Tag: Covent Garden

Six, The Musical and Dinner in Covent Garden

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

I had been hearing such good things from friends about Six The Musical so I decided to go and see it for myself. The show is on at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand. I paid approximately £130 for two tickets for a Saturday evening performance. We were seated in the upper circle, the seats couldn’t really have been better.

We caught the train from our local station to Charing Cross and then had a mooch around Covent Garden. Most of the shops were closed but there was still an buzzing atmosphere with , street performers such as contortionists, magicians and musicians. We went to Buns and Buns and had a steak dinner with a large glass of wine which was delicious.

The first, and only negative, thing I will say about Six is that it is unnecessarily loud, so loud in fact I did actually worry about damaging my hearing when it started. The show was written in 2017 by Cambridge University students Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss and was first performed by the university’s musical theatre group at the Edinborough Fringe Festival. Six is the tale of Henry the Eighth’s six wives, all told through song and dance. It has a similar fast-paced, high-energy vibe to Hamilton. The performers playing the wives enter the stage wearing various sexy interpretations of Tudor costume. All the musicians are women too, it is definitely a Girl Power show.

Each “wife” sings a number summarising how she met Henry and what fate befell her. Some of the tales are extremely sad. Tickets to Six would be a great gift idea for anyone studying history and I learned some facts that I hadn’t known before. Ann of Cleves was chosen by Henry after he saw a portrait of her by the German artist Hans Holbein. When Henry saw Ann in the flesh he declared she was ugly and their marriage was eventually annulled. She was luckier than Ann Boleyn and Catherine Howard though who famously lost their heads. Ann of Cleve’s musical number is very night-clubbish and there is a strong element of fun and humour throughout the whole musical. There is strobe lighting at a number of points in the show. My favourite performance was from Thao Therese Nguyen, the actress playing Anne Boleyn who somehow managed to stand out on a stage crowded with female talent.

Unusually, the show lasts for about an hour an a quarter, there is no interval. To be honest, I wish more productions were like this. I imagine the theatre loses a lot of revenue though as theatre-goers aren’t buying drinks in their bar or purchasing merchandise. We had sped through some really interesting herstory, pardon the pun, and were back home by 9.30am. A pretty perfect evening.

Thank you for reading

Samantha

Mean Girls – The Musical, a Review

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

My daughter’s twenty first birthday is fast approaching but she will be at university, taking exams. I thought it would be nice to take her out for lunch in Covent Garden and then on to see a show. I looked at what was on and decided to book tickets for Mean Girls which has recently opened at The Savoy Theatre on The Strand. I paid around £200 for two tickets for a 2.30pm Saturday matinee perfomance.

From the town where we live to Charing Cross is around a half hour train ride and then we walked to Covent Carden and had a look around the East Collanade Market which has dozens of stalls selling handmade items, similar to the sort of thing you might find on Etsy. We stopped off for lunch at a pizza place and then went on to the theatre.

The Savoy Theatre is covered in scaffolding at the moment but there is a big banner outside so it was easy to find. In the lobby there is a stand selling some merchandise such as “I’m a Massive deal” tote bags for £20 and “On Wednesdays We Wear Pink” T shirts , also £20. I have only seen the Lindsey Lohan movie once and wasn’t aware that there has been another film made in 2024 so the catch phrases didn’t mean much to me. There were lots of little girls in the lobby dressed in boucle mini dresses (the Mean Girl uniform) which was surprising to me, I thought the target audience would be much older than six or seven years old.

Although the tickets stated that audience members should arrive by 2pm the theatre was very slow to fill. We had terrific seats but, annoyingly, a huge man sat right in front of me blocking my view so I had to spend the entire performance peering around him. While we waited, the backdrop was back-lit pages of the “burn book” featued in the story which wasn’t very inspiring to sit and look at. Then the show started and we are introduced to the characters of Damian and Janice, the school’s arty, gay outcasts. Damian has a crush on George Michael and this is a running theme in the set design.

If you haven’t seen the film, written by comedy genius Tina Fey, the story revolves around the character of Kady Heron, played by Charlie Burn. Kady has has recently moved to Illonois from Kenya and High School with its different cliques is rather a revelation to her. The school Queen Bee is Regina George, played by Georgina Castle, who presides over The Plastics, a clique of pretty, popular, shallow and insecure “mean girls” who are all desperate to be Regina’s best friend. The most memorable moment of the show was Regina’s majestic entrance onto the stage. Despite being a maths wizard, Kady finds herself damping down her academic ability and morphing into a Plastic herself and decides to topple Queen Regina when they clash over a boy, Aaron.

To be honest the whole production felt slightly amateurish, particularly the dancing, and some of the singing was a little screechy, even from the leads. Georgina Castle, Elena Gyasi (Gretchen) and Grace Mouat (Karen) were the stars of the show and Tom Xander provided the well-timed comic relief. The songs were fun to listen to but, in my opinion not very memorable apart from Karen’s solo “Sexy”. There was one instance were Janice hopped into a scene to clarify what was going on which was irritating and unnecessary. The cast seemed very joyful and genuinely delighted to be there which is always contagious and it is definitely a feel-good production. I enjoyed Mean Girls and so did my daughter, it isn’t a show that I would go and see again but we left the theatre feeling uplifted and entertained.

Thank you for reading

Samantha

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A Trip To The Theatre – The Mousetrap

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

My friend Helen and I like to go out somewhere nice every few months or so. In between these trips we will go for walks to the cinema or just have a coffee but we both work hard and like to treat ourselves to a theatre trip or visit a nice restaurant once in a while. Just for a change of scene as much as anything else I think. It’s also nice to have a catch up during the train journey into London.

This time we decided to go and see the long-running play The Mousetrap. Based on the famous murder mystery by Agatha Christie, it is the longest running play in the West End, showing since 1952 . I was in two minds about going to see this because, thanks to an unwelcome spoiler on a radio arts show, I already knew whodunnit but it seemed like something we would both enjoy and reasonably priced tickets were available.

We decided to go for dinner before the show and I booked a table at a small restaurant called Violas in Tavistock Street. As seems to be the case nowadays I had to provide my card details when booking online and was informed that, in the event of us not attending, I would be charged £40. This is the steepest no-show fee I have encountered but I suppose it is Covent Garden. Anyway, Violas is very prettily decked out with lots of artificial flowers everywhere (must be a nightmare to dust) and there are faux fur throws on the back of each chair. The staff were unsmiling apart from the French manager who was running up and down the stairs to the kitchen every five minutes and apologetically explaining to customers that there would be at least a twenty minute wait for their food. This obviously isn’t ideal if you have to be at the theatre at Seven O’Clock and the party on the table next to use took their food away in take-out boxes and asked for the service charge to be removed from the bill. 

I ordered the Black Truffle Pasta which was absolutely delicious . Helen wanted the Salmon but this wasn’t available so she ended up with the Prawn Pasta. Her dish was a plate of tagliatelle with a few prawns, one sliver of aubergine and not much else. Disappointing. We both had a coke to drink and the bill, including tip was about £50. I would have liked a desert but we ran out of time.

Thanks to the miracle that is Google Maps and Helen’s navigational skills we found our way in the nick of time to St. Martin’s Theatre in West Street. We had paid £40 for each of our tickets and we were sitting very high up in the Upper Circle, the stairs are very steep and quite deep. There was a long queue for the two cubicles in the ladies toilets which would have benefitted from a freshen up. We decided not to have a drink during the interval although we did go into the tiny bar which is right behind the light-up sign. The window was open and it was nice to get some fresh air as I had an immovable migraine. As is typical of these old theatres, there is very little leg-room between the seats. It would have nice to have had the option of borrowing some of those little binoculars, or Opera Glasses, to see the actor’s faces more clearly. 

Although I already knew who the villain was, I knew very little about the story itself. Set in a guest house called Monkswell Manor, it tells the story of the two young guest house owners who find themselves hosting an odd assortment of strangers during a snowy night. There has been a shocking murder nearby and investigations have led the local police sergeant to their door. I thought the actors were speaking too quickly at the beginning and it took me a while to settle into the story which, to be honest, was a bit daft but enjoyable. Another friend coincidentally went to see The Mousetrap the night before us and she described it as “a homely play” and that seems quite an apt description.

The woman sitting next to me kept whipping out her iPhone and checking her social media. She was in her fifties, old enough to know better and I found it very distracting. She also kept muttering the dialogue under her breath. She seemed a bit strange so I just tried to ignore her.

We enjoyed The Mousetrap but I was pleased we hadn’t spent a lot of money on the tickets and it definitely isn’t something I would want to see twice. We walked back to Charing Cross station where a train was already waiting on the platform. Towards the end of the journey a very drunk man walked through the carriage asking the other passengers for money. This can be very intimidating, especially if you are travelling by yourself. He didn’t cause any trouble though. We were back in our home town by ten forty five.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha