Tonight Jen and I decided at the last minute to check out the longest running show at West End, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. It has apparently been showing since 1952 and at its current home for more than 30 years. So, for something that has lasted so long, I was expecting something pretty special. I don’t think that is what we got.

It is around the 1930s, it is the dead of winter and the blizzard has kicked up around Monkswell House, a new boarding lodge out in the middle of nowhere. The radio is on and we hear about a murder in London then, as the play progresses guests, expected and unexpected, slowly trickle in. The arrival of a policeman brings with him the threat of more murders and suspicion amongst the guests. We were asked to keep the secret of the play a mystery so I’ll stop there.

For a whodunit I just wasn’t interested. The first half of the play is entirely too slow and by intermission it wasn’t a case of me wondering whodunit but rather wondering when it was going to come to an end. Maybe being up in the Upper Circle (where views were not the greatest and I had people behind me constantly whispering and sometimes talking loudly) meant we couldn’t get as involved as those in the Dress Circle or Stalls. Maybe.

Overall, I guess it was an okay form of light entertainment and it did improve a little bit in the second half. Still, I’m glad we didn’t spend the extra money to get better seats.

Chicago boy Ren moves to Bomont, a hick country town in America, where dancing has been banned and the spirit of the town is low. He struggles to fit in as the new kid in school and in town. Eventually though he is able to win the heart of the girl (and town) and soon everyone is footloose and free. All in all a fairly faithful interpretation of the 80’s classic of the same name.

Here are some of my thoughts on aspects of the show:

The Music. The soundtrack was great and had the crowd rocking with such hits as Holding out for a Hero (I think one of S’s favourite number for the “guy in the sailor suit who was well fit”), Let’s Hear It for the Boy, I’m Free and of course Footloose. The only downside being that its delivery (that is, the singing) was a bit disappointing from the males in the cast. Although far and away THE best dancer in the cast it was clear that the male lead’s talent (Derek Hough) lay not in his singing but in his dancing and dare I say, roller blading! Also at times it seemed that we were being blasted with the music and the producer/director would have done well to tone it down in places. Credit to the ladies in the cast though as their singing was fabulous. The band was great too.

The Dancing. Fantastic dancing all around and good choreagraphy that made the best use of the stage. The encore is particularly satisfying as the cast put together a medley of all the songs in the musical. Not sure how they managed to get through it because it looked like very hard work and went on for quite some time without a break. They deserved the great applause they got for that finale.

The Lighting. Oh my. The audience would do well to take note of the signs advising of strobe lighting. Both halves start off literally with a bang (with many people literally jumping in their seat at the shock) and in some numbers during the show the floodlights are directed right at you in the stalls (only for a few seconds) but enough to maybe blind you.

Classic Moment. The faux Baywatch beach run during Holding Out for a Hero.

How do you integrate Tae Kwon Do with a sitcom. Well, the first ingredient is a typical Korean household – where the melodramas are enough to create the kind of slapstick situations where the martial arts actually almost make sense. You wouldn’t think that mixing the Tae Kwon Do into a narrative would actually work but tonight somehow it did.

The household has Grandpa, Father, Mother, Daughter, Suitor and the very hilarious (and cute) drunken Uncle. There is also an old man who plays kind of a narrator and then two burglars – one with a very very fit body and the other one, well, with not so much a fit body but a great almost afro like hairdo. The basic premise is Grandpa trying to hook Daughter and Suitor up and along the way the whole family train in Tae Kwon Do and become “victim” to the two burglars.

The comedy was fairly “Benny Hill” as my colleague described it – whilst there were some absolutely side-splitting moments, the comedy was just at that level of cheesy but not too cheesy. The action though was another thing altogether. The talent that this crew has is just simply amazing and there was great innovation in using every part of the stage (walls included) and all sorts of tools. Lighting and the soundtrack were also put to good use.

Overall, a pretty fun show with the highlight of their skills coming in the last 10-20 minutes. Oh – be warned that if you are in the first few rows you may be chosen to go up on stage to fight some of the performers. Yikes!

Identical twins Pablo and Pierre Caesar are charming enough guys with great hearts and fantastic gymnastic skills however overall the show was more than a little on the amateurish side. Caesar Twins and Friends had a number of stages which I guess were used to demonstrate the bond that exists between the twins. I’m not sure if each stage was supposed to represent another level in the relationship but I guess the stages served their purpose by breaking up the show into manageable pieces. There was some innovation (such as a very clever upside down bicycle act) but overall there was a lot I’ve seen before, and delivered much better, though there is no doubting the twins’ skills and strength.

The grand finale involved this giant type fish bowl act with the two doing tumbles and acrobatics into and around it. Fairly impressive skills I’m sure but I couldn’t help but giggle at the “shower” that I’m sure some of the people in the front rows were getting.

Oh and the “and Friends” part of the title relates to a singing gymnast/dancer and saxophonist. Although both were clearly in there to provide some of the soundtrack and also to give the twins a breather between acts, sometimes their segments threatened to take over the show.

Overall, I think the boys have a good basic product but could do with learning how to apply the professional touch to it. Admittedly the show had a lot in it – acrobatics, comedy, video games, technology, and admittedly great soundtrack – but it felt like there was an overuse of the projection screen and some acts didn’t seem to really fit in or went overly long. A bit more spit and polish required.

Mary Poppins is one of the relatively newer musicals on at the West End opening in December 2004 so discounts tickets have been very hard to come by, therefore the Get Into London Theatre promotion was happily received by me and I jumped at the chance to go.

Mary Poppins has been on my to do list for quite some time so I was really looking forward to seeing the production – and I wasn’t disappointed. Of course Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are an extremely hard act to follow – but I think that the actress and actor playing their roles (sorry – names escape me) pulled it off fairly well.

The songs and the acting were on par with what I expected and the movie trademark songs (Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, A Spoonful of Sugar, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Let’s Go Fly A Kite) were toe tappingly infectious. There were also some new songs including Practically Perfect (to introduce Mary to the children.) The choreography was pretty good – but the impact was probably less for me as I was sitting off to the side a bit – and one stand out scene involved Bert walking up one wall, across the ceiling and then down the other wall. There were also some moments of magic with Mary pulling out a tree, lamp, and full length mirror from her bag.

What I enjoyed most was the set – it was in a word – brilliant. Somehow the designers were able to fit a two story house (17 Cherry Tree Lane) plus the roof on to the stage – with floors moving up and down as required. In addition to Cherry Tree Lan they were able to take us to the park, to the markets, and to the bank. Brilliant engineering.

Overall, Mary Poppins is a fairly enjoyable musical and, although Lion King still rates as my favourite, Mary Poppins definitely rates up there.

I’d booked to see the original show in Vegas back in 2004 but unfortunately it was cancelled so even though I was a bit hesitant about the price tag for the London show I figured it hey ho you only live once. I was not disappointed.

This is one “experience” that cannot be categorised – to call it “performance art” is understating it. There is comedy, theatre, music, art but again to describe it like this fails to capture the entire experience. The basic concept is three blue men who present a series of sketches/segments (and for those who have a mind even contains political messages) and although simply put this way, the actual production is the result of some very out of the box thinking.

The show actually starts with messages scrolling across two small LED screens on either side of the stage. Whilst people are still filing in, they held the usual messages such as: no photography, no film, no interval, no smoking and some other not so ordinary messages such as “Please take a moment to turn off all mobile phones, pagers, gameboys, palm pilots, skyliner wands (what the?), laptops and portable fax machines” because yes if I’m going to a show I will have brought my portable fax machine and it will be on.

Once the show formally starts these messages turned into all sort of messages from congratulations (we had the 1986 Booker Prize winner and some dude who worked on the Human Genome), to happy birthdays, to greetings (including a lady who had had tickets bought for her by her co-workers RyanAir – who was asked to show us the emergency exits), and even a commiseration to some lady who had a headache. Of course this all involved crowd participation which was quite amusing.

This actually proved to be a great warm-up and got the crowd going – which is an important part of the entire show – it is very interactive and relies heavily on a good crowd.

The show is fairly heavy on percussion (necessary to give the rhythm) and paint (for the visual aspect) and lighting (be prepared for a lot of strobe lighting) so be prepared, they are not used in all acts – just most of them! The brilliant thing about the show is the ability of the group to really use their physical surrounds from the stage, to the audience seating, to the roof above our heads, to incorporating projection, TVs, giant LCD screens, to the simple use of glass, whipped cream and projected images to present a story, to shoving a video camera down an audience member’s throat to see what the guy had for dinner! (well, sort of) and even using an audience member as a sort of giant paint brush – I was constantly amazed. One of the more simple skits was one blue man throwing marshmallows/clay at another who caught it in their mouth – I have trouble catching one when I through it in the air let alone 10-15 all in a row and thrown pretty much flat at me!

The finale involved giant rolls of paper being unrolled from the ceiling at the back of the audience to be pushed forward by us to the stage to some pulsing music. It created an interesting ocean of paper (paper which is recycled by the way!) I think everyone really had fun with that one.

Blue Man Group definitely gets my recommendation.

I wanna join the circus!! This is the type of emotion that tonight’s show invoked in me at the finale … and from what I could hear in most of the people around me too.

The spectacular tonight combined three arts woven into one story – the acrobats of the Chinese State Circus, the martial artists of the Shaolin Wu-Shu Warriors and the performers from the Peking Opera.

The show really is too amazing to describe and is something that needs to be experienced in person. You’ve got acrobatics, contortionists, the classic strong man, dancing lions (something that creeped me out when I was a kid but now I can appreciate the grace of them thrills me to no end), juggling, tight-rope walking on both the slack wire and double-wires in ways you couldn’t imagine (I mean they were doing things I couldn’t even do on the ground!), pole jumping, martial arts on and off the ground. The Mystery of 100 Faces was a pretty cool contribution by the Peking Opera too.

Unfortunately, it was over all too soon!

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the movie version of this play – Tom Cruise and Demi Moore versus Jack Nicholson back in 1992 which itself was based on the Broadway hit – so just a quick summary then: Rob Lowe plays Harvard trained lawyer Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee enlisted to defend two Marines ((Michael Wildman) and Louden Downey (Nick Court) accused of murder at Guantanamo Bay. He is assisted by pushy straight-laced Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway (Suranne Jones) and Jewish Sam Weinberg (Dan Fredenburg).

I was expecting the whole performanced to be played out in one boring court room scene with the audience having to rely purely on the script for entertainment. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the smart sets as the scenes switch between Washington base, the court room (view point changing as we reach the climax) and the Bay. Even the lighting adds to the feel military feel to the whole play.

As for the performances Rob Lowe was the main reason I went to see the play and although he is no Tom Cruise he delivered a charming enough performance. To me he seemed surprisingly slight on stage with less of a commanding presence than I expected. However, he did have the best lines and delivered them with aplomb. In other worthy mentions Jack Ellis plays Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep and although the well known line of “The Truth? You can’t handle the Truth” wasn’t delivered with as much punch – Jack Ellis played his role well enough.

Overall the play was much funnier than I expected (I don’t think I laughed at all during the movie) and if you get the chance to see it is definitely worth checking out.

That Ewan McGregor is one smooth character! Perhaps this wasn’t the perfect vehicle for his singing but there was definitely no faulting his stage presence, his acting and his dance moves. Very smooth!

R and I had booked tickets for this show back in July (!) and it was definitely worth the wait so that we could get the seats that we got – prime viewing to see this spectacular show. The sets and costumes (love the suits that the guys wear!) are relatively simple for a big West End production (though still fairly impressive) allowing you to enjoy the characters and storyline which is basically about gamblers and their ladies.

Oddly endearing “cheap bum” Nathan Detroit (Douglas Hodge) bets Ewan’s Sky Masterson that he can’t make missionary Sarah Brown (Jenna Russell) fall in love with him. In the mean time Nathan has his own issues juggling his engagement to Adelaide (played engagingly by Jane Krakowski) and avoiding the eyes of the law as he tries to find a suitable venue for his crap game.

The four leads have a great chemistry and nearing the end of Ewan’s run in the musical the bond between them really shows. Lots of great dancing (look out especially for the scene in Havana where Sky and Sarah dance their rocks off in a huge saucy number) and the score is swinging! The comedic timing is also spot on. What more can you ask for a fabulous musical.

This year sees Les Mis’ 20th year of performances in London’s West End. After all this time you would think that the show would be a just a little bit old and a little bit stale. To my pleasure it didn’t have that feel. With a new home (moving to The Queen’s Theatre from The Palace Theatre in April last year), updated sets, slight adjustments to the acts and of course an ever-changing cast this performance felt fresh and powerful.

The basic premise of the show (an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic novel) is the fight of the poor against the wealthy set against the backdrop of the Paris uprising in the French revolution. The audience should be warned that the story is not a simple one and at times I found myself having to give up on trying to follow the intricate story weaving and just sitting back to enjoy the performances – which I was happy to do. For the most part the tale is depressing but be assured that peace and happiness is found at the end.

The show definitely wowed me through the entire 3 hours (don’t worry – there is an intermission!). The singing was superb and heart-felt (even if a few songs did seem to go on and on at times) and was well supported by the orchestra. But mainly I was impressed with the ingenious sets and the great choreography that allowed scenes to meld seamlessly from one to the next.

If you are one of the few people in London who haven’t yet made it to a performance – get your skates on, get down to The Queen’s Theatre now and Hear The People Sing.