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Catching Up...
I've been back from London for nearly a week, but this is the first time I've opened my computer. I've been utterly shattered (see icon), no doubt from a combination of jet lag, getting Ros to all her various activities, stepping up Taekwando to four times a week, and seeing two concerts this week (Taylor Swift for Ros, and Joan Armatrading for me.)
And logging onto LJ for the first time in a week, I see I've missed the deadline for Yuletide nominations! Oh noes! Actually, this has me wondering if I should skip out on this year entirely, given that the TKD training is going to get more intense, not less as the year progresses, and it's entirely likely that I won't have time to write anything anyway. But on the other hand, I always enjoy writing for Yuletide and would be sad to miss a year. Shall have to mull that over.
Since it's late, and I'm still feeling shattered, I'm going to do a short summing up post on the London trip (which was absolutely amazing), and a few assorted odds and sods.
It will likely surprise no one on my flist that I adore London, and this trip just nailed that home more than ever. The trip managed to be both packed and yet sort of relaxed.
I went over with a couple of mates (one fannish, one not), and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
soundofthesurf joined us. Getting to spend time with everyone, especially SotS, absolutely made the whole trip. We had some great meals, and had some fun outings, both all together and in various configurations. And I got to hang out with halotolerant (and have a bit of a Take That natter), solosundance and heliophile_oxon (who are both quite lovely and I hope we shall be able to meet up again the next time I'm over, and also sc_fossil and her family, whose visit overlapped ours.
Before we saw Hamlet, we took in the adaptation of Jane Eyre the National Theatre are doing. It was done with a very stripped down stage, with most of the actors, except for Jane and Rochester, taking multiple roles, including one bloke who (brilliantly) played Rochester's dog. The woman playing Rochester's mad wife sang songs commenting on the action all through the play until she's finally revealed by the plot, and her voice was extraordinary. It was one of the best productions I've seen in London, and gave Hamlet a lot to live up to. (Along with Hamlet, this is going to be one of the NTLive broadcasts, and I can highly recommend it.)
Then it was on to Hamlet. First, let me just say that Hamlet is not one of my favourite plays. I appreciate it's a great role for actors to tackle, and there's lot of interesting stuff going on in it, but it doesn't speak to me on a personal level. That said, this was a really great production. Cumberbatch was as fantastic as I reckoned he'd be, and he made the mad scenes unexpectedly funny. (His Hamlet put on a sort of toy soldier persona for those scenes, and did them very playfully.) Ciaran Hinds was a great Claudius, and though the actor playing Ophelia didn't project her voice as well as she could have, I thought she did a good job playing what can be a really thankless role. So frequently Ophelia's descent into madness can seem to come from nowhere, but in this production it begins to be telegraphed in the earlier scenes.
The director did interesting things with the set as well. For the first half, it was an airy room at court with a grand staircase off to one side, but at the end of the half, when everything is starting to truly go to hell, they blow in all sorts of ash and debris from the wings and turn it all into a wasteland. Very striking.
And to cap it off, Cumberbatch made an appeal for charities supporting Syrian refugees at the curtain call that impressed me.
Ros loves Taylor Swift, and the Sweetie and I don't mind her either, so we decided we'd take her to see her on her latest tour. She puts on a great show, has a great voice and did a credible job playing guitar and keyboards. One of the very cool things was that they had taped light-up bracelets to every seat, and during certain numbers in the show the whole stadium would be awash in synchronized blinking lights.
In the end, the show was impressive, if not quite my thing. I felt like the Sweetie at the end of the Take That show, saying it was "fine," but didn't entirely move him. Though I did totally dance during the Shake It Off finale, because you can't not dance to that song.
I've loved Joan Armatrading since the early '80s, but I'd never seen her live. So when I found out she was going to do one last solo world tour, I was determined to see her. I haunted her website until she finally announced a Toronto date, and managed to get tickets in the 8th row for me and a mate.
It was a fab show. Joan is a fantastic guitarist and still has a wonderfully rich voice, but what I wasn't quite expecting was her lovely, puckish sense of humour.
Here's the original video for Drop the Pilot, my favourite song of hers.
And logging onto LJ for the first time in a week, I see I've missed the deadline for Yuletide nominations! Oh noes! Actually, this has me wondering if I should skip out on this year entirely, given that the TKD training is going to get more intense, not less as the year progresses, and it's entirely likely that I won't have time to write anything anyway. But on the other hand, I always enjoy writing for Yuletide and would be sad to miss a year. Shall have to mull that over.
Since it's late, and I'm still feeling shattered, I'm going to do a short summing up post on the London trip (which was absolutely amazing), and a few assorted odds and sods.
It will likely surprise no one on my flist that I adore London, and this trip just nailed that home more than ever. The trip managed to be both packed and yet sort of relaxed.
I went over with a couple of mates (one fannish, one not), and
soundofthesurf joined us. Getting to spend time with everyone, especially SotS, absolutely made the whole trip. We had some great meals, and had some fun outings, both all together and in various configurations. And I got to hang out with halotolerant (and have a bit of a Take That natter), solosundance and heliophile_oxon (who are both quite lovely and I hope we shall be able to meet up again the next time I'm over, and also sc_fossil and her family, whose visit overlapped ours.Before we saw Hamlet, we took in the adaptation of Jane Eyre the National Theatre are doing. It was done with a very stripped down stage, with most of the actors, except for Jane and Rochester, taking multiple roles, including one bloke who (brilliantly) played Rochester's dog. The woman playing Rochester's mad wife sang songs commenting on the action all through the play until she's finally revealed by the plot, and her voice was extraordinary. It was one of the best productions I've seen in London, and gave Hamlet a lot to live up to. (Along with Hamlet, this is going to be one of the NTLive broadcasts, and I can highly recommend it.)
Then it was on to Hamlet. First, let me just say that Hamlet is not one of my favourite plays. I appreciate it's a great role for actors to tackle, and there's lot of interesting stuff going on in it, but it doesn't speak to me on a personal level. That said, this was a really great production. Cumberbatch was as fantastic as I reckoned he'd be, and he made the mad scenes unexpectedly funny. (His Hamlet put on a sort of toy soldier persona for those scenes, and did them very playfully.) Ciaran Hinds was a great Claudius, and though the actor playing Ophelia didn't project her voice as well as she could have, I thought she did a good job playing what can be a really thankless role. So frequently Ophelia's descent into madness can seem to come from nowhere, but in this production it begins to be telegraphed in the earlier scenes.
The director did interesting things with the set as well. For the first half, it was an airy room at court with a grand staircase off to one side, but at the end of the half, when everything is starting to truly go to hell, they blow in all sorts of ash and debris from the wings and turn it all into a wasteland. Very striking.
And to cap it off, Cumberbatch made an appeal for charities supporting Syrian refugees at the curtain call that impressed me.
Ros loves Taylor Swift, and the Sweetie and I don't mind her either, so we decided we'd take her to see her on her latest tour. She puts on a great show, has a great voice and did a credible job playing guitar and keyboards. One of the very cool things was that they had taped light-up bracelets to every seat, and during certain numbers in the show the whole stadium would be awash in synchronized blinking lights.
In the end, the show was impressive, if not quite my thing. I felt like the Sweetie at the end of the Take That show, saying it was "fine," but didn't entirely move him. Though I did totally dance during the Shake It Off finale, because you can't not dance to that song.
I've loved Joan Armatrading since the early '80s, but I'd never seen her live. So when I found out she was going to do one last solo world tour, I was determined to see her. I haunted her website until she finally announced a Toronto date, and managed to get tickets in the 8th row for me and a mate.
It was a fab show. Joan is a fantastic guitarist and still has a wonderfully rich voice, but what I wasn't quite expecting was her lovely, puckish sense of humour.
Here's the original video for Drop the Pilot, my favourite song of hers.
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I never did see Tennant's Hamlet. Have been meaning to catch up with that on DVD for ages. (His Richard II was certainly extraordinary.) My gold standard Hamlet is a small scale staging I saw back in my uni days with Tom McCamus, a local actor who's a favourite of mine. It's definitely not my favourite Shakespeare, though. I prefer Henry IV Part 1 and Coriolanus by far.
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Yuletide - you don't have to sign up to write! This discovery was a great revelation to me. All the fun of writing, and none of the pressure - this is what I've done the past several years.
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Oh, now there's an idea for Yuletide! I do love the signing up and being assigned someone and something at random, but I rather suspect that would be insane for me this year. But looking for fun prompts to write is definitely something I could attempt, and then I'm not disappointing anyone if my schedule forbids it.
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I do like Taylor Swift, and Shake it Off is a song you *have* to dance to for sure! Glad you all had fun.
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Shake It Off definitely must be danced to!
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Do you know if there will be further books in that series/universe?
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I rather think there will be more stories in that universe, if only because it was Bear's most successful book to date, and for good reason. (I quite like Bear's other books, but not as much as I truly love this one.) I'm seriously thinking of dropping her a line--I got to know her in UNCLE fandom--and seeing if she has further plans for Karen and her group.
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Joan Armatrading popped up on the radio the other day and I remembered how much I love her voice. Fantastic that you got to see her live. And Tay-Tay! I'm sure I would have enjoyed that show too - my son likes looking at her but considers himself much too indie to like her music, heh. I would have danced too!
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JA's voice is still as rich and wonderful as it was back in the day. And she's so funny, in a very dry way. Ros' enjoyment is still mostly very innocent of what's cool and what's not. Although her school choir has apparently become very disgruntled that the music teacher is making them sing songs from Frozen. Their age gorup has gone from singing Do You Want to Build a Snowman All The Time to not wanting to sing it ever again. *g*
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Do you like Tracey Chapman too, btw? Very much inspired by JA, I think.
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It was wonderful to meet you, and hopefully the next time I'm in town we can have a less fleeting meetup. (Or you could come over to our side of the pond for BistoCon next year, she says enticingly. *g*)
I like Tracey Chapman, but not quite as much. I always enjoyed hearing her music, but I never went out and bought her records. I do have a couple of Indigo Girls albums, though, keeping in the female singer/songwriter vein.
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It really was a wonderful, wonderful weekend! I'm still high on energy and it made me so very happy! A sunny weekend with fantastic people, brilliant theatre, great museums, and lovely food - what could anyone want more?? It was just too short! (But isn't it always??)
You know what makes me the happiest? I know we will do this again - still so many things to do and see in London for the two of us (and anyone else who wants to join in! *G*)! \o/
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And yes, we will totally do it again! There are always more things to do in London than there is time. And hey, maybe some day you'll make it over to our side of the pond.
BTW, I checked and I sent you the spy story thus far around August 24. I managed to write a new scene on the plane that I'm hoping to (finally) transcribe tonight, and I'm starting to monkey with character arcs, so I'll send you the latest version.
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Good to hear that you had such a good trip to London. I'm not particularly fond of Hamlet either but it does seem to be *the* Shakespeare play everyone wants to tackle at least once in their career.
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The whole trip was fantastic, capped off by the Hamlet. Though, yeah, I'd have loved to have seen the Cucumberpatch do almost any other Shakespeare more. Except Titus Andronicus. *g*
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I'm extremely chuffed I got to see Joan Armatrading after liking her for so long.
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