not had the rave reviews one would suspect - people by and large like to believe in narrative in film and once the carpet is pulled out from under them they are largely distrustful of the fact that they were 'conned' by the slight-of-hand. I suspect the film warrants another viewing - just to see it with the knowledge of hindsight.

I enjoyed the sheer Ghost Train thrill of seeing the film on a big screen with sound effects echoing around me - the film also has one of the most genuinely chilling soundtracks, compiled by Robbie Robertson from various recorded works of modern classical and avant-garde composers. It's worth staying for the end credits just to be spooked by the mash-up of Dinah Washington's haunting vocal for "This Bitter Earth" woven into Max Richter's "On The Nature Of Daylight".With excellent performances across the board, DiCaprio holds the audiences attention throughout - the only jarring note being the slight suspicion that he is channeling Jack Nicholson's performance from CHINATOWN.

Next up to the ocky is the curio AGORA from Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar.
I have heard your cry Constant Reader "When oh when is someone going to make a film of Hypatia, the Greek Egyptian teacher and philosopher who caused a schism between the Roman Prefect Orestes and the Christian leader Cyril?"

Well Amenábar heard your cry too. Whether you should have kept your gob shut or he should have had his iPod earphones in I have yet to resolve.

I hadn't the slightest clue of the story of how the Greek atheists, Jewish believers and Roman powers were swept away by the onslaught of Christian fundamentalism in the 4th Century AD. For some reason we weren't taught that in school. But luckily Amenábar picked up on it somewhere along the line and obviously thought "Aha... religious fundamentalism, middle east, women being banned from study, statues being toppled to overthrow regimes... this is all so topical!"Well bigotry is always au currant somewhere but the obvious parallels with today are - well a bit obvious.

It's an ambitious film and it's to be applauded for trying to make the sort of 'intimate epic' that David Lean and Anthony Mann would have attempted. But by Isis, it's so leaden. We get revolt after revolt, stonings, burnings, blood, fire, corpses by the binload... but i was aware from quite soon after it started that I was staring at it, not watching it.

Rachel Weisz certainly gives a thoughtful and nuanced performance - I had never noticed her odd resemblance to Charlotte Rampling before - and she has a rare intelligence on screen but Hypatia sadly remains a pillar of virtue and intellect all the way through - she seems so unconcerned by her obvious fate that it is hard to feel anything for her character. Some sign of doubt or even a sense of humour might have made her more human.

The supporting actors are given more running around and shouting to do but to little obvious effect of making one even remotely concerned in their character's destiny.

Max Minghella - son of the late director Anthony - has a dog of a role as Davus, Hypatia's servant who loves her but who defects to the Christian cause thereby endangering her life. He glowers at anything and everything but his character's sudden defection back to helping her seems forced and the ending flies in the face of what is known of her demise, contrived to give her a dignity that was ill-afforded her.Oscar Isaac is able to bring more subtlety to his role of Hypatia's former student - and ardent admirer - Orestes, who after the upheaval becomes the Roman Prefect and finds himself caught between the hardline Christians and the atheist Hypatia. He gives an interesting performance but again, with no attempt by Amenábar to humanise the character his character is oddly becalmed.The nasty Cyril - dear Horus that name! - is played with an unrelenting mad-eyed stariness by Sami Samir that certainly makes him a hissable villain but again, I found myself aching for some varying of the one-note characterisation.The film certainly looks impressive - it won 7 production Goya Awards in Spain this year - with it's evocative sets suggesting the city of Alexandria (the film was shot in Malta) and Amenábar certainly pulls off some stylish touches such as when the Christian mob ransacks the library they are shot from above as the film speeds up faster and faster, the pillagers resembling a ravaging hoard of insects.

But also he has hit on the notion that to suggest chapters in the story he will zoom out of the city and contemplate the world in the cosmos before zeroing back into the city again like some ancient world DHL advert. Once or twice ok - it fits in with Hypatia's quest for the facts of astronomy - but after a while it is just another distancing effect in a film that really doesn't need any more barriers to engaging with it, a pity as Weisz certainly shines amid the film's torpid atmosphere.So finally to the last film of the bunch and to a director who rather than inducing disinterest by too little connection with the characters, manages it by overuse of his style.

I speak of......although Alice In Burtonland would be more appropriate.

We saw this at the iMax in Waterloo which is a very odd experience... all screen, no atmosphere.

So here we surely have the last shake out of Burton's over-used visual tricks. One would have thought that Alice and Burton would go together perfectly but I felt there to be little connection between him and the material - it all looked exactly as I expected it to.

Only once was I genuinely intrigued by the imagery which was when Alice used the severed heads of the Red Queen's victims as stepping stones as they floated in the castle moat.

The visualisation of the characters was certainly interesting, just this side of disturbing but again I felt like Burton was soft-pedalling - I don't know whether this was due to the length of the artistic spoon he used to sup with the Disney organisation or whether it was down to the bog-standard storyline he had to work with.
The intriguing jump-off of an older Alice returning to Wonderland - or Underland as the natives call it - is soon dissipated as the whole premise turns out to be one long meander to a climactic duel between her and the Jabberwocky. It didn't help that we had previously seen a trailer for the new CGI-fest CLASH OF THE TITANS which ends with a duel with a big feck-off monster so rather than a thrilling climax we are given a by-the-numbers Big Battle that seems de-rigour for these sort of films. Sadly by this time I had kinda switched off having been dulled into submission by the torturous route that had led us to this. it seemed to involve a lot of traipsing around for no discernible purpose than to drag out the film's running time.

I also think the idea of presenting the film in 3-D led to the film to look even more tired - it wasn't even filmed using the process but was added on afterwards and it shows. Occasionally something would grab my attention - the Cheshire cat was always looked forward to - but it all just seemed to dress up the fact that Burton seems to have run out of ideas.Much has been made of Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen and she certainly perked the film up but I was alarmed how much of the character seems ripped off from Miranda Richardson's Queenie from BLACKADDER 2. The success of her performance though robbed the film of any other strong female presence - Alice was cookie-cutter Burton heroine: pale-faced and with hardly any life in her, and I found Anne Hathaway's White Queen character forgettable as I watched her.And then there's Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Of course the plot had to find much for him to do but as soon as he would appear on screen I was praying for him to get off again. He brought nothing to the film but the worst excesses of his previous Burton characters - excluding SWEENEY TODD - and as usual, this awful passivity.I think it's about time they took a break from each other - they seem to bring out the worst in each other when they are let loose in Fantasyland. I think SWEENEY TODD is an interesting exception as the form dictated that they couldn't play it cute.

I also think it's odd that critics are happier to find fault with DiCaprio and Scorsese than with Depp and Burton. Give me SHUTTER ISLAND over this misfire anyday.

My advice to Burton? Start making films with a genuinely anarchic performer from ALICE...

The day after receiving very positive reviews, what is the best the American company of HAIR can look forward to? Me and Owen in the audience of course!

Yes it was time to re-visit Diane Paulus' explosive production that we had previously seen in February with most of the same cast in New York.If anything, I thought it was even better at the Gielgud. I was a bit worried how a London audience would take to the show but the audience were up for it from the get-go and I suspect the prospect of performing this very American-themed show with all it's now-obscure cultural references to a London audience made the cast go for it a little harder.

Yes the book still has problems, Claude's extended bad trip sequence does seem to go on a bit - although it does feature the marvellous ABIE BABY - but the sheer brio and exuberance of the cast carry you through the dodgy patches.It was great to become re-acquainted with the cast members from NY such as Will Swenson's Berger and in particular Gavin Creel's Claude - his torment over what is his ultimate destiny is palpable in an excellent rendering of WHERE DO I GO at the end of the first act, so good he pulls the focus from the company stripping off behind him! His choice leaves him invisible to his former compadres and leads to a stunning coup-de-theatre.

It was a pleasure to see Caissie Levy again as Sheila, the political activist doomed to be disappointed in love and life - her soaring voice turns EASY TO BE HARD into a genuine showstopper as well as sparkling in I BELIEVE IN LOVE and GOOD MORNING STARSHINE.

Two performers who I wasn't sure of in New York made a greater impression here: Kacie Sheik as the pregnant Jeannie made the most of her one-liners and got a massive laugh on her Mary Magdalene gag - I guess I was so used to Linda Kendrick's version of AIR on the London cast album - and Darius Nichols was great as Hud - during the HAIR number he crawled over the stalls seats and made it all the way to K row where we were!
It was sad that Bryce Ryness didn't make the trip as he was great as Woof but it was delight to see Allison Case as Chrissy as she had left the cast by the time we saw the NY production. She gave a winning performance as the love-lorn Chrissy and carefully managed to steer her rendition of FRANK MILLS through the lines that elicited laughs to the touching last line. I happily "Woo"ed at the end.

The real bugger was that we didn't see Sasha Allen as Dionne - again! She was off in New York and she was off again last night - c'mon gurl... it ain't THAT taxing a role.

However we had instead the delightfully-named Phyre Hawkins who raised the roof at the top of the show with AQUARIUS and also raunched the bumhole out of WHITE BOYS.

Special mentions must go to Andrew Kober and Megan Lawrence who step out of "The Tribe" to play Claude's parents as well as scene-stealing turns as Margaret Mead and Buddhadalirama respectively.
Oh and the cherry on the cake?

During the finale the audience are invited on stage.... OH COURSE WE DID! It was a great experience to join the teeming crowd on the stage and dance to the finale music played by the rockin' Hair Band.

My estimation of the company went up leaps and bounds while up there - those damn lights make it boiling up there!

Owen has booked for us to see it again soon - can't wait!

Constant Reader... I have been a busy Hector recently so cry you mercy!

I have not STOPPED! It's like that when you have a birthday... yes, birthday. Where was my card? Anyway I have much to impart... firstly two theatre visits. Because if you hadn't noticed, theatre takes precedence every time.
We saw one of the last performances of THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED at the Garrick written by Douglas Carter Beane. I loved his riotously fun book for the Broadway musical XANADU so was keen to see this play. It's New York run earned him the first of his two Tony Award nominations - he was nominated for XANADU the following year. I enjoyed the play's whiplash wit and killer one-liners but felt I would have got more into it had it been played by actors who could have been more at home with the show's Gotham rhythms.

Like... the whole Broadway company has come over with HAIR!... surely they could have spared some actual American actors for this too?
Tamsin Greig is an actress I have never really taken to and while she certainly convinced as Diane, the gimlet-eyed L.A. actor's agent who will gallop over anyone to get her way, I was always aware of her wandering, generic US accent - half the time she seemed to be doing a bad Sandra Bernhard impression. I am sure Sandra could have persuaded to do a limited three month run in the west end... failing that Ruby Wax.
Rupert Friend played Mitchell her #1 client, a handsome new actor generating serious Hollywood heat - and who has "a slight recurring case of homosexuality". A visit to New York has him calling an escort agency and opening his hotel door to the chirpy part-time rentboy Alex, here played by Harry Lloyd. Again the play suffered as the many hesitant, embarrassed exchanges between the two characters seemed to be played with EXCLAMATION MARKS!!! at the END!! of!! each!!! exchange!!!! It was like watching the puppet characters of Rod and Nicky from AVENUE Q.
There wasn't much change either out of the performance of Gemma Arterton as Ellen, Alex's sometime lover who is a spoiled sometime-model and Z-list celebrity. Arterton might be a happening film actress at the moment but she looked a bit amateur-hour-in-Dixie on the Garrick stage.

I suspect some of the above problems are the fault of director Jamie Lloyd who seems to have favoured artifice over substance. Worryingly we have tickets for two more productions of his in the future.It sounds like I had a Hellish time - but most of the time I was laughing at the deliciously savage lines that Beane gave his lead character - and in among the laughs there were some truths about the problems of being a gay actor in Hollywood. Namely the kudos a straight actor gets for playing a gay role - as Diane says "That's like the pretty actress putting on a fake nose and winning the Oscar" whereas "a gay actor playing a gay role? That's not acting - it's bragging".

I also loved being there for when Mitchell said to Diane that he wanted to be a successful out film actor and she shouted back: "Are you British? Do you have a knighthood? Then shut up!"
We were sitting behind Sir Derek Jacobi and guest! He roared.

I'd love to see the play again - but maybe not if the above were cast again.

Of course one straight actor who won awards for playing a gay character was Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey in CARRINGTON - which leads me on to...
My second evening at the theatre was to see Christopher Morahan's revival of Pinter's 50 year-old masterpiece THE CARETAKER at the Trafalgar Studios as is, the Whitehall Theatre as was. It was nice to think that Divine once acted on that very stage in 1977 in WOMEN BEHIND BARS - with Fiona Richmond yet.

Of course in THE CARETAKER it's the men who are trapped in their environment.
Jonathan Pryce was Davies, the vagrant who is saved from a fight by Aston, an oddly subdued man who not only invites the tramp back to his large cluttered attic room in a derelict house but who also offers him the room and a spare bed for as long as he needs it.Davies' joy is soon thrown into confusion when he is surprised the next morning by another man, Mick, who tells him that it's his room, his house. Before Mick can beat him up Aston arrives back and tells Mick - his younger brother - that Davies is his friend and he wants him to stay.

As with most Pinter plays, there then follows a psychological battle for control with all three men wanting some control over one or both of the others - the cramped, cluttered room becomes a mindgame where there is always someone holding what they think are all the cards.Jonathan Pryce was wonderful as the derelict Davies - querulous but ingratiating, self-pitying but boastful, seemingly always on guard for the next physical attack or prying question. His ferrety, crumbling shabbiness made it all to easy to believe that this Davies would walk from the centre of London to Luton on the promise of some second-hand shoes. What Pryce made obvious was how Davies' survival techniques are all too easily his undoing with the brothers.

It was great to see him in this as my only other CARETAKER was the BBC production in 1980 where Pryce played Mick to Warren Mitchell's Davies and Kenneth Cranham's Aston.There is another stand-out performance by Peter MacDonald as the emotionally-submerged Aston. His quiet absorption in his plug-mending is of course the perfect springboard for Pryce in their scenes together but his performance is slowly building to the quiet desperation of his long second act speech where he reveals his secret to Davies.

Aston tells Davies of how he was sectioned as a teenager and how, despite his pleading with her, his mother gave permission for him to be given electroshock treatment which was administered as he stood terrified against a wall, leaving him impaired. It is of course telling that during this confession, Davies falls asleep, oblivious to his would-be friend's tragedy. Peter MacDonald was mesmerising in the scene.Sam Spruell plays the volatile would-be property owner brother Mick and I felt him to be a bit lightweight - I never felt any genuine menace in the character and Mick should have an almost Kray-like ability to be totally unpredictable. You should feel that Davies' attempts to ingratiate himself with Mick should feel like watching someone pulling a sleeping tiger's tail.
It was intriguing to see the play on that stage bearing in mind the last production I saw there was the revival of ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE. Orton's play has some striking similarities to this one and you can easily see how he was influenced by Pinter's shark-below-the-surface style.

I think the only fault I could single out with Christopher Morahan's production is that it possibly could have done with a more disorientating atmosphere - the production seemed a bit too 'joined-up' at times. But it was an engrossing night - with a special mention for Eileen Diss's grungy, cluttered set design for the brother's room.

It's not a good week for tawny-heads... it was sad to hear of the death today of Malcolm McLaren.

Love him or hate him, you couldn't ignore him.

It appears he has been ill with cancer for some time but it had been kept quiet.

His ex-partner Vivienne Westwood has said "When we were young and I fell in love with Malcolm, I thought he was beautiful and I still do. I thought he is a very charismatic, special and talented person. The thought of him dead is really something very sad"

From New York Dolls to The Sex Pistols, from Bow Wow Wow to Boy George, from bringing the underground sounds of hip-hop and Vogue house to a wider public to mixing electro beats to classic opera... he had an unerring knack for seeing a new area for discovery then moving on as soon as it was spotlighted.

His confrontational behaviour won him enemies - and it's a shame that his Situationist activities ostracised the very people he had put in the front line, but the world will be a poorer place for his absence.

He had said in January "‘I have concluded that this is the year that pop culture has finally become a crumbling ruin. No matter where I look and listen, the ruins are all I am beginning to care about. I believe in the ruins."

It has crumbled a bit more with today's news.

Amid the ballyhoo over the called election was the news that Corin Redgrave died today aged 70.

Much is made of sister Vanessa's politics and the effect on her acting career but Corin's promising acting career in the 1960s was the one that took the biggest knock as he concentrated more on outside interests, working for the Worker's Revolutionary Party and later taking on the care of his father Michael when his Parkinson's Disease became more advanced.

His early work on screen always seemed a bit colourless, a bit unformed. In the 1970s his screen work slowed down during the decade and in the 1980s he only appeared in two films and two tv projects. But with Michael's death in 1985 and the fading away of the WRP, he found a new interest in performance and slowly started to re-emerge as a strong stage actor - particularly in late-Shakespeare roles - and also carved out a new career as a character actor on screen, ironically usually as upper-class roles. He was of course still a political activist, passionate on the rights of political prisoners and in attempting to get Blair impeached for the Iraq War.

I was lucky to see a few of his stage performances. Among his regular appearances at the Young Vic and National Theatre I saw him at the former in Ibsen's ROSMERSHOLM with Francesca Annis and at the National I am remembering his unfaithful husband opposite Eileen Atkins in HONOUR and the brutal prison warden in the early Tennessee Williams play NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES which won him the Olivier Award and a Tony nomination in New York.

He also appeared at the National in a revival of Pinter's NO MAN'S LAND as a supercilious Hirst and at Greenwich in a revival of Clifford Odets' THE COUNTRY GIRL in the role of the alcoholic leading man that his father had originated in the London premiere in 1952.He also appeared twice with his older sister in recent years - at the National he was a masterly Gayev, pampered and snobbish, opposite Vanessa's Ranyevskaya in Chekhov's THE CHERRY ORCHARD and at the Gielgud, they played the combative ex-lovers in Coward's SONG AT TWILIGHT. His performance as Hugo Latymer, a man made to confront the memory of his dead gay lover, was marvellously nuanced and ultimately very moving. It must have been strange to play the role bearing in mind he knew that Coward and Redgrave had been lovers when they were younger.

Corin had been aware of his father's bisexuality for many years and while the secret was still kept when he helped write Michael's autobiography, after his father's death he wrote a memoir of their life as father and son as well as making a powerful Omnibus profile on their relationship. It revealed Corin as a man seemingly at ease with himself and the legacy that had passed to him and this I think informed his performance.
Like his father, his later years were filled with cameos and supporting roles in films - he was particularly effective as the pompous Sir Walter Elliott in Roger Michell's 1995 adaptation PERSUASION and as the icy interrogator in Jim Sheridan's IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER.

Corin had suffered a serious heart attack in 2005, coming a few years after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and the last time I saw him - in 2008 at an early evening talk being interviewed with Vanessa about their family on the stage of the Lyttleton Theatre - he was still obviously frail. He appeared for the last time on stage last year at the Jermyn Street Theatre in a play about blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo at the same time as his niece Natasha Richardson was killed. His last screen role was in the television adaptation of Henry James' THE TURN OF THE SCREW which was broadcast last Christmas. Again ironically, Michael had appeared in the 1961 screen version THE INNOCENTS.

Corin's generous and humanitarian spirit will be missed both on and offstage.

April the 3rd was Screen Diva Birthday Central!

Happy birthday to Doris Day - seen here as Ruth Etting in LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME, one of her greatest films who is 88 today! I hope she had the puff to blow her candles out.

A big ¡Feliz cumpleaños! to the marvellous Marisa Paredes, my second-favorite Almódovar screen siren who was 64 today.

And finally... how on earth is Sally Thomsett 60????

On Monday Owen's period of birthday celebrations finally came to an end with us attending SISTER ACT at the London Palladium that I had bought us tickets for! It was an enjoyable experience to go to the Palladium as I never go there too often as the productions always seem to be more family-orientated - says a lot about me I guess! It also tells you that I enjoyed the theatre more than the show. Oh I enjoyed the two hours-plus traffic of the stage, don't get me wrong... I just found the show vanishing from my mind as I watched it.

The trouble is the source film - okay the musical premise is fine for a story about a group of nuns being taught how to sing by someone hidden in their convent on a witness protection scheme - but the actual plot is thin, thin, thin - and it really can't bear the strain of a musical plonked on top of it. The inconsistencies in the story are too exposed on the wide expanse of the Palladium's stage.It was packed with coach parties and group bookings so the place was well buzzy... which is always a nice atmosphere to enter - just as long as they shut their gobs during the show. Sadly the teenagers behind Owen were not told this. However it is the kind of show that you really don't need to worry about missing any of it's subtleties.

A lot of money has been spent on the show but the script - surprisingly from two producer/writers from CHEERS - is a bit pedestrian. Alan Menkin has showed that he has an uncanny ear for a pop pastiche - most notably in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS as well as his Disney cartoon scores - and here he turns in a couple of 70's old school soul numbers - oddly though only for the male supporting performers: the villain's three henchmen get the best with a Floaters-style LADY IN THE LONG BLACK DRESS, the desk-job cop who secretly loves the heroine sings I COULD BE THAT GUY with blink-and-you-miss-them costume changes into a Travolta white suit and back, and the villain gets the comic WHEN I FIND MY BABY - sadly they, along with the rest of the score, are lumbered with Glenn Slater's uninspired lyrics. The big production numbers are loud, rollicking and well-sung - it's just a shame they are a bit unmemorable - maybe the score duties should have been given to HAIRSPRAY's Marc Shaiman who has a genuine ear for a good, memorable tune.Patina Miller plays Delores, the lounge singer who witnesses a gangland killing and is hidden in a convent, and she has a fierce belt of a voice that does indeed lift her songs to dizzying heights. Sadly her non-singing performance is a trifle samey - I wasn't sure if it reminded me of Tina Turner doing a Bette Midler impression or vice versa. The one attribute she lacked was a genuine warmth.

Sheila Hancock played the role of the Mother Superior with a nice air of testy impatience but ultimately I wearied of her role which ultimately gave her nothing to do but come on and off the stage with a frown and a resigned not-too-funny putdown. I guess I just wanted maybe a LITTLE depth to these roles. To be honest, most of the time I was remembering Hancock was London's first-ever Mrs. Lovett in SWEENEY TODD.

In fact I found myself thinking occasionally of other shows - how Patina Miller would be good as Deena in DREAMGIRLS.... how it's about time we saw DREAMGIRLS on stage... how the aisle would be a good one for Mama Rose to barge down at the start of GYPSY... when are we going to see GYPSY in London again... OH I HAVE TO CLAP AGAIN!!

The cast certainly put their all into the production, a little too much really - there was an ensemble number for the nuns to tell Delores how they joined up which they belted out to the back of the balcony. The next scene has Delores taking them in choir practice - and guess what? None of them can sing. Like... duh.

The sets were lovely however! Whether using the famous Palladium revolve or with the use of sliding screens to give us ever changing vistas of the Convent, Klara Zieglerova's set was a constant pleasure as were Lez Brotherston's absurdly OTT frocks.

The show ended on a high after a rather truncated climax but what I remember most was the total lack of surprise in the show, nothing surprised, nothing original. It was all very well constructed but it was all quite soulless. If I had written this earlier in the week I might have been a bit more generous to it but in the meantime we went to see AVENUE Q at it's new home at the Wyndhams. Everything SISTER ACT labours for, AVENUE Q manages effortlessly.

Genuinely funny with memorable songs across a range of styles and when needed, lip-smacking bad taste as opposed to mere tackiness.

Where SISTER ACT goes out of it's way to make it's line-up of nuns endearing - salty nun who takes to rapping, fat jolly nun, young nun who is not sure of her calling - and failing because they are so paper-thin, AVENUE Q's line-up of felt and fur characters get you rooting for them with no effort at all!

It was good as well to see Delroy Atkinson in the cast of AVENUE Q as the hapless Gary Coleman. He gave a fine performance in the Ray Davies musical COME DANCING at Stratford East as the young Jamaican musician Hamilton and here he delivers in all his numbers.

Let the SISTERs ACT, get yourself to AVENUE Q if you haven't already - or even if you have!

On Saturday afternoon Owen and I made a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory to see one half of their new season of plays by Willy Russell, SHIRLEY VALENTINE.

This and the accompanying production of EDUCATING RITA of course trail the memories of the big screen versions - neither of which I was particularly keen on. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't all that struck on SHIRLEY VALENTINE the first time I saw it with Pauline Collins back in the day at the Vaudeville Theatre.

I remember laughing every so often but I found the comedy a bit too pat, a bit too sit-com in style, a bit obvious. There was no denying the excellence of Pauline Collins and she certainly gave a real star performance which deservedly won her a raft of awards along with the rare honour of being allowed to immortalise her performance in the film, not always a given.
So I was vaguely curious to see how it holds up 22 years later. Actually I found that history was repeating, while I found the first act still playing like a vaguely amusing sit-com, I was won over by the inspired casting of Meera Syal as Shirley. I had hugely enjoyed her performance in RAFTA, RAFTA at the National a few years ago and was interested to see how she would respond to the challenge of a one-woman show.We saw only her second performance in front of an audience as Shirley so the occasional stumble could be forgiven and she negotiated her way through the first two scenes well.

We all know Meera Syal is an accomplished actress as well as writer so it's no surprise she can multi-task on stage too - during the first scene she cooks as she acts! Yep them are real chips in the deep fat fryer and eggs scrambling away in the frying pan - dangerous smells to have wafting around you with an empty stomach just after lunchtime. A helpful generous squirt of air-freshener was dispensed during the scene change!
Syal nailed the laughs that are to be had in the script but more than anything, she managed to find the sadness in the character and in the moments when Shirley realises that life has reduced her to being just someone's wife and someone's mother, she has you despairing with her. The second half, where Shirley goes to Greece and finds her long-lost self, was by far the best part of the show and Meera Syal rose to the challenge of giving us a character that it was a pleasure to spend a few hours with.
She also coped well with an ominous snap under a raised part of the stage masquerading as a sand dune. Looking at the bottom of her shoe she said "Oops I think I killed something" and successfully rode out her own and the audience's laughter to continue on. A fine example of including the audience in 'on the joke' but also knowing when to get our broken concentration back on track.

Director Glen Walford directed the show's first-ever outing in Liverpool in 1986 so knows the play inside out and charted the character's progress to self-realisation well. Walford is herself a fine performer and I remember well her tough-as-nails performance as a Soho clip-joint manageress in LOVE ON THE PLASTIC at the long-gone Half Moon Theatre.

On Friday it was time to get all unnecessary at the thought of seeing Alphabeat live, this time at the Islington Garage.Their first album was such a lifesaver in the dark days of Borehamwood that they really can do no wrong in my eyes - but the idea of seeing them live always fills me with an odd fear. Maybe I am waiting for the time when I don't 'get' it anymore?

The gig was free entry - thanks to pre-ordering the album through HMV, winning competitions etc. We were told that guaranteed entry was up until 8pm so I made sure we were there nice and early.Actually it was my first visit to The Garage and, despite the lighting turned down to full-on MURK it seemed ok. We stood towards the back by the bar and waited for the doors to be taken off the hinges at 8pm with the crush of first-come, first served entrants. And we waited...

By the time the 'beaters came bouncing on the stage, we had moved down towards the stage and the floor was just over three-quarters full. At least it gave me room to dance but it was a bit depressing that they could not pull a bigger crowd. I concur with what D.A. Harvey had to say later that people are wary of free entry gigs - one always assumes that they will be mobbed so it's easier to stay away.

It wasn't long before I was in my own little Alphabeat world - the new songs sounded so much better live than on the over-tweaked album and I was singing, clapping and dancing along as they cantered through ALWAYS UP WITH YOU, THE BEAT IS..., THE SPELL, D.J. (my favorite track off the new album after THE SPELL), HOLE IN MY HEART, CHESS, WHAT IS HAPPENING and 10,000 NIGHTS. Something however didn't seem to be firing with Anders SG and Stine, a reticence, a feeling of peddling. It was then that Anders announced that they were sorry but they would be curtailing the show as Stine was feeling poorly - NOOOOO!

They did come back after a lengthy chant of AL-PHA-BEAT! and launched into the fabulous, long-intro'd live version of the glorious FASCINATION which had us all singing and riding the Alphabeat love wave. Then it was over... a group bow, waves and leaving the stage with Stine coughing and holding her chest.

It was disappointing but I was so happy to have spent time in their pop heaven. Soon come the Koko gig....

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