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Showing posts from December, 2005

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The brown word: Death on the Throne @gatehouselondon

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We’re warned at the start of the show with an upbeat number that this is not the usual sort of musical. And it turns out to be just that. But with boundless enthusiasm and energy from its two leads, who deploy a range of voices and breathtaking energy to create a series of voices for puppet characters, a bedtime story becomes a silly oddball tale about four souls stuck in purgatory. With puppets. And various toilet humour references. It’s currently playing at Upstairs At The Gatehouse . The piece starts as a bedtime story. Daddy (Mark Underwood) is about to read a bedtime story for Louise (Sarah Louise Hughes). But her stomach felt funny, and soon, she went to the bathroom. Then, for reasons that seem to only make sense in the confines of the show, they start telling the story of four people who died in unfortunate circumstances in the bathroom. Depicted as puppets, they’re stuck in purgatory as St Peter doesn’t have enough space for each of them in the afterlife. And so begins a puppe...
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Scenes from various parts of London Thursday evening. I kept getting the strangest of looks on the tube home with my luggage covered in plastic wrap. It was if I was carrying Laura Palmer home. Cling-wrapping your luggage probably isn't as popular here as it is in Australia as Londoners don't know that loud mouthed drug smuggler from the Gold Coast otherwise known as Schapelle Corby . I got the "Schapelle Wrap" as I wasn't confident that the zips would contain the 30kg of stuff contained within, and I didn't want my Aussiebum pants flying all over the cargo hold, rather than over any concern about what baggage handlers in Brisbane would do with them (or stick in amongst them)... Of course since everyone in Australia now is paranoid about 4kg's of dope being inserted by Brisbane baggage handlers the wrap is de rigeur. Incidentally while in Oz I heard a new jingle: Don't blame it on the sunshine, Don't blame it on the Bali Nine, Don't blame it o...
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Scenes from Heathrow Thursday 19:36 - After nearly an hour at immigration (where someone was arrested after walking around for 10 minutes yelling out what sounded like "Stella" in another language), Paul walks back into London... Incidentally as the plane was getting ready to land one could glimpse all the major landmarks of London (Tower Bridge, Westminster, The Eye etc)... Just another winter's night in London. Oh and it wasn't as cold as I was expecting... Temperatures were somewhere above zero for most of the night...