Tonight I saw a show that was so amazingly bad I barely know where to begin with my hatred and disdain for it. Alas, as it was playing at a theatre that I work at, I’m unable to name the production or indeed the theatre for you, but rest assured it was truly terrible. I mean we’re talking Respect La Diva levels of terrible here. And you know I wouldn’t make such a comparison lightly!! A medley show of popular hits from the 70’s and 80’s (and the hits of one Scandinavian pop act in particular) it was bad to the point of making me start to hate all theatre and all music. Well ok, that’s maybe a slight exaggeration, but y’know, it definitely maybe me want to exit the theatre by the closest exit possible. Alas as I was working, that wasn’t a possibility, so I did what any self respecting theatre fiend would do and spent the vast majority of the show making catty and scathing (and in my mind, hilarious*)  asides to the other ushers whilst mentally starting to write a blog ridiculing it and cataloging it’s failings.

Despite my disdain and scathing throughout however, a curious thing happened as the elderly and infirm audience began to file out of the auditorium after the current fell. A theatregoer told me how much they’d enjoyed it. And without even the slightest hint of sarcasm in their voice. Whilst trying to pick my chin up off the floor where it had fallen in the shock, the same thing happened again. And then again. And then the companion of a man with learning difficulties told me that she hadn’t seen him smile for months, but that he’d beamed the whole way through. This was closely followed by an elderly gentleman who was struggling to walk without doubling over pain, straightening himself out and exclaimed “That’s made me feel 60 years young, and nothing does that nowadays”.

So do you know what? Whist it may have lacked ANY artistic integrity or originality whatsoever, and whilst I constantly fret that this type of show is killing off any chance of new writing getting produced and find an audience, and even though the sheer crassness of it all left me wanting to run for the hills clutching a bundle of Philip Ridley playtexts, I don’t feel up to arguing somethings failings when it left row after row of people with smiling faces. So I shan’t. (Just this once.)

Fiendishly yours xxx

*most things I say sound hilarious in my mind, but in reality probably aren’t. Sigh.

Yesterday I read a brilliant blog by Derek Bond with a useful list of do’s and don’ts when it comes to theatres managing their Twitter accounts (you can read it here http://www.derekbond.co.uk/?page_id=197)  and it got me thinking about which are my favourite theatre accounts. Having a scroll through those that I follow, it occurred to me that there are actually lots of accounts that could greatly benefit from being pointed in the direction of Derek’s blog! Sure, there are lots that are informative with details of upcoming productions and where to get tickets etc, but if you’re interested enough in a venue to follow their tweets then you’re probably interested enough to be on their mailing list or checking their website regularly so have this sort of info to hand already. What I really want from a theatre twitter account is a bit of humour, personality, interaction and the occasional birth of an amusing but pointless meme.

So taking all that into account, here’s my (in no way) definitive guide to the best theatre accouts on Twitter:-

I’m yet to find an account that I like more than @The_Globe, which (fairly unsurprisingly) is the Twitter account of Shakespeare’s Globe. They’ve managed to balance information giving with, competitions, fun stuff, facts about Shakespeare and some general tomfoolery. Oh and they’re great at engaging with their followers in a meaningful way as opposed to in a lip service way. Top marks!

Moving on, the Ambassador Theatre Groups account, @ATGTickets isn’t an account I’ve taken much notice of in the past but they got brownie points yesterday during the “Otters that look like Benedict Cumberbatch” debacle by issuing a challenge to their followers to find pictures of Johnny Lee Miller that look like squirrels. Still some way off @The_Globe’s overall effect, but definitely getting there.

As befits the national treasure that is the National Theatre, @nationaltheatre is worth a follow for info on the many different events they have going on, as well as some nice little insights into what goes on off stage. They can get a bit hashtag happy at times, but I’ll forgive them on account of their general brilliance.

Heading over to the big opera companies and both the ROH (@royaloperahouse) and ENO (@E_N_O) are doing a good job. ROH in particular have a nice varied stream of tweets coming out with a mixture of info, competitions and starting/joining some opera themed memes. They also get extra marks for tweeting links to videos of old operas/ballets.  ENO are also doing quite well, but are more heavily concerned with marketing their product, and can sometimes go a couple of days without tweeting.

Another favourite is the Young Vic’s account, @youngvictheatre, which wins marks for sounding like it’s tweeted by a real person with a bit of personality as opposed to a faceless, corporate, marketing machine and for making me laugh out loud on occasion. For example “We’ve added an extra performance for the sold-out Going Dark. Book now! Quick, like a bunny!”. I’ve no idea why this made me laugh, but it did, out loud, whilst at my desk, in my very quiet office. Whoops! The account is also really good at putting out alerts when they’ve had tickets returned for sold out shows, which is useful for a theatre fiend such as myself.

Whilst we’re on the subject of the Young Vic my final mention has to be to the “unofficial” Young Vic account, a kid brother account if you will, which goes by the name of @yvteabitch. Sillier, ultimately pointless, but it regularly makes me giggle and it gives great biscuit chat. And if great biscuit chat isn’t ultimately the point of Twitter, then I really don’t know what is.

Yours fiendishly Xx

Prompted by the seemingly increasing number of annoying f*cks that are attending the theatre these days, of which many were encountered at Sweeney Todd in the West End this week, here’s 7 of my theatre pet hates…..

1. People who leave a show the second it finishes BEFORE the applause has happened. Sure, you’ve got a train to catch, and sure, you want to beat the rush, but can you really not spare TWO minutes to applaud the people that have been slogging their guts out for your entertainment all night?! May I suggest watching a DVD at home is the arts medium you should probably be consuming?

2. People who talk or whisper to their companion. When I’m at the theatre the only voices I want to hear are those of the actors on stage, and the only words I want to be treated to are those of the playwright. I guess I’m just funny like that. Please keep your “I’m sure I know that one from somewhere, ohhhhhhhhhhhh, didn’t she used to be in Corrie?” and “I swear that’s not Michael Ball, hmmm no maybe it is, no, no definitely not. Must be the understudy. What do you think? Understudy? Oh you think it’s him. Oh, now I see it. Yep, definitely Michael Ball.” to yourselves, or at least wait until the interval.

3. People who eat in the theatre, or more specifically, the idiots who think no one can hear their incredibly loud crisp packets or sweet papers rustling. There aren’t enough expletives in the English language to adequately describe how much I HATE people who do this. You’re not in the cinema, you’re at the THE-AT-RE, you neanderthals. There are living, breathing, human beings there on the stage right in front of you, working their butts off (normally) for a pittance - the least you can do is pretend to be more interested in them than your Cheese and Onion McCoys. 

4. People who forget to turn their phone off. How long have mobile phones been around for now? 3 months, 6 months? NO. Years. Years and years and years. I’ve had one for 13 years. Hell, even my technophobe mother has had one for about a decade. But yet, some (idiot) people still aren’t able to grasp the concept of switching their phone to silent when they enter the theatre. It wouldn’t be *quite* so bad if theatres didn’t play those annoying cacophonies of ringtones at the beginning (the only place that’s managed to get this right is The Donmar Warehouse with the rather sarcastically performed version by the actors of The Recruiting Office played on period instruments). If you sit through the ringtones, and then fail to remember to switch your phone to silent, you deserve to be slapped with a lifetime theatre ban. Either that or you should be forced to sit through Respect La Diva every night for the rest of your life.

5. People who text/facebook/tweet etc whilst the show is going. Are you really so busy/important/bored that you need to use your phone during a show? Not only is it disrespectful to the people on stage (and believe me they can see you as this tweet from Mark Gatiss demonstrates “ @MarkgatissSchool’s matinee. A child in the front row texting. If she does it again I shall skewer her to death. #intervaltweets ”) it’s vastly distracting to everyone else in the theatre everytime the light on your screen comes on. If you think your need to text/facebook/tweet is more important than EVERYONE elses need to enjoy the show, you’re clearly the President of the United States or something and thus probably shouldn’t be wasting your time in the theatre anyway.

6. People who carry on talking once the overture starts at the opera. I mean sure, the curtain hasn’t gone up yet, and yes you’ve had a glass of overpriced wine from the bar which has loosened your tongue, but the instrumental music is just as much a part of the opera as the singing parts are and there’s still 30 odd people playing their hearts out in the pit for you. I guarantee cutting your conversation short about which shades of Farrow and Ball paint you’re debating between in order to listen to the opening bars of Wagners Parsifal will do more to enhance your life than a nursey painted in Mizzle ever will.

7. Latecomers. Last year I saw over 80 productions and do you know how many I was late for? None. Not one. Yet I can’t remember the last show I went to see where my focus and concentration on a show wasn’t shattered at some point within the first 15 minutes by people traipsing in late (other than Shivered at the Southwark Playhouse where the director has given strict instructions not to admit latecomers - bravo that man). And don’t give me any of this “London transport is a nighmare” bullshit either. We all know London Transport is a joke, so how about you try leaving a little bit earlier? Or not voting for Boris at the Mayoral Elections in May.

Darn it - had already accepted an invite to see Absent Friends tonight and then someone else has just invited me to the opening night of ENO’s Der Rosenkavalier. Will have to honour original plans (despite being DESPERATE to see my 1st ENO production of 2012!!) and wait until Wednesday to see Rosenkavalier.

Looks like there’s going to be £25 front-row day seats when Sweeney Todd hits town in March. *jumps for joy*

 http://sweeneytoddwestend.com/tickets-2/

Examining the futility of life, Haunted Childlooks at the juxtaposition between the ideology of childhood and the reality of adulthood. Ben Daniels exquisitely plays engineer Douglas who returns home to his family after disappearing some months previous to seemingly join a cult. His son, Thomas, is happy to see him, whilst his wife Julie, underwhelming played by Sophie Okonedo, is torn between her frustrating at his new found faith which caused him to abandon his family and a fear of being left alone to raise their son.

The play poses big questions - who is more right? The mother who has lost sight of what it is to have childlike hope and ambition in her desperate attempt to protect her child from the harsh realities of the world he is growing up in thus making it difficult for her to relate with her son, or the father who remembers what is to be a child and full of happiness and hope since he (misguidedly) believes he has found the answer of how to change the world for the better?

The writer Joe Penhall plays on our fears of living in a modern world which has ever advancing scientific discoveries where it’s entirely reasonable to presume that at some point the possibility of God existing will be scientifically disproved. The play questions whether despite some of us struggling to believe in the existence of something greater than ourselves for which their is no evidence, that the world might not be a better place when this happens as it will rob us of the option of having hope.

Thought provoking and questioning this play has the potential to become a modern classic, providing a snap shot of the current psyche, however the occasional lack of subtly and sensitivity in some of the writing and acting means this play still needs some work if it is to achieve such greatness and go on to reach a wider audience. This aside, it made for a unsettling and powerful evening of theatre leaving me with a sense that there’s a haunted child in all of us, grieving our loss of innocence and the days when we were protected from the reality of the big, bad world around us.

This run has now closed (once again I’m posting a blog late!), however, a new Joe Penhall play ‘Birthday’ is premiering at the Royal Court later on this year so look out for it!

Fiendishly yours Xx

I wrote here http://thetheatrefiend.tumblr.com/post/14923937112/day-seats-oh-day-seats-where-are-you a while ago about day seats in the West End and promised to update the blog with details if I tried for anymore. 

First up, Legally Blonde sell 10 tickets for £10, 15 for £15 and then the rest (no set number, varies day to day depending on how well the show is selling) for £25 for that evenings performance (and matinees on Thursdays and Saturdays). The box office opens at 10am and on the day I queued up (between Xmas and New Year) I arrived at 9am to find I was the first person in line. I remained the only person in line until about 9.30am so somewhat over egged it. Whoops. The box office manager told me that other than Saturdays, most days you can turn up at 9.45am and bag yourself a cheap ticket. I ended up with a £10 seat in the front row which made up in cheapness for what it lacked in sightlines…..

When I was on my way to the Savoy to queue for Legally Blonde tickets, I passed the queue for One Man, Two Guvnors day seats at the Adelphi Theatre on The Strand and I’m pleased to report that at 8.50am the queue only had about 5 people in it. The run with James Cordon in comes to an end in Feb so the queue is likely to start forming earlier and earlier but it’s well worth the queue. I saw this show earlier in the summer at it’s original home of the National Theatre and it’s one of the most charming and entertaining plays I’ve ever seen.

Next up, I queued up to get tickets for me and my lovely housemate to see the sold out Richard II at the Donmar Warehouse on New Years eve (for the matinee). They sell 10 tickets at £10 each (max of two tickets per person) each day, and then sell about 20 standing places for £7.50 each. The box office at the Donmar doesn’t open until 10.30am and I’d heard on the grapevine that day seat queues start considerably earlier than that, so I arrived at about 8am to find only 2 other people in front of me. It was a while until anyone else joined us, but I do wonder whether the fact it was NYE had an impact on this? I suspect the queue is forming much earlier now as there’s only 2 weeks left of the run and the lovely Eddie Redmayne, which it’s stars, currently being flavour of the month due to his BAFTA nomination. Either way, it’s well worth the wait for the chance to see this sold out production and if you’re lucky you might find some interesting fellow queue-rs to chat to as I did, including a lovely older gent who worked the box office at the Coliseum for 30+ years.

A couple of other shows to mention, although not ones I’ve actually attempted to get day seats for myself, but worth updating you about nonetheless. Ghost allegedly sells £25 day seats (box office opens at 10am) although I’ve heard rumours of people queuing up for a couple of hours just to be told that there isn’t an allocation that day once the box office opens. I get the impression that there’s only tickets available if the show isn’t sold out, so it might be worth checking this first before getting up early and standing in the cold. Crazy for You is also selling £25 day seats for each performance and I’m informed that you can turn up there most days a few minutes before the box office opens at 10am and be guaranteed a ticket. I’m yet to test this out though, so please don’t blame me if this isn’t the case! Finally, for that days evening performance (and matinee on Thursdays and Saturdays). Finally, Wicked sells 24 front row stalls tickets for £27.50 (max of 2 per person) from 10am every morning. I queued for one of these several years ago and as the stage is quite low at the Apollo Victoria, it was a great seat. If memory serves me right, the queue used to start around 8am, however I walked past the theatre on my way to a meeting a week or so ago and at 9.30am there were only about 20 people in the queue, so I would say at 9am queue start time would see you visiting the Emerald City quite happily.

More day seat info and queue times as I come across them!

Fiendishly yours Xx

*Just found this old post in my drafts - apologies for not posting it sooner. The run has now finished in London, but is bound to come back around at some point.*

Try as I might, I’ve found it hard to bring myself to care about productions by the ENB of late. Last years Romeo and Juliet left me cold (although that might be more to do with the narrative overall and whether it translates into a dance piece or not - too much stage fighting, not enough ballet for my liking), Swan Lake was beginning to look dated and The Nutcracker which I saw just before Christmas was lack lustre at best. I feared that a long time love affair had run it’s course.

But hurrah, Strictly Gershwin has returned the ENB firmly into my affections where they had previously been for many years since I started regularly making the trip to London from the New Forest as a 17 year old dance student to sit in the rafters at the Coliseum where they make their London home. A swirling mix of ballet, tap, jazz and song set to the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Strictly Gershwin takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the greatest songs of the 20th Century. With most of the music being instantly recognisable (and fantastically performed from a Big Band version of the Orchestra of the ENB, brilliantly led by the ‘dancing’ Gareth Valentine) the company of the ENB take us on an enjoyable journey from Broadway to Hollywood in a riotous celebration trimmed in bright lights and sequins. 

Accompanied by the fantastic Madia Vale Singers, Douglas Mills and Paul Robinson light up the stage with their tapping for Fascinatin’ Rhythm leaving a goofy grin on my face by the time they finished 4 minutes later. Each time they returned (for Lady Be Good and Strike Up The Band) I found my heart lifting and it made me wonder why there isn’t more tap on the London stage

Of the many young (and getting younger, or am I getting older?) ENB company on stage, the stand out performers for me were the young Vadim Muntagirov (a rising star seen in last year’s brilliant Agony and Ecstasy documentary on the ENB for the BBC), Kerry Birkett getting her tap on for Lady Be Good and Daria Limentova dancing alongside Vadim for Summertime. Esteban Berlanga danced a stunning tango to It Ain’t Necessarily So but lacked the charisma or gravitas to emulate the greatness that Gene Kelly achieved in the screen version of An American In Paris.

As the man sat behind me said at the end “What a perfect antidote to a dreary January day - I didn’t want it to end” I have to say I was inclinded to agreed. Shall We Dance, ask the ENB? We shall, we shall.

(Production seen on Wed 4th Jan 2012)

Fiendishly yours Xx