Scenes from Balham Tube Station Friday 20:56.

Balham - gateway to the south - does have a few smart restaurants on and around its High Street. Friday night I went with A to Dish Dash, which is a smart Persian restaurant offering delicious meats on sticks among other things. A gay couple sitting next to us and celebrating a birthday offered us cake. It was that sort of night... Posted by Picasa

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Conductor John Eliot Gardiner keeps the music well paced. Dimitri Platanias in the title role sounded great and received a rapturous applause for his interpretation of the role. You get a sense more of the doting father rather than the court jester or cursed man here.

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Love is in the air in Strictly Ballroom, currently playing at The Piccadilly Theatre. It’s the musical based on Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 movie about a boy daring to dance his own steps in the cut-throat world of amateur ballroom dancing. The movie was full of irony and light-heartedness with its corny follow your heart and ugly duckling storylines. Here the musicalisation hits this message over your head as if you’re watching the fall of communism.
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