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Bear with me: Sun Bear @ParkTheatre

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If The Light House is an uplifting tale of survival, Sarah Richardson’s Sun Bear gives a contrasting take on this. Sarah plays Katy. We’re introduced to Katy as she runs through a list of pet office peeves with her endlessly perky coworkers, particularly about coworkers stealing her pens. It’s a hilarious opening monologue that would have you wishing you had her as a coworker to help relieve you from the boredom of petty office politics.  But something is not quite right in the perfect petty office, where people work together well. And that is her. And despite her protesting that she is fine, the pet peeves and the outbursts are becoming more frequent. As the piece progresses, maybe the problem lies in a past relationship, where Katy had to be home by a particular hour, not stay out late with office colleagues and not be drunk enough not to answer his calls. Perhaps the perky office colleagues are trying to help, and perhaps Katy is trying to reach out for help. It has simple staging

Overheard on Borough High Street

Man 1: It is hard running with this thing in my front... Man 2: Yeah and I'm cold... Man 1: Lets run on the spot... Man 2: Good idea...

Scenes from a church steps in Borough Saturday 19.52

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Scenes from a church steps in Borough Saturday 19.52 , originally uploaded by Paul-in-London . Cantaloupe

Scenes from Tate Saturday 15:40

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Scenes from Tate Saturday 15:40 , originally uploaded by Paul-in-London . Despite the warm sunny weather, hundreds of people still flocked to the Tate for the last weekend of the Hogarth exhibition . Warm sweaty (and sometimes a little smelly) bodies huddled close to take in the fine drawings, bringing suffering for art to a whole new dimension... Faces visiting the exhibition looked like some of the post-coital faces painted by Hogarth but it was probably just the hot weather and not something sordid going on in the members' lounge...

Scenes from Waterloo Station Sunday 16:07

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Scenes from Waterloo Station Sunday 16:07 , originally uploaded by Paul-in-London . I have no idea what they were doing here at Waterloo Station, but it did look rather impressive...

Partying and whinging

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Create Your Own Photos from the West End Whingers After a long day rehearsing for upcoming concerts with the London Gay Men's Chorus in deepest darkest N15 (that's a long way from Clapham), I went back to civilisation and the West End to a party thrown by the West End Whingers . The Whingers first noticed my blog after my account of watching Cabaret last year. There was mutual agreement that the show was rubbish despite all the critics going ga-ga over it (and the fact that it is still playing). Well anyway their blog is definitely a must read before a night out at the theatre. The party brought bloggers, along with wannabe whingers, fans, friends, miscellaneous people from the theatre business, and a dame or two. In fact we all had name tags to describe who we were and what we were doing there. In writing out my tag and putting the word "blogger" I realised it was the first time I identified myself as one. I never identified with that group before. Nevertheless I h

Theatre: Dying For It

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Liz White and Tom Brooke in Dying For It In a week of playing theatre catch-up, Friday night I managed to catch Dying For It which is based upon Nikolai Erdman’s once-banned satirical comedy The Suicide. It is a sort of silly story about a man who is propelled into celebrity for announcing he was going to kill himself and pokes fun of all sorts of people in society - particularly post-revolutionary Russian society but I was wondering whether there are any analogies for Islington society as well... I thought there were a number of similarities - artists, the intelligentsia, officials, ideologues, pragmatists, sex workers, unemployed - you get 'em all there... It is always fun to watch a silly play with a silly person. And that I did by seeing it with An. An loves farces and I think I have seen more farces with him than anybody else and so we were able to laugh out loud at double entendres about socialistic uprisings and sex and the like. Actually we do that anyway (the double enten

Scenes from the Victoria line Saturday 17.28

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Scenes from the Victoria line Saturday 17.28 , originally uploaded by Paul-in-London . After a long day of rehearsals for the upcoming LGMC concert Bad Boys , one's feet were a tad exhausted... Oh and this marks the first photo posted using the Nokia N95 camera... Hmmm

Film: The Lives of Others

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Ulrich Muhe in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others." Photo by Hagen Keller (image from film) I caught The Lives of Others this week. Set in the early eighties, it is a creepy drama-meets-thriller about a Stasi operative who spies on a famous writer for reasons that are less to do with state security and more to do with a woman and a jealous rival. The movie beautifully recreates the banality and subtle horror of a totalitarian regime before its fall. You get a sense that Formica has never been photographed so lovely. The story unfolds like a thriller but it is a little more than that, and its interest in human frailty is really what makes it stand out. Seeing it with M, I had to explain the history of East Germany as much as possible without annoying the other cinema-goers so it does help to have some understanding about post-war Germany before seeing it... And there I was thinking that everyone had seen Gotcha! so that would explain enough... Anywa

Theatre: Porgy and Bess

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I finally got to the theatre this month and saw Porgy and Bess - the musical... As somebody who had appeared in an all-white chorus of a concert production of Porgy and Bess back in Australia ten years back (don't ask) I was very familiar with the piece and curious to see how it was translated from opera to musical. The short answer is that it doesn't translate very well. Of course there were moments that worked well, particularly the numbers that are not operatic anyway. The plot was also a lot easier to follow without all those recitatives getting in the way too. But all told the production seemed to be missing a lot of drama and tension the opera has. Also while the soloists "jazzed it up" the chorus still sounded like an opera chorus, which gave it the feel of one of those period musicals rather than something new and different. In a way Porgy and Bess is already a musical (albeit a four hour sung-through one). Most productions in the past have made cuts to the o

Scenes from Jubilee Bridge Sunday 18:38

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Scenes from Jubilee Bridge Sunday 18:38 , originally uploaded by Paul-in-London . Matching pastels and thongs on the bridge to the South Bank... Well, after an afternoon of people watching on Green Park (a popular thing to do when the weather is fabulous) it seemed silly to stop...