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Wine time: The Frogs - Southwark Playhouse

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For a show called The Frogs, there isn’t much amphibian activity in the piece. But being a show with music by Stephen Sondheim, you could be mistaken for thinking it’s a critical theatrical piece. But like Sondheim’s final musical playing at the National Theatre, while it may not be a musical that fills you with provocative thoughts, it’s a fast-paced romp through hell and back to save the world for the sake of arts. With rousing choruses, thrilling choreography and plenty of cheap laughs, what more can you want from the theatre? It’s currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse (Borough) . There isn’t much to the plot, except that Dionysus (Dan Buckley), disillusioned by the state of a divided world, and his sidekick and slave, Xanthias (Kevin McHale), cross the river Styx to the underworld to find a great writer who they can return to the world to teach the world about life. He has his mind set on bringing back George Bernard Shaw until he hears the poetry of Shakespeare.  This v...
Theatre: By the Bog of Cats with Holly Hunter

Holly Hunter in a West End play was too good to pass up at £15, so I went to Wyndhams Theatre to see By The Bog Of Cats tonight. The house was half full so there was plenty of room to stretch out in the theatre.

It was an updating of the Medea story to Ireland amongst the peat bogs and the travelers who live in them, so that might explain why it hasn't found an audience. Holly Hunter could stand on stage and recite a list of vulgarities and it would be still worth seeing her act of course...

At crucial moments in the story the man sitting next to me kept rustling his bag of nuts which was a bit of a distraction, and just before Hunter's character gets killed by a man with a white face (not sure about the logic behind that part) somebody's phone went off. The magic of live theatre...

Miscellany

* Liquorice Allsorts are back on my table.
* Was followed tonight at Piccadilly Circus tube station by a man in a pinstripe suit and a cheap backpack.
* Have started looking in earnest for nice place to live in fabulous location... That has own bathroom and broadband. Apart from that, I am not fussy.

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