I first saw Rent on Broadway back in 2003 and was very taken with the story of these young struggling people on the streets of Manhattan. I also absolutely fell in love with the song Seasons of Love and the tune has stayed with me ever since. So when I saw that Rent (but Remixed) was now showing at the West End here in London I was surprisingly hesitant about going to see it. Sandra, however, was quite keen so taking advantage of an interesting recent deal on cheaper tickets Pauline and I joined her.

In keeping with the theme of Rent, the theatre have employed an interesting tactic of discounting tickets but not allowing seats to be reserved so it was first come first serve. Of course there are number of premium seats that are available for “rent” for those particular about where they sit and who don’t mind paying the extra £20-30. From our experience tonight my advice is that if you go for the cheaper option you should make sure to get to the theatre quite early to line up otherwise you will be stuck sitting right at the front or right in the wings. It was quite funny watching everyone scrambling around to find a good seat.

Rent Remixed is based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme where young aspiring artists (be it singers, performance or film-makers) living in abject poverty in New York’s East Village have to battle their inner demons, each other and ultimately the killer AIDS to survive. There is an interesting bunch of characters which includes a boy in love with a showgirl who is HIV positive and a drug addict, another boy dumped by a girl for a girl, and big stud of a man who falls in love with a drag queen, who later seems to die of AIDS.

In this version an attempt has been made to it for the now. Therefore the charm of the original, with its grungy messy set, tattered outfits and rock flavour, has been replaced by a clean white modern almost sterile set and with characters dressed in nice clean clothing that does nothing to evoke the bohemian feel of the original The music too has been updated and now borders on pop. It truly is a reflection of the current climate.

Overall the musical was okay if not particularly evoking the emotion and passion of the original. The singing was quite outstanding even if the acting bordered on the average. It also confused me a bit to have a couple of English accents thrown into the mix of the American ones. Nevertheless the cast clearly enjoyed themselves up on stage and it showed generally in their performance. I must also comment that the boys were all very good looking which didn’t hurt at all. 🙂 Denise Van Outen, as the girl who falls for another girl, was the big ticket star and she certainly brought it however embarrassing her character proved to be. She strutted on after the beginning of the second half and boy was she hot and feisty! She definitely left nothing behind and really camped things up and played with the audience. I was fairly impressed with her even though I’ve seen a lot of comments slating her. In contrast Siobhan Donaghy, formerly of the Sugababes, was awful in her role as a showgirl. Denise, I’m afraid, upstaged everyone.

The Museum of Garden History is probably one of the most unique places I’ve been yet for a gig. Hosted in the church of St-Mary-at-Lambeth tonight’s performers could take full advantage of the amazing acoustics that such a venue could provide. (Despite this there was a lot of faffing about at the beginning of the evening as the acts did sound check after sound check.)

It seems that this is not the first time that the Museum has hosted such and even. In fact this is the fifth year of a series of jazz festivals that Museum has hosted. Tonight it was Cuban Night featuring first up Robert Mitchell & Omar Puente and then second up Cubana Bop.

The venue as a gig sight is fairly interesting. Hot food, which is generally reasonbly priced and not at all junkie, is on offer as well as a fairly well stocked bar – stocked with wine and beer that is! There are quite a few tables set up (which are of course higher priced tickets) with plenty of standing room for the rest of us though it was awkward to find the best position to stand. Nevertheless it was Cuban Jazz Night so we weren’t expecting to be sitting for most of the perfomances.

Unfortunately the music wasn’t all that for dancing. The first act of Robert Mitchell and Omar Puente were … not great. Not at all what I expected I felt that the performance was self-indulgent and sometimes I was wondering if they were performaning for themselves or the audience. Or perhaps my taste is music wasn’t sophisticated enough to recognise rhythm in what they were presenting. Often the two went off into some improvisation piece that was neither pleasant on the ear nor enough to capture my interest. The second act, Cubana Bop, was much better and delivered much better pieces and to my surprise towards the end even had the mostly English crowd up on their feet. It was very much towards the end however.

Craig promised to continue the good times at Bar Thompson. See how happy everyone seems?

As the placard reads Spamalot is “the new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I’ve never seen the movie so from that perspective I didn’t have too many expectations going in however I’m familiar with Monty Python humour so I was expecting some funny moments.

The translation of a movie into the musical can be fraught with dangers and I think for the most part Spamalot has managed to avoid most of them. It wasn’t outrageously funny in the way a comedy such as Avenue Q is but it definitely had its moments with the humour coming across that typically dry English way with the funniest moments involving the French taunting and abuse of King Arthur and his Knights as they attempt to storm the French castle, the killer bunny and as Silvie put it the overall musical p!sstaking.

From a musical perspective the songs were well written and the pieces very well choreographed. The sets were pretty good – above average in themselves but also smart in the number and method of scene changes they were able to incorporate into the show.

Where it did fail was in the male cast, in particular King Arthur, who were surprisingly not as impressive as singers or performers as I was expecting. On the other hand I was very impressed with The Lady of the Lake, played by Hannah Waddingham. Waddingham delivered an amazing vocal performance and was highly energetic and engaging as an actress.

If you are suffering from a lack of silliness in your life then Spamalot is definitely the cure for you.

Tonight’s showing of Carmen Jones at Royal Festival Hall has been the closest I’ve come to seeing an opera so far. This musical adaptation of the opera Carmen was supposed to be my pathway to attending a full-scale opera but I’m not sure how much I would be into one after tonight’s showing.

Carmen Jones is set, not in the traditional gypsy setting, but into Cuba during war-times where a parachute maker, a sizzling scarlet woman, lays a trail of broken hearts until she falls in love first with one man and another before it all ends tragically.

There is no doubt that the Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi looked and played the part of Carmen well in her gorgeous outfits (first a beautiful red number and then later on white) however her voice, though no doubt on key, was lost in the huge room at times. The same goes for many of the other singers except X-Factor’s Brenda Edwards whose feet tapping number mid-way through the first half was definitely my favourite performance. My main struggle seemed to be with understanding what was being sung on stage (and actually at times even identifying who was doing the singing.) Sub-titling would have been appreciated!

Operas are supposed to be rather emotional and passionate and though this was a musical adaptation I still expected the same emotion and passion. It seemed to be rather lacking and to be honest none of the characters gain my sympathy. The set didn’t help any and I found it was fairly standard, and dare I saw boring, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra strangely placed smack bang in the middle.

I was hoping for more tonight.

The Christ of Coldharbour Lane brings to Soho the tale of a mentally unstable young man who is elevated to the heights, firstly in his mind and then eventually in the people of Brixton, of a messiah.

In the first half you see Omo depart prison or a mental institution (you aren’t really told which) a changed man. He is recruited by The Mission to talk the talk on the streets to encourage the Brixtonians to join the faith. He tries everything to get the people to join but has no success. All the while he believes he is Jesus reborn but refuses to perform any miracles.

The second half (note there is no intermission) was a strange departure from the first when, after Omo does perform a miracle, suddenly there is talk of conspiracy and government assassins which all finally resolves itself abruptly in revolution and the start of civil war.

There are a lot of random characters in Christ of Coldharbour Lane and no doubt every single of one them is an exact characterisation of typical Brixtonians. The lead character, Omo, is a strange mixture of preaching, socialism and African voodoo magic which to me was a bit confusing. The strength was definitely in the supporting cast of five who were brilliant in representing the hustle and bustle that is Brixton and to me utterly charming and outrageously funny at times.

There was a lot going on in this play and many messages to be heard so its certainly a play that makes you think but unfortunately I walked out of the play a bit confused and unsure where the play was trying to take us. The journey though was filled with a fair amount of laughter so it wasn’t a bad night’s entertainment.

What a crazy night! Lord of the Rings The Musical promises: “Thrilling music, enthralling choreography, remarkable staging and stunning design combine to transform Drury Lane into Tolkien’s Middle-earth in a mesmerising and spectacular theatrical event.”

Billed as the most expensive West End musical to date (costing at least £25 million apparently if you include the Toronto showing) LOTR The Musical definitely had a lot to live up to – I read somewhere that they will have to fill the 2,200 theatre to capacity for 34 weeks just to even break even! (Though based on what I saw tonight it shouldn’t be to much of a problem.) That’s a lot of pressure on a franchise which already has hugely popular books and movies to live up to. The fact that not only a week before one of the actors injured himself during the show only added to tonight’s intrigue. Happily there were no such mishaps tonight.

The show actually “started” about 15 minutes before the official start with hobbits running around the theatre chasing fireflies (how they made the fireflies is still a mystery to me today.) It actually reminded me of Cirque du Soleil performances where they get the crowd energised and ready for the start of the show with their clowns and other antics, and in fact the show does borrow quite a bit from Cirque techniques. From this it moved smoothly into the start of the musical, hobbit-music included, and you actually did feel like you were part of Bilbo Baggin’s birthday party. It was a good start.

I think it helps to be slightly familiar with the plot of Lord of the Rings because in trying to condense three books or over 9 hours of movie footage into 3.5 hours with a 20 minute interval some of the detail is definitely lost. Having said that it turns out there were plenty of spots during the musical itself which they could have easily cut and saved themselves a few more minutes here and there.

The most obvious and first impression you get from the musical is that the staging is simply breath-taking – from the forest extending out to the audience, to the golden ring through which we are pulled into the Shire, to the moving stage which revolved, lifted, and descended to convey a sense of movement and to the brilliant use of the lighting, in particular to make people disappear it was simply brilliant and truly creative.

The costumes were well made and imaginative with the undead, puppet spider and Balrog truly terrifying and the Ents on their stilts hilarious. Strangely enough the orcs seemed to borrow from the hyenas from the Lion King musical. Their movement was smooth and conveyed the sense of urgency required though I’m not quite sure why they were given such crutches.

The music was surprisingly effective though at times I think the elven singing went on for far too long and since they weren’t speaking English it was a bit of – okay get on with it. Aside from the singing and the songs the use of sound actually contributed quite well to the overall feel of the the musical drawing you into the emotion or feeling of the moment.

From an individual performance perspective the stage was shared by a wide-range of characters so everyone got their bit of time on stage. The acting was fairly so-so (but this maybe had to do with some of the admittedly cheesy lines the actors/actresses were obliged to speak.) The stand out performance was Michael Therriault’s Gollum. He had Gollum down pat from the voice, to the schizophrenia, and to the physical movements – all slimy and bendy and just generally fantastic. Too bad he wasn’t on stage for all that long. The elves had too many strange hand movements as well that had me giggling at inappropriate moments. Despite this Galadriel, played by former Mary Poppins Laura Michelle Kelly, did have her moments. No one can deny she has a beautiful voice and good stage presence.

So, did Lord of the Rings deliver on its promise?. For the most part it did – mainly with the choreography, staging and design (absolutely super!) The music and lyrics were a little less than thrilling but most of it was fairly pleasant to the ears and there were at least one or two songs that were memorable. At the end of the day there can be no denying that the star of the show is the set. I’m not sure what this says about the Lord of the Rings as a musical but I would recommend this show to anyone who is up for a true spectacle.