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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...

Film: A Scanner Darkly

I caught the movie A Scanner Darkly on Wednesday evening. Based on Phillip K Dick's novel and set seven years in the future in California where the war on terror and the war on drugs seem to have merged as the same threat. The film was a trippy sort of story full of paranoia and hallucinations. It was probably deliberate that it all didn't make sense until the last half hour or so.

It was also a film that was shot normally and then animated using a process called interpolated rotoscoping which added to the dreamlike feel to it… In the end I kind of liked it as it was like a graphic novel. The only problem I really had with it was that it was a bit hard to take a movie about drugs featuring Robert Downey Jr and Winnona Ryder… It felt like watching a sensitive documentary on the holocaust narrated by Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise doing a community awareness spot on depression: just all wrong and a distraction.

The author acknowledges at the end of the film all the people who have done drugs over the years that he has know that are either dead or with liver failure, mental illness, bowels that don't function or some other problem… A nice message to send the audience out of the theatre with…  

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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Damn Yankees at the Landor Theatre is one hell of a fun, sexy show. A great cast of dancers and singers give this show about a man who sells his soul to get on his beloved baseball team (and give them a chance of winning) new legs and balls. It also helps to up the ante with the sexiness with some healthy doses of cleavage and legs (and that's just the men). The musical is a retelling of the Faust story set in the 1950s when the New York Yankees dominated the game.
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