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Belters and bohemians: Opera Locos @Sadlers_wells

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At the start of the Opera Locos performance, the announcement says that they really are singing. You could be forgiven for wondering that, given the amplification turns up the backing track and the voices so loud that you can't always tell what's real. But this is a mostly harmless and slightly eccentric blend of opera classics fused with the occasional pop classic. However, recognising the pop tunes would help if you were over a certain age. The most recent of them dates back twenty years. It's currently playing at the Peacock Theatre .  Five performers play out a variety of archetype opera characters. There's the worn-out tenor (Jesús Álvarez), the macho baritone (Enrique Sánchez-Ramos), the eccentric counter-tenor (Michaël Kone), the dreamy soprano (María Rey-Joly) and the wild mezzo-soprano (Mayca Teba). Since my singing days, I haven't recognised these types of performers. However, once, I recall a conductor saying he wanted no mezzo-sopranos singing with the s
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Scenes from Tottenham Court Road Tube Saturday 19:23 - The long walk down the stair shaft... 99 steps... 
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Scenes from Tooting Common Thursday 08:09 - a frosty reception going to work... 

Television: Celebrity Big Brother

I have started to pay a little more interest in Celebrity Big Brother as tonight I caught some highlights showing transsexual Pete – famous in the eighties for that song "You Spin Me Round (Like a record)" doing a repeat performance of his one hit wonder. It was an amazing act of desperation. Pity he has so much plastic surgery his face looks like a mask. The rest of the "celebrities" includes ex-basketball player Dennis Rodman and Michael Barrymore. Barrymore lives in New Zealand after some guy turned up dead in his swimming pool in the UK but he is fondly enough remembered in the UK for most of the papers to warn the other contestants to skip the swimming lessons with him…

Movies: Match Point

Today was one of those cold windy and wet days so it was a perfect opportunity to go to the movies. Match Point had just opened and being a new Woody Allen flick (and his first to be shot in London) it was well worth going to… Or so it seemed. It turned out that the story was a series of clichés held together by some pretty bad acting / pouting on the part of lead actor Jonathan Rhys-Myers. There was also a rather absurd plot development of two murders committed by a shotgun that took place in a central London apartment block with not a CCTV camera in sight. In real London six cameras would have caught the murderer's every move (unless the cameras had burnt out or malfunctioned)… Part way through the film A asked me if I was seeing a lesson in the film for me and I whispered back to him that the lesson from this film is to not screw around with your tennis coach as they can be such nasty bitches... The locations were bog-standard spots and included St Mary Axe ("the gherkin&q

Overheard in the gym Friday...

Man #1 : You’re looking great… You’ve got a great colour! Man #2 : Oh I’ve just been to the Canaries for a week… (I was in Australia for eight and all I got to show for it was a slight farmer’s tan…)
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Scenes from Waterloo Tube Saturday 00:16 - Heading towards the Northern Line branch 
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Scenes from Tate Britain Friday 18:54 - There was a long queue just to leave (or pick up as I was doing) your things at the cloakroom. The Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition is closing soon and so Friday night at the Tate was popular (it was also half price). It is a smart idea going to the late night showings, just get there at 17:30 as by 7pm you could barely move. It's a great exhibition, but not when you need lubricant to get through the crowds...