Scratch that. The second one’s a whole lot better.
Thursday was a morning I’d planned to sleep in. Instead, I woke up extra early to have a Skype interview with an ESL teaching coordinator in Thailand. Jaysus. That night, I planned to see Wicked with Kayla. Not only did that not happen, but we skipped the last train to Harlow Mill and went to Harlow Town instead, walking for half an hour in the sprinkling rain and showing up to the common room soaked and tired and late.
Who’d have figured how much better that actually would be?
The lot of us spent the day at a matinee performance of The Pitmen Painters, a 2007 show by Lee Hall about a group of miners-turned-artists from the 1930s – the real life Ashington Group, who lacked any formal training in the craft other than an art appreciation course through the Workers Education Association, but who ended up being real good painters.
My initial problem with the whole thing was that the paintings they showed on stage were too good for complete amateurs – suspended disbelief just wasn’t happening.
Joke’s on you, Ryan. This is a true story, remember? The paintings they showed were facsimiles of the real ones, so I guess that complaint is a bit moot.
Such is life. The reins came off then, and moi et Kayla branched to go see that damn musical that I’ve been wishing and hoping and thinking and praying to see before we even left St. John’s. Student tickets were available at the door – if someone hadn’t forgotten their student ID. It’s not a big deal, and I’m not gonna point any fingers . . . but I had mine.
Instead, we took a little jaunt through Piccadilly, with a little scare that, when the table next to us at the pub got the “last fish and chips of the night,” we’d been snubbed. It all worked out in the end, and we went to see Mr. Bean in Johnny English Reborn. Fun fact: you can bring beer into the theatre in this crazy, apparently perma-drunk country.
"That's not my real name . . ."
Lazy morning on Friday, the perfect kind of day to unabashedly do nothing, guilt-free. I did manage to practically sleep through supper, which was a semi-formal awards dinner with some major benefactors of Harlow campus dropping by. I woke up from a nap around 6:30, figured I wouldn’t be missed, and dozed off again, only to get the ol’ rap on the door, the you-had-better-come-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you spiel, and rush to get the redness out of my eyes from sleeping with contacts. Thankfully, the menu had one of my favourite delicacies on it: free wine. It made for a great night at the Crown, with some group karaoke shenanigans.
The train to London is apparently down every weekend in November, which translates to a big nuisance to get to the city. Still, we wanted to get in for the day, so myself and Kayla bundled up (needlessly) against the autumn air and braced ourselves for whatever rigmarole we’d have to go through.
Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever written the word rigmarole before. I just might have to start now.
From Harlow Town, we got a bus to Enfield, and a quick train to Liverpool Street. It took a bit longer – about an hour and a half – but hell, it was easier than the trip that I’d been anticipating, which I just assumed would include at least a little bit of hitchhiking. From there, we went to Camden Town, a borough of London that’s best known for the Camden Markets (as well as the spot where Amy Winehouse lived and died), a huge assemblage of vendors selling crafts, antiques, food, and clothing, that apparently brings in, no joke, 100,000 visitors every weekend. We found the Stables Market, which is the largest of the six market sections in the area, literally built in the former Pickfords stables. The stalls and alleyways were loaded with people, perusing and bartering, in a giant swell of consumerism. Lots of cool stuff, though, and more than you’d expect to find at Primark – some afternoon I’d like to head back to get a better look at everything.
The food vendors were a bit off-putting, though. It’s one thing to hear store owners trying to persuade you to take a spin through their merch (though I still don’t like it), but when workers at Asian corner restaurants are literally holding food out to you and calling you over, I just want to keep right on walking. The Indian spot was much tamer, and for £4 you could get a mish-mash of curry, chicken, chick peas, and rice that was actually more than I could eat.
With the sound of fireworks ringing in our ears (it was, after all, November 5 – remember remember, the gunpowder plot is a bigger deal over here than in Pasadena, where I distinctly remember having bonfires in the snow), we hopped the train to Victoria. That’s right kids, the green light over the Apollo Theatre was getting a second chance.
Our seats for Wicked ended up being in row H, just slightly to the left of the stage. In 1995, a dude named Gregory Maguire took L. Frank Baum’s nearly hundred year old story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and said, “You know what? The Wicked Witch of the West might not be so bad after all.” I've had the novel for a few years, but have never gotten around to cracking into it - hopefully now I will.
Elphaba became a real character who started out as friends with Glinda, the Good Witch – her green skin made her a bit (read: a lot) of an outcast, but the whole point was that she was misunderstood (and not just in a terribly clichéd way, either). In spite of being majorly ostracized, she ends up taking a pretty significant stance against the corrupt Wizard, which leads to a public fall from grace and the perception of her as being, well, wicked. Two sides to every story.
In 2003, Wicked the musical was adapted from Maguire’s novel as a Broadway show, and it’s made a pretty big mark on the musical theatre world (which I’m clearly so well versed in), winning a scatter award, breaking a scatter box office record, and touring all over the globe. In London, it’s been a permanent fixture at the Apollo Victoria since 2006.
The lighting, the costumes, the music, the wrenching conclusion, and the set of pipes on Rachel Tucker, the Belfast gal in the lead role – it was all wicked.
The list of things I’d planned on doing before I came over here is getting smaller and smaller as November pushes on. That’s a bit of a bittersweet realization, that the here and now has to contend with the fact that everything is going to change all over again, and sooner rather than later. That’s something you can count on, but you can also be sure of the terrifyingly exciting unknown.
Wicked was part of The Plan. Walking back along the Thames on a crisp fall night, guided by the lights of London in twilight and holding hands with a sweet girl – that wasn’t. I guess you’ve got to have a bit of both to get through this thing with a smile on your face. And I sure as hell am counting on that.
Cheers,
rb
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