Category: not a book

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Actual proper culture from me this week with some Shakespeare. Although to be fair, Conclave got a bunch of Golden Globe nominations this week so maybe it’s two weeks in a row.

The RSC are back at the Barbican this winter with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This had a run at Stratford earlier in the year and has transferred in and as you can see from the programme, the big name here is Matthew Baynton (of Ghosts fame) who is playing Bottom. When I started writing this, I thought this might be the first time I’ve seen Dream done professionally* but I had totally forgotten that I saw the Michael Grandage Company’s production with Sheridan Smith and David Williams in it a decade or so ago. This is much better than that one. Much.

This isn’t one of my favourite Shakespeare’s (that’s Twelfth Night) but this production is a bit like a minimalist fever dream – with 80s inspired costumes in a big black space where lights and ladders can appear and the actors at times seem to materialise from no where. Baynton and the mechanicals are genuinely funny and their final performance capped a riotous evening that seemed to go by in a flash.

It always feels like A Decision to go and see some Shakespeare – so long, such language, not always funny when its meant to be but this was an excellent choice for a wintery evening – and as I happened to be there on press night, I also spotted several of the other Ghosts stars in the audience (to be fair I mainly spotted them in the bar at the interval) to support their colleague. A very satisfactory night out.

*although technically it was the first Shakespeare I ever saw – because Class Six did it as their leavers play when I was in Class Five, but I don’t think that counts. In case you’re interested, I spent two years in Class six (village primary, only six classes for seven years of school when I was there) and we did Bugsy Malone – I was a dancer at Fat Sam’s, and Twelfth Night – I was a recorder player at the court of Duke Orsino. As you can tell acting was not my forte

book adjacent, film, not a book

Book adjacent: Conclave

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Another Sunday, and another week where I’ve been out and about and doing a few bits and bobs. It’s been a few weeks since I talked about a movie so I’ve gone with that.

Conclave an adaptation of the book of the same name by Robert Harris. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on the differences between the two. But as the movie starts the Pope has died, and Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence is suddenly in charge of the Conclave – the meeting to chose the new Pontiff. A flock of cardinals descends on the Vatican to be cloistered together and vote. There are several different candidates and factions as the diversity of views in the church try to find a candidate the majority can get behind.

Considering that at the core of this is a group of old men voting, this is a suprisingly exciting movie, with plenty of twists and turns as votes go on and the situation in the Sistine Chapel gets tenser. And it’s got a pretty cracking cast: Ralph Fiennes plays Lawrence, who says (repeatedly) he doesn’t want to be Pope, much to the disbelief of some of his colleagues, and who has doubts – about himself and about some of the leading candidates. Stanley Tucci is Aldo Bellini, a liberal American cardinal who was close to the previous Pope, and who is one of the favourites going in to the conclave. John Lithgow is Joseph Tremblay, a moderate Canadian cardinal and Isabella Rossellini is Sister Agnes, the head of the Vatican housekeeping staff.

I really, really enjoyed it – the plot keeps moving and shifting, and the set design and cinematography make it feel cramped, dark and claustrophobic – a feat considering it’s set in the Vatican, a place filled with marble and high ceilings and designed to make you feel small and insignificant. The ending is going to be… divisive, but I thought it worked – and fitted in to the themes of the movie in general.

Conclave is in cinemas now – not sure how easy it will be to fine for long, but this week it’s on at both the independent cinema in my town that we’re members of and at the big chain.

Happy Sunday everyone!

concerts, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Avenue Q

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Something a bit different this Sunday – some thoughts about a show, but not really a review because it’s a bit more than that but also there’s nothing for you to book right now.

I took this photo at the end of the Avenue Q 18th birthday concert last month. I said on my Instagram that I think it might be the best photo I’ve ever taken – the cast looking back at their younger selves at the end of the show. That it’s a good photo I know because most of the cast have used it in their Instagram posts about the show, which made my theatre nerd heart happy. That I was in the position to take such a good photo is down to being quick on the booking fingers when the tickets went on sale – and snagging us prime seats in the middle of the middle of the stalls for the matinee show.

Who is us in this context? Well it’s me and my little sister. The West End production of Avenue Q opened just as I was finishing university, and as she was doing her A Levels. I think every theatre geek has a couple of shows that are formative in their development as a theatre fan, and this was one for us. It wasn’t the one that got us into the world of theatre message boards, but it resonated with us at the points in our lives that we were at at the time. If you’ve never come across Avenue Q, it’s a comedy musical that tells the story of a new graduate, Princeton, who moves to New York to start his adult life and ends up living on Avenue Q – a sort of grown-up Sesame Street and through the show he learns life lessons from people and puppets. One of the writers went on to write Book of Mormon, and the music for Frozen (and Frozen 2). It premiered on Broadway in 2003 and it actually beat a little show you might have heard of called Wicked to the Best New Musical Tony in 2004.

I saw the original cast three, maybe four times, and then saw it on Broadway with Little Sis on our five days seven shows trip a year or two later, and again in London with Him Indoors a few years after that. One of those times I saw the original cast I took my then boyfriend, who subsequently blamed it as a factor in our break up for “giving you ideas about needing a purpose”* which was… a stretch. Anyway. Moving on. It’s a show that has a special place in my heart. And it was wonderful to go back to it and see it again, with the actors we loved that first time. Twenty years after its first production there are some things that haven’t aged that well – they did a disclaimer at the front to that end, which felt sensible – but there’s so much that’s wonderful and the nostalgia factor was great too.

And the other thing about Q is how well the original cast have gone on to do. Jon Robyns who played Princeton has just finished up a run as The Phantom in Phantom of the Opera. Simon Lipkin is about to play Fagin in Oliver! in the West End after a successful run Chichester in the summer. Giles Terera has pack of awards for his theatre work – including an Olivier for originating Aaron Burr in the West End production of Hamilton. The only original cast member who couldn’t make the reunion was Clare Foster – and that was because it was opening week for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in which she’s playing the female lead.

Sometimes its hard to tell if seeing a show that you have such fond memories of will enhance your memories or detract from them – we actually avoided seeing a revival of one of the other shows that was seminal for the two of us a summer or two ago because we were worried that it would taint our memories of it – but I’m not sure we ever really worried about this one because it was the original cast and it was billed as “in Concert” although it was more staged than that suggests. So it was great to see the band back together and be reminded how good they are and how fun the show is. And for me and Little Sis it was great timing too – this was our last theatre outing before she has a baby and so seeing a show that means so much to us but that is also about new beginnings and new possibilities was a great way to mark a bit of a moment in both of our lives.

I hope you have a show you have as happy memories of as I do Avenue Q, and that you get the chance some day to have a moment like we did at the Stephen Sondheim for this.

*Other things he blamed: “those books you read and films you watch for giving you ideas about happy endings”. I hope your eyes are rolling as hard as mine are.

book adjacent, streaming

Book Adjacent: Rivals

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Back with a book adjacent streaming pick this week, because why not. And this has had so much advertising that you all can’t have missed it and as I’ve watched it I thought I should report back.

This is the pretty starry eight part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s legendary 80s bonkbuster novel, Rivals. Set in the Cotswolds, it’s 1986 and retired Olympic showjumper and now MP Rupert Campbell Black and his rival Tony Baddingham are jockeying for power. How are they doing that? Well it’s through the medium of regional commercial TV franchises. I know. That sounds bonkers, but it works. And yes – those franchises really were a thing. And there are a lot of storylines going on here from the huge ensemble cast. At the start of the series we see Tony returning to Britain from a trip to New York where he’s recruited a hotshot producer for his company Corinium and then poaching Irish journalist and interviewer Declan O’Hara away from the BBC. And it’s the arrival of the O’Haras that sets up a lot of the events of the series.

I’m going to fess up now that I hadn’t read the book when I watched this, but maybe that’s for the best, given that you often have a picture in your head of what everyone should look like and the show often doesn’t match up. So I went into this with no preconceptions or loyalties and I enjoyed the hell out of it. This is a over the top melodrama where basically every character is doing bad things to a greater or lesser extent. In fact, the only really “good” character in all of this is the eldest O’Hara daughter Taggie. Taggie is 20, and it’s her… complex relationship with Rupert that is at the heart of this and keeps it from vereing over into awful people doing awful things. And I thought long and hard about how to describe what’s going on between Rupert and Taggie, but it basically boils down to the fact that I know that the age gap is too big, and I know that Rupert is probably morally bankrupt, but by the final episode I really didn’t care!

This has also got a lot in it about the British class system – everyone in it is rich, but they’re not all posh. And the way you can tell is through a myriad of tiny and bigger things – from Valerie’s double glazing and uncertainty about whether she should be saying dessert or pudding, to Tony’s insecurity about his grammar school education compared to Rupert’s at Harrow and much, much more. It’s so clever. Oh, and there is so much sex. From opening on a couple joining the mile high club in Concord’s toilet to fourways and pretty much everything inbetween. Excess is the word of the day – and there’s a lot of 80s excess in here. Your mileage may vary on that – and also on the sexual politics. I could have done without Rupert’s behaviour towards Taggie at the dinner party and I could definitely have done the full visuals on the nasty rape in episode six, but for the most part I just tried to see it as a product of a different time that the show runners haven’t tried to modernise too much because if you did that you would lose a lot of the rest of what makes it so much fun.

I watched the first four episodes in Essex the other week, and I then watched them again with Him Indoors so that I could watch the rest of the episodes with him and I could happily watch the whole thing again – maybe now with the benefit of fast forwarding the bits I didn’t love. And can we have series two stat please – there is so much left unfinished they can’t just keep us hanging surely…

announcement, film, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Kiss Me Kate in Cinemas

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You all know I saw this three times at the Barbican this summer, so it’s my duty to report that they recorded the revival of Kiss Me, Kate and it’s coming to cinemas from today (17th November) and I am in fact going to see it, in my local indie today because a) I loved it and b) I want to see how it comes across on screen. It’s one of those event-cinema releases, so the dates may vary (the cinema where I’m seeing it is only showing it twice a couple of days apart at the moment) and you may need to look at either an indie or a larger multiplex cinema, but hopefully if you want to see it you’ll be able to find it.

book adjacent, film

Book Adjacent: The Count of Monte Cristo

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It’s Sunday and this week I have a movie to recommend, and it’s a bit of an epic. It’s not often that I recommend a three hour-long film, but honestly The Count of Monte Cristo didn’t feel that long because there is so much going on and it’s so much fun.

So this is the latest adaptation of the book by Alexandre Dumas (pere), and unlike The Three Musketeers, it’s not one of his that I have read so I can’t tell you how much this new French version has left out, but I suspect it’s a lot because it is a long book and covers a huge period. The early phase of this has a lot of “x years later” slates to get you to the point where Edmond Dantes returns to seek his revenge. But I’ve skipped a few steps. Here is the rough outline of the story, as told in the movie:

In 1815 Edmond Dantes, a young sailor, is falsely accused of aiding Napoleon and is arrested on his wedding day (before the knot can be tied). Betrayed by his friends and convicted by a corrupt magistrate, he is sentenced to life in prison. Some years into his time in prison, he meets an old abbé and while the two of them work to escape the Abbé educates him and also tells him where to find a mysterious treasure. On his escape, Edmond locates the treasure and sets himself up as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo and in the 1830s arrives in Paris to wreak revenge on the people who put him in jail.

I love a bit of swashbuckling adventure, and this really delivers on that. It doesn’t have as starry a cast as the two recent French Musketeers movies, but it has a similar amount of swagger and adventure, and as I said at the top, there’s so much going on that you don’t notice the three hour run time. You might have to have a hunt around to find a screening of it, but it looks amazing on the big screen – it made me want to go to the south of France again as well as being entertaining.

Have a great Sunday!

tv

Not a Book: Home Town

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Given that I’ve already written posts about two series about home renovations and made a romance about a home renovation a book of the week, it should not be a surprise to you that I love a show about renovating houses – particularly American houses where it seems like it’s much easier to rip things up and reconfigure than it is here in the UK. And with autumn being all cosy and making me want to nest, this is the perfect time of year to be watching them!

Home Town is probably my current favourite of the HGTV series – and I’ve watched a lot, including several on my various long-haul flights over the last six months. Home Town is set in Laurel, Mississppi and features Ben and Erin Napier, a husband and wife duo (as do so many HGTV series) who restore historic homes. In the majority of episodes, Ben and Erin show their renovatees (is that a word?) a couple of housing choices, and present them with a painting of how the exterior would look after it’s been renovated and then once the hosue has been bought, they renovate it without the new purchasers seeing what is being done (or at least that’s what they say!) until the big reveal at the end,when they’re also presented with that painting from the start – now framed and with The *family name* house written underneath it. Coz every show has to have a thing right.

Ben is a carpenter and woodworker and Erin is a designer and artist. The series started in 2016 and having recently watched some of the earlier series you can see how both of them have got better at renovating things and also how prices in Laurel have gone up as more houses have been done up over the last eight seasons. I find Ben and Erin charming and I love that her decorating style isn’t black and white with shades of grey like some (Christina on the Coast I’m looking at you) but is all about colour and pattern. I also really like their commitment to improving their small town – which seems really genuine and backed up by the fact that they own and run businesses in the town. It’s all very low stakes, and low conflict and just perfect for watching while you’re doing the ironing!

Home Town is on HGTV and Discovery+ in the UK. Have a great Sunday

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Mr McMahon

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Back on a streaming documentary this week, and it’s more of an interesting watch than an enjoyable one, and less of a recommendation than that word implies for reasons which I will explain if you read on…

The basics: Mr McMahon is a six part Netflix documentary about Vince McMahon, the professional wrestling promoter who ran WWE (or WWF as it was) from the early 1980s until basically the start of this year. Interviews for this documentary started before the 2022 allegations of misconduct against him emerged, and McMahon himself cancelled his final interviews for the series after this happened (as the series tells you several times). McMahon took WWE from one of a number of professional wrestling companies to the dominant force in the industry – but to say his tenure was not without controversy is to vastly understate the case.

This is the point where I say that I am not a wrestling viewer. In fact one of the things I say often when people ask me what sports I do (or don’t) watch (usually in the context of the Summer Olympics) is that I will watch pretty much anything except boxing and wrestling. During the dominant years of WWE, it very much just wasn’t on TV at a time I was watching (or channels I was watching). And lets be fair – I’m not the target market for it anyway. So I went into this not knowing a lot about wrestling other than the fact that Hulk Hogan was one of the biggest stars for a period, that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena started out in WWE and that there used to be loads of WWE toys in the Argos catalogue that I used to flick through when I was younger. Oh and that the women of WWE are called Divas, and that the winners are pre-determined.

So this was an eye-opening (and horrifying at times) watching experience for me. And of course I have no idea what has been left out, or glossed over or otherwise elided. But it does explain a lot – whether it’s how wrestling actually works, or about the wider state of the world in some ways. One thing that really, really comes through is the force of Vince McMahon’s personality. He says on camera that he doesn’t really want people to get to know him, and even in the interviews recorded after the 2022 allegations, the WWE employees are still incredibly reluctant to say anything against him – one of them describes the stuff they’ve seen so far as a hit job.

And I should say that we got to a point where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to the end of the documentary. The feeling started somewhere around the point where Owen Hart died (off camera but in the arena) during a Wrestlemania, and they continued the show, even with his blood on the ring, but intensified during the next episode where the Mr McMahon character and the Ruthless Aggression era just become overwhelming. But I was determined to stick it out to the end. And, oh boy. And that’s why I said at the top it’s not really a recommendation, because I came out of this pretty depressed that WWE still exists and is a thing, and that so much of it was allowed to happen at all, let alone in giant stadiums in front of baying crowds and then shown to worldwide TV audiences. But at least now I feel better informed about the world of wrestling, so I guess that’s something right?

Mr McMahon is on Netflix, you’ll probably need to be in a pretty resilient mood to watch the final few parts, and I would say go armed with a drink, but that’s not the sort of behaviour I should be encouraging, but I needed one by the end…

book adjacent, theatre

Book Adjacent: Pride and Prejudice (Sort Of)

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We are back at the theatre again this week because I had such a good time at Pride and Prejudice (sort of) on Friday night that I needed to write about it asap.

So, if you’re here and reading this, I’m going to assume you know the story of Pride and Prejudice. And this is a modern retelling of the story through the eyes of the servants, and with a cast of five each playing a servant and then various of the main characters, who sing carefully chosen pop songs at key moments. Here’s a trailer to give you a bit of a sense of what we’re talking about because it’s sort of hard to describe.

The London production of this won the Olivier award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play in 2022 and I can totally see why. The commentary on the events of the book is on point, the songs are witty (including Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow and You’re So Vain) and the running jokes are a hoot too. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought my mum who was sat next to me was going to cry laughing at more than one point.

We did wonder how it might work if you *don’t* know the story of Pride and Prejudice – which as I said may not be a problem for you but maybe your normal theatre going companion isn’t an Austen fan. Well luckily I know someone who went earlier in the week to me and who isn’t familiar with the original text and she also enjoyed it – her description was “pretty good” and she liked the meta-commentary on the events and also the sweary bits, of which there are a few. So I think it’s probably a pretty safe choice for a theatre trip – if you don’t mind a bit of swearing (my mum coped) and some double entendres!

We were the second stop of a new national tour around the UK – you can find all the rest of the dates here along with info on how to book.

Have a great Sunday!

film, not a book

Not a Book: The Thomas Crown Affair

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You know there are some films where if you come across them on TV you just end up watching them again? Hot Fuzz is one of them for me – and the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair is another.

Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown is a wealthy industrialist and playboy. And as we discover in the opening sequence, he’s taken to stealing art from museums for kicks. Rene Russo is Catherine Banning, the insurance investigator sent to find out what happened to the Monet that has gone missing from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She soon grows suspicious of Crown and the two start a romantic cat and mouse game.

This has got romantic tension and intrigue galore and two brilliant heist sequences to boot. You can’t help but root for Thomas, even though he’s stealing things, and Rene Russo is impossibly glamorous as Catherine. This is a remake (although somewhat tweaked and updated) of an earlier Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway movie of the same name, which I keep meaning to try and find and then never getting around to. But in terms of a film where people have cool jobs and live amazing lives in New York, this is right up there. Just try not to think too hard about how much money this must all cost – although at least to give this some credit Thomas is explicitly super wealthy and Catherine explains she gets a percentage of the value of the artwork that she recovers, so it fairs better on that front than say You’ve Got Mail or When Harry Met Sally!

The Thomas Crown Affair pops up fairly regularly on the various ITV channels in the UK, and it’s also on the MGM subscription service within Amazon Prime. And just a couple of weeks ago it was announced that there is third version of the story coming – this time directed by and starring Michael B Jordan. I’ll be going to see it just to see how different it is from the other two…

Have a great Sunday