It’s the final word of the NFL season against, and this year the Vince Lombardi trophy will be handed out in Las Vegas. I don’t think I’ll be staying up to t watch this year, but I might try and make it to the half time show, which this year is Usher.
I’ve written about the NFL before – here are my posts about me and the NFL, the Chicago Stars series and Swamp Kings. I’ve just finished watching this season of Hard Knocks, which was following the Miami Dolphins, and I’ve also been watching The Franchise, which has been following the Kansas City Chiefs – defending Super Bowl champions, who play the San Francisco 49ers tonight.
I was talking the other week about trends in romance – we’ve had famous people and normal people, we’ve started getting Taylor Swift-influenced romance s – and u expect in the next little while we’ll start getting pop star and NFL player romances. Mark my words!
Enjoy the game if you’re watching – enjoy whatever else tire doing with your Sunday if you’re not!
We finished off our time of work with a trip to the theatre on Monday tonight to see the new show from one of my favourite comedy theatre companies – Spymonkey.
Their latest show is another coproduction with my local – Royal and Derngate. This time they’re doing their version of The Frogs, but with an incredibly Meta twist. The original four monkeys are down to two – Petra is on “ long-term loan” to Las Vegas, where she’s the star of a cabaret show (except when joining the ENO for the Gilbert and Sullivan I saw before Christmas!) and Stephan died (yes, really died) in 2021. So as well as being drama’s oldest double act who go searching for a dead playwright in the under world, the Tony and Aitor double act is also searching for a missing person – and looking to a different future. And while it’s still gloriously silly and utterly bonkers, there is an edge of sadness about it. I was wondering if that’s only because I’ve met the monkeys in real life – I pitched a piece for work about their previous show at R&D and got to interview them and film them rehearsing The Complete Deaths, but Him Indoors hasn’t met them – he’s just come to see that shows with me – and he felt it too.
And because I’ve seen their previous shows is hard for me to judge how someone who hasn’t will see this. There are call backs to their previous shows and the hallmarks of their comedy. And this is the point where I say I’ve sometimes found it hard to work out who to recommend them to, because as well as being quite off the wall in comedy terms, full frontal nudity is a thing that happens in most of their shows, and that isn’t something for everyone! Anyway, we had a great time, I hope non-super fans do too and I’m not ruling out going to see it again when it transfers to The Kiln in London in a few weeks time.
I’m off to watch my DVD of Cooped aka Hysteria. Have a lovely Sunday everyone.
As I’ve looked ahead at everything else this January, today I’m doing a quick run through what I’ve got tickets for so far this year – as always I do a lot of my buying last minute, but there are a few things that I’ve booked in advance as ever.
Let’s do the theatres first and this week coming I’m catching the very tail end of the run of Backstairs Billy in the West End. It’s a comedy about the Queen Mother and her “most loyal” servant and it has good reviews. Then in March I’m seeing a new version of The Time Machine which had a London run before Christmas and is now out on tour. Then there’s a big gap until July, which is when I’m off to see Imelda Staunton in Hello Dolly!
On the comedy front, there’s a couple in the box already – Rhod Gilbert in April and then Henning Wehn all the way in October. I’ve only got one music gig booked so far – Caravan Palace in April. We saw them in early 2020 in one is the last things we did before the world shut down so I’m looking forward to seeing them again. And finally – we’re off to the Athletics this year too. No not the Olympics, the last event before the Paris Games at the London Stadium in mid July.
And just writing this out has made me realise that I need to get booking some more stuff! There are some more things coming into the West End this year that I should really get the tickets in for.
Two more shows this week and I just can’t stop myself from telling you about them! But that’s pretty on brand for me at this point, so I’m sure you’ll forgive me.
First up was Peter Pan Goes Wrong, which has had a Christmas season in the West End. I saw the original cast when they were touring the UK back in 2014 (I was shocked when I realised how long ago that was). Since then the Mischief Theatre Crew have done all sorts of things – many of which I’ve seen (Groan Ups, Magic Goes Wrong, the TV series) and now fresh from a run on Broadway some of the original crew are back in the show before it goes out (with a slightly different cast) on a 2024 tour. Having been asked to explain panto earlier in the week on a Discord group I treated myself to a trip to this not quite a panto but based on a panto. I was worried that it wouldn’t be as funny as it was the first time, but I shouldn’t have. It’s still side achingly funny in the first half and when it takes a turn in the second it brings it all back around in true panto style.
Heres the trailer for the TV version of Peter Pan Goes Wrong on YouTube- although I think the TV version doesn’t do the theatre experience justice.If it’s coming to your local theatre, and you like comedy based on physical humour, then this might be your thing. I think if you’ve seen and enjoyed shows like Noises Off then it will work for you.
And then on Thursday night we were at my local for Yipee Kay Yay – which is a one-man retelling of the classic Christmas movie Die Hard. I would suggest having seen the film before you go – we did a refresher the week before to make sure we were ready for it, but I think Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber is nearly well known enough that you’ll get some laughs out of it even if you haven’t. I bought the tickets for Him Indoors for Christmas because he loves a cheesy action movie and he laughed consistently the whole way though (so did I). I asked him to sum it up for you all and his response was: “one very enthusiastic man’s poetic take on the Die Hard movie and how it’s affected his life”. In case that doesn’t make any sense, here’s the 30 second trailer!
Now I’ll admit this is harder to see than Peter Pan Goes Wrong, unless you’re reading this in Oxford on Sunday or live in Adelaide – because it’s going to the festival there in March. But it was a hoot and he said at the end that word of mouth was important- so it’s the least I can do. Here’s the Website in case they add more dates.
Peter Pan Goes Wrong has a week left in the West End, then it’s touring til April. Here’s their website to check if it’s coming to you.
Having seen two productions of Private Lives in 2023, I thought I’d start 2024’s NOt a Book selections by flagging a documentary I watched over Christmas about the play’s author, Noel Coward.
This is a ninety minute journey through Noel Coward’s life, mostly told in his own words. This is largely told in his own words – through clips from TV appearances and home movies, with extracts from his writings read by Rupert Everett and the whole thing narrated by Alan Cumming.
I’m a pretty big theatre-goer (as you probably know by now!) and so I’m fairly aware of the impact that Noel Coward had on the theatre – I’ve seen Private Lives live four times now (in three different productions), Blithe Spirit twice and Hay Fever as well. I probably should have seen more, but historically I went to musicals more than plays, and plays also used to be harder to get cheap tickets to (although that is now improving/changing). Even if you’ve never seen his work, you may have a distinct image of him in your head -smoking a cigarette and wearing a dressing gown and talking in a very clipped upper class British accent. And you’ll hear Coward referred to as “a witty raconteur” – which can often mean “humour may not translate”. But actually when I was watching this I found him genuinely funny and his life is actually fascinating – his childhood in poverty, building a theatre career, being gay in a time when it was illegal – but not exactly hiding it either, and then when his plays fell out of favour, reinventing himself on the cabaret circuit.
If you already know about Coward, I’m not sure that there’s going to be a lot here that you don’t already know, but for the rest of us – who don’t want to wade through three volumes of autobiography or try to figure out which is the right biography to go for this might do the trick – we certainly enjoyed it while we were watching it – and I spent more time paying attention to the screen than reading my book, which is not always the case!
If you’re in the UK, it’s being repeated in the early hours of the 11th, and you can watch it on iPlayer for the next 11 months.
Happy Sunday everyone, I’m back again with my latest binge watch, this time brought to you thanks to three months free Disney+ from my mobile phone provider!
So in case you’ve missed it, the set up here is that three strangers living in the same New York apartment building discover a shared interest in true crime after another resident of the building is found murdered. And as they investigate the murder together, the launch their own true crime podcast about it called… Only Murders in the Building. Oh and it’s a comedy. Steve Martin is Charles-Hayden Savage, star of a 90s crime drama but currently struggling for work, Martin’s long time friend and sometime collaborator Martin Short plays Oliver Putnam, a washed up theatre director and Selena Gomez is Mabel Mora, an artist living in her aunt’s unit in the Arconia.
At the end of each season, someone new gets murdered – and that case will be the subject of the next season – with Charles, Oliver and Mabel implicated in some sort of way in the crime. And I’m really trying not to say too much about the rest of the plot, because all the season build on each other and I don’t want to spoil anything. The episodes are all sitcom length (aka about 26-28 minutes, an American TV half hour) and it’s incredibly easy to binge. I think we did all of season one and two across about 4 (weekend) nights, and then waited a few weeks for all the season three episodes to be released before we binged that one – again across only a couple of nights. I know it sounds a bit weird to have a comedy series about murders, but it really works – and if you’ve listened to any true crime podcasts there are plenty of jokes here about them too – especially in season two.
Despite my caution above about spoilers, I’ve put the trailers for all three series in here (and I don’t think they’re going to ruin anything), because I think it’s fun to see how the show has developed – and how the guest stars have got bigger and bigger. At the start, aside from the main trio it’s faces you might recognise from TV but who have been bigger stars on stage (or at least they have if you know your Broadway) but by series three we have Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd (and not just as cameos) as well as Matthew Broderick (to complete original The Producers Broadway duo as Nathan Lane was in series one) and Jesse Williams – who did twelve years on Greys Anatomy and did a Tony nominated turn on Broadway in 2022 too, just to complete all the theatre links. And there are a lot of theatre links here. I started looking at how many people in the cast had won or been nominated for Tony Awards and it’s insane. Along with Short, Lane and Broderick who all have at least one, I counted at least 8 other Tony nominees or winners in the cast across the three seasons.
It’s been renewed for season four, but given that we’ve just had an actor and writers strike, who knows whether it will actually appear in autumn 2024 or whether we’ll have to wait a bit longer. It’s getting its US TV debut (on ABC) in the new years, so I guess it may come to UK TV at some point too – although it hasn’t so far. But if you happen to have a Disney+ subscription (or someone gives you one for Christmas) this is a really fun way to spend about 15 hours…
I was somewhat surprised that I had missed the furore about the Twin Flames Universe until a month or so ago when I started seeing articles about two documentaries coming along the track. And as you all know American Religion and Cults are one thing that will get me watching a documentary – or two – so of course I’ve watch the Amazon Prime and Netflix docs *and* I’ve listened to the Wondery Podcast series, and now I’m here to report back to you.
So lets start and in case you also haven’t encountered The Twin Flames Universe, the very basic summary is that it’s a cult run by a husband and wife, based on the idea that everyone has a “twin flame” soulmate and that they can find yours for you, if you just pay them enough money for classes and instruction…
Both the documentaries explain the early lives of Jeff and Shaleia and how they met and started making their own self help videos on YouTube and evolved into relationship coaches and then… well. It’s as lot and some of the allegations are pretty awful. And the two documentaries cover a lot of the same ground in many ways, but I would say that the Netflix doc is much, much bleaker. It gets to the grimmer end of the allegations much quicker than the Amazon one, which for two thirds of the time seems like it’s creepy rather than actively sinister. The Netflix one has more of a true crime feel from the start.
There is some crossover between the two documentaries – with some of the same former Twin Flames Universe members featuring in both, but there are different talking heads and experts. I’m glad I watched both because I think they both offer different things – the Amazon one is easier to see how people get hooked in to the content, the Netflix one goes deeper on the most serious allegations. And what makes these documentaries off from a lot of others is that the TFU operates by video conferencing and over Zoom – and they have recordings of Jeff and Shaleia’s sessions so you can see their coaching and what they’re doing rather than just being told about it over long shots of a house or blurry anonymised people recreating things. And it does make quite a difference.
Neither of them quite hit the bleakness of Keep Sweet – the documentary about Warren Jeffs and his Fundamentalist Mormon Church, but it’s still pretty grim. So maybe wait to watch until you’re in a good resilient frame of mind.
You obviously need a couple of subscriptions to be able to watch these – and for that I apologise, but they are worth a look the next time you have the appropriate subscription active.
Ok, ok, this is starting to look a little like boasting, but these were the last things I had in the ticket box before Christmas so I’m going with it!
The first show of the week was Noises Off – again! Yes I only saw it at the start of the year, but it’s back in the West End for Christmas, with a slightly tweaked cast – with Tamzin Outhwaite, Matthew Horne and James Fleet joining Felicity Kendal, Alexander Hanson and the gang. This time I booked steaks tickets on the side that Lloyd-the-Director hangs out in during the first act, so that added a little some thing – and it’s still hilarious.
Tuesdaynight was a really last minute trip to see Private Lives – not the production that I saw at the Donmar Warehouse but one that had older leads with Nigel Havers and Patricia Hodge as Elyot and Amanda before it closed this weekend. I still love the play – but this was the least favourite of the three productions of it that I’ve now seen ( and it should be noted that I loved the Anna Chancellor and Toby Stephens so much I went twice) but it was interesting to see it done with a different age of cast.
And finally, no photo but on Thursday night we went to see some comedy – Dave Gorman at my local theatre’s and that was so, so, so funny. I nearly cried laughing at one point. If you’ve never seen Davec and his PowerPoints I thorough recommend him. I think this is the back end of this tour, but we’ve seen him before and he’s consistently very funny.
And that’s the lot, but it spreads feel like quite a lot – have a great Sunday everyone!
A bit of a change this week because I had two nights out at the theatre, both of which were great and both of which were sort of one off things. So I’m bundling them together today because I wanted to talk about them anyway!
So I started the week with a night out at the Jinkx and Dela Christmas show – I went last year and it was fab, and it was equally brilliant this year. BenDeLaCreme is my all time favourite from Drag Race and she and Jinkx Monsoon are a brilliant pair. This years show is a bit meta – they decide they don’t want to do a holiday show, but get trapped by the show and have to do it anyway to try and escape and it’s really a lot of fun. The UK dates are over now, but there’s nearly two dozen across the US before Christmas – and if they’re coming near to you it’s definitely worth the trip.
Tuesday night was Mandy Patinkin, doing a solo concert run in the West End for just under two weeks. I went because he’s a bit of a Broadway legend – Tony award for originating Che in Evita, original George from Sunday in the Park with George – and I like to see the big names from across the pond when they come over here if I possibly can, but I wasn’t expecting him to manage to make me cry – twice! It’s a really well put together show, with loads of songs, some you’ll have heard of, some you won’t (or at least I hadn’t) and it’s just him and his pianist and a chair (and a towel). That’s it. And yet his singing – even at seventy years old – can make you feel so much emotion. Really worth it, even though there is very little legroom in the side of the circle at the Lyric. So very little. I think it must have been where I saw Avenue Q with Him Indoors years ago where we were nearly late and the seats were so cramped that Him Indoors never managed to get into the spirit of the show. I won’t forget again…
I have two more trips planned this week – I’m making the most of the run in to Christmas while I can!
I’m planning a quiet day this Sunday, but this year I’ve been thinking a lot about my great uncle Harold – because he’s popped up in a family history content. He signed up to fight in World War One when he was underage, and was wounded very early on – and left with a permanent leg injury. He worked at a model making company for his professional career, including making the model of the floating harbour at Arromanches that you can see in the museum there. How many other stories like that are there out there the people don’t know about?
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 