To start off, I saw Christian Slater in "Swimming with Sharks" an off-colour black comedy. I thought he did a could job, though some of the American accents of the other actors seemed dubious at best. If you have seen the movie True Romance, this play echoed slightly of the feel of his character, Clarence Worley, especially the scenes in True Romance where he is trying to sell the load of Mafia coke to this big shot director and he is talking about the director's magnum opus "Coming Home in a Body Bag". There you get to hear a great Slater monologue about movies, America, etc and so he also does in this play too,many times has great deliveries. But "Swimming" really had a lot of good one liners and Slater did a great job playing a scurrilous character. I also laughed at the really off color parts like when he was being tortured by his assistant. I think Jess can agree with me that that was pretty damn funny. Unfortunately if anyone wanted to go see it, the last performance was this past Friday. Don't feel bad, I almost missed out on it too but I was determined not to. But no the fun did not stop there. I thought I was done for the week until the weekend, but I was invited to see Othello with none other than Ewan McGregor playing Iago! One nice thing about this theatre was its size: it was so small. There were only 3 rows in
the balcony and the orchestra only had, maybe 9 max? Also it was set in the round so all the seats surrounded the stage on 3 sides. So I was really close to Ewan and the rest of the cast. Also he looked into the crowd as he was delivering some soliloquys and other speeches, so I caught eye contact with him a few times. One time he looked long and then looked away, sort of rattled: I wonder if me stupidly grinning during a Shakespearean tragedy weirded him out. But how can you not if it is Ewan McGregor giving a stellar performance in front of you? The rest of the cast was very good too. All in all, great theatre performances. Back in NJ, my mom would always take us to musicals on Broadway and oh how I loved going to them. Still like musicals. However, one thing I feel Broadway was lacking to Theatreland (London's theatre district) was high quality plays. Here, I have not been disappointed at all with the acting and plays and lack of musicals (hehe maybe perhaps the musicals are better back in the states as the one I saw here, Spamalot, was good but did not measure up fully with Broadway.)So finally, I got all my work together and done. Boy did I feel relieved. Now I get to start it again for another week! Haha! But before that begins, I got to see Van Morrison on Friday at the Hammersmith Apollo. Jess gave me the heads up on this and we were psyched, we listened to a Van Morrison greatest hits compilation to get us up to speed, we listened to his two great albums Astral Weeks and Moondance. Worst comes to worse, the generic Van song has a droning background musical part and he sings "a-runnin-and-a-lovin, a-runnin-and-a-lovin, a-runnin-and-a-lovin, yeah-yeah-yeaaaaah..." (sung/spoken really quickly) That is every Van song, when in doubt. So we get there right before he is come onto stage. He has a backing band of 8 players and 3 backup singers. Wow impressive. And then all of a sudden the show starts and Van walks on in a fedora and glasses (I couldn't tell if they were sunglasses or not). So I don't recognize the first song. OK no big deal, probably playing stuff off a recent album. Then song 2, 3, 4, 5, 6....Jess and I would look at each other to see if either of us had any glimmer of recognition: nada. Also all the music we didn't know, although the band was
in top form, it sounded like lounge music. While being puzzled at attempting to decipher songs, I had forgotten about Van's infamous concert histrionics. In the middle of a song, as he was singing the "a-runnin-and-a..." drone I explained above, without warning he just dropped his mic and it fell and hit the stage with a loud THUMP! and he slowly began to wander off stage and behind the curtain. The band looked a little puzzled but continued to play and finish. Van after the song ended came back on stage and the bassist leaned over and tried to talk to him but he started another song. Again, he placed down the mic towards the end and silently and mysteriously walked off stage. Finally they ended the show with what we realized was the finale when again Van abruptly left the stage, never came back, an announcer shouted "THAT WAS VAN MORRISON!" and the band began to pack up. Bizarre indeed. Hopefully some reviews will comment on this. In the end, I only recognized 2 and 2 halves songs: Moondance, Gloria, some cover of an old crooner standard from the 40s or 50s, and a cover of St James Infirmary. We were both a little disappointed at the concert afterwards. I think my favorite members of the band, based on their performance and solos were either the woman play steel guitar/slide guitar/banjo or the keyboardist. Both of them were awesome. The lead guitarist's style I just really did not like: something was grating about it.Should I save in other news for later? Nah, two quick observations: Closet-gay-yet-he-himself-doesn't-know-it-yet Matthew (long story, maybe it will be the topic of another post) from Development Economics might be onto something in one of his descriptions of the denizens surrounding High Holborn Hall: there really does seem to be a crazy guy that shouts randomly at 3 in the morning outside our dorm. I didn't believe Matthew until I started hearing him too. It is really bizarre. Now here is the annoyance: I am sometimes really surprised about niceness among people in London. There is a record store I go to in London, and I buy from there and I am not regular, but I come in enough that I think they might recognize me. So I put on hold two used CDs that I need to check online and the counter assistant gets all indignant and huffy and puffy like I just told him off. Jeeze! If I pain you so much, I won't come back then, asshole. I'm a customer, I buy stuff from you, I actually come regularly, and you need to hact like I am hurting you in someway all the time? Get a fucking life...and a new customer. (though I probably will return again hehe) Now this makes it even stranger: so I walk back to the dorm from the store and I need to cross a busy street, Charing Cross. Bus drivers in London have a reputation for being rude and mean, and not caring about pedestrians (they speed up when you cross in front of them!) So I need to cross the bus lane and there is a bus, and I wait for it to go. However, there was a backup and stop in the bus land and can you believe this: he stopped further back and waved me through. I couldn't believe it, just stunned me. This bus driver, who will never see me again was so much more nicer to me than the store owner, who actually probably recognized me and knew I was a regular paying customer. Sometimes people don't cease to amaze me!
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