Sweeney Todd

Earlier in the year, for my birthday in fact, Mister M took me to the Abbey to see Julius Caesar and we were so pissed off with the whole experience that we left at the interval. There were three reasons for this.
1) People in the theatre were talking along with the famous bits
2) The acting was poor to shouty. There was none of the seemingly relaxed, conversational style of Shakespeare acting that we had witnessed in Anto and Cleo in February
3) The seats were deathly uncomfortable, even allowing for our noble girth. I, a woman with notoriously short legs (just ask my tailor), was jabbed in the knee by the girl in the seat in front of me every time she reached for her mobile phone, which was every five minutes

I put it down to a poor production and thought no more about it (well, you know, except to complain loudly at every opportunity).

But last week we went to see Sweeney Todd in the Gate, and I was reminded of nothing so much as the time we went to see the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society do Guys and Dolls about 25 years ago. The acting was, well... Anita Reeves was very good as Mrs. Lovett, and Barry McGovern was excellently creepy as the judge. The juvenile leads were sorely lacking any kind of appeal or lung power, however, and Sweeney himself was a little too shouty and not enough singy for me.

Moreover, the whole thing just kind of smacked of not quite enough attention to sound quality, which is not fair when you're putting on a musical, especially one that hasn't got a lot of dialogue in it, so you kind of need to be able to hear the words of the songs in order to follow the plot. Don't get me wrong. It was very enjoyable, a good time was had by all, the show is great and rollicks along like, I don't know, some sort of bloodthirsty child in a fairground, and even the enormous school group managed to stay quiet most of the time, even if the ones near us did continue to hit each other for a very long time after the show started. Still though, the tickets were €35 each, and the scrapey violins did sometimes drown out the singing, something I don't expect. And the chorus' lyrics could never be made out. And there just weren't enough of them to make a big, threatening sound and a bustling street scene. I don't know, maybe I'm too demanding, but I kind of expect proper, good professionals for that kind of money.

ATP countdown starts NOW!

Mister Monkey got tickets to ATP for Christmas. Okay, he didn't actually get the physical tickets, because that would be against the law or something, but he got to look at the charge for them on the credit card. We were talking about it today, and we are kind of excited about the fact that we seem to be the only people we know who are going. This would be bad if we had booked a four-person chalet, but there will just be us in our hotel-like room.

It turns out that loads of people we like are playing, such as Joanna Newsom, and Papa M, and some interesting acoustic thing which may or may not be members of Spiritualized and Spacemen 3, and of course Low and Dirty Three. Oh, and various Nick Cave/Dirty Three side projects.

Cat Power is also playing. She is someone I have not been well disposed towards in the past, but People say that her album from 2006 is amazing, so maybe I will have to try and hear it and reevaluate her and become a huge Cat Power fan.

New album at last

I downloaded this last night off iTunes. I should probably have gone out and actually bought a physical copy of it, but hey, it's instant gratification.

I don't know if I like it. I loved Pulp so much, and it's easy to think that the reason you love a band so much is because you're hopelessly in love with the front man--and who can resist him, really--but you forget that all those other people moving around out there on the stage are doing their important things too. And gradually, as they dropped away, the Pulp sound changed, and then, gradually, Jarvis got older and his politics changed too. So everything's different now. And it might take me a while to get used to it. Nobody gave We Love Life a chance, but it is a truly great album. Perhaps, after I've listened to it incessantly for many months, I will love this one as much.

Alone and unreal

Poor Syd. When I was 19 and 20, he was so important to me. I must have listened to The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (I had the two-in-one double vinyl set) every day for about three years. His songs are great, for singing, like.


Altogether now, yes I'm thii-iiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiinking...

My birthday (Part two)

Presents from The Carpenter and The Lady arrived today, hooray. Another Magnus Mills book (which reminds me that I must read that other Magnus Mills book and give it back to William) with a picture of a ship on the cover, and this four-CD set.
The first thing I did with the Irving Berlin box set was import it to iTunes so that I could listen to it on the iBook. So, once again I am in the amusing position of using thousands of monies' worth of equipment to reproduce crackly mono recordings. I'll be on the wax cylinders before long, I predict.

Another return

I always like to ask the big questions. Questions like "where the hell did Ricky Martin go?" regularly pass my lips in the pub. I've asked all the gay guys I know (two of them) in case he was spirited away to some secret place that only they know about. But no-one seemed to know where Ricky was. Some people suggested he might be in Vegas, but no-one was sure.

And it was genuinely bugging me. Maybe not all the time, but it was there in the back of my head and would come to the fore whenever I reached "Livin' La Vida Loca" on my iPod.

And then this week he turned up on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and he really has been out of the public eye for four years or so. The relief was huge. Not that I was worried about him, I was more worried that I was out of touch with the world around me. If Ricky Martin could have a thriving career without me knowing about it, who knows what else I might be missing.

But it turns out that he has been travelling around the world and collecting new musical influences for his new album (his new single sounds a little like a man singing a song by that mad woman (Shabiya? Serena? What the hell was her name? And whatever happened to her, while I'm at it?) anyway, you know the one I mean).

He has also been busy setting up and administering The Ricky Martin Foundation and its offshoot charity People for Children, both of which are trying to stop trafficking of persons and modern day slavery.

Of course, as with all pop stars who claim to be trying to save the world, you wonder how much they're really doing and how much more money they could be giving and still live comfortably themselves, but Ricky seemed pretty serious about it. I was only annoyed that Jonathan Ross stopped him from talking about it. In fact I was very annoyed about it. Ricky wanted to say a little something and get the word out there, but Ross stopped him and asked could they talk about something else, as it was kind of depressing.

RTE should have invited him to come on The Late Late Show (actually, they might well have done, I wouldn't know, I don't watch it). It might be a bit rubbish and flat as a pancake, but at least it's a major Friday night entertainment show that's willing to recognise that Friday night entertainment can be, well, a bit more serious.

Certainly it turns out that Ricky's not very funny, bless him. But he does own four rescued dogs, which makes me like him even more than I did before.

SHAKIRA! That's her name. I knew it would come back eventually. What the hell ever happened to her?