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AnneMarriott

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Everything posted by AnneMarriott

  1. Saturday afternoon matinee at "The play that goes wrong", Duchess Theatre. Never been there before so I checked the details. Useful information about running times, including that the interval would be short, just 15 minutes and as no food or drink was allowed in the auditorium we'd all have to be quick with our interval refreshments. Imagine my surprise to see that we were in a tiny minority of patrons without food and drink in the auditorium. There was a positive hurricane of wrapper-crackling, chomping and slurping during the performance, not least from the young lad next to me with his family-size bag of Wotsits and his plastic bottle of water. Luckily the gales of laughter at the on-stage antics overwhelmed the "feeding-time-at-the-zoo" cacophony. (Really enjoyable farce, incidentally, but I wouldn't recommend the theatre for a quiet, contemplative play.)
  2. I sympathise wholeheartedly. Twice recently I have had the ultimate humiliation of waiting for an assistant to come and "verify my bags" after placing them - as instructed by the disembodied voice - in the bagging area.
  3. I attended the Thursday matinee and wonder if I was actually at the same show as many others here. Without wishing to indulge in special pleading, my hearing is poor and I have to use hearing aids; I also like music to have either some recognisable rhythm or melody (or even both) so the afternoon was musically challenging. Anyhow, here's my contribution: I had never seen anything by Tiler Peck so Rotunda came as a novelty. I enjoyed the choreography, although I thought it had a strangely academic flavour in parts. Hated the score (no surprise there). Costumes (what costumes?) were unattractive, especially the leggings cut off just above the ankles with socks and jazz shoes - particularly unflattering to short-limbed dancers. I thought it looked a bit untidy at times - perhaps unfamiliarity with the choreographer or (as has been discussed above) the downside of throwing dancers on at the last minute? I had forgotten how much music and how little dancing there is in Duo Concertant. Stravinsky is one of the more challenging composers for me and sadly my enjoyment of the piano is a thing of the past (Satie formerly one of my all-time favourites) so it was a relief when the dancing started. I was knocked back in my seat by Anthony Huxley. Such precision and clarity, and all delivered with a charming nonchalance. Spellbinding! I had seen one Pam Tanowitz piece before. Suffice it to say I don't remember anything about except that I didn't enjoy it so, unsurprisingly, Gustave Le Gray No. 1 had me stumped. Won't bother to mention the score. Choreography very limited and repetitive. Costumes nice to look at but surely hell to dance in - I thought the male dancer caught his left heel in the bottom of the batwing sleeve early on and was fixated on whether or not he would take a tumble. Was it all supposed to be joke? If so, at whose expense. If not it came across as po-faced if not downright pretentious. More special pleading: my enjoyment of popular music tailed off dramatically after trad jazz (1950s-1960s) and trickled on through the 70s and 80s so I have no previous awareness of James Blake. I loved Love Letter (on shuffle). When the music started I thought "Oh God, I'm going to be deafened and my teeth are going to vibrate", but neither happened - instead the happy realisation that at last here was a score with both a defined rhythm and series of melodies; it was possible actually to imagine dancing to it! Unlike most others posting here I appreciated the mix of street, ballet and Tudor styling in the costumes. The lighting didn't bother me, nor did the stop/start approach to the various tracks. I loved the choreography and the story-telling, something of a surprise because my only experience of Kyle Abraham was something he made for the Royal Ballet which left me underwhelmed. I didn't want it to end, despite having left two dogs alone for the afternoon and realising that the early train was not going to be an option. There has been some comment about front of house staff conduct. If there was an announcement about a pause between Duo Concertant and Gustave Le Gray No. 1, I missed it. So did lots of others. Having one of the ushers shouting "It's not a break, it's a pause" above the general hubbub didn't do a lot to resolve the issue. It's also something of puzzle why, with ushers checking tickets at the entrances to the auditorium, an elderly couple, one of whom was disabled, finished up pushing their way through an entire row of seated audience members to take their places in the aisle seats on the opposite side of the theatre.
  4. I seem to remember from one of Vadim's interviews that he chose not to dance in any contemporary works to avoid injury associated with the physical demands which are so different from classical choreography.
  5. Neither of the two BBC4 ballets appear in my Radio Times or television programme guide - instead it's The River at 9 pm and When Coal was King at 11.20 pm pm Sunday. Weird, and disappointing.
  6. After reading RobR's experience with inappropriately targeted advertising on Instagram, I am putting cookies in general in Room 101. No matter how many times I log on to various favourite websites there seems to be an interminable list of cookies to accept or reject. Try to ignore it and the website is unavailable. Take the easy way out and click "accept all" and you'll forever drown in unwanted advertisements. Or scroll miserably through the interminable list to make sure all the unwanted items are off. Life is too short ... Thank goodness there is now an occasional "Reject all" option.
  7. With a bit of googling you can get an additional shelf to fit your oven. Take an accurate measurement of your existing shelf and google "replacement oven shelf ??cmwide x ?? deep. I did this recently. As far as I know this shouldn't cause problems with the oven on conventional mode.
  8. Wow - am I glad my oven can switch between fan assisted and normal! Glad to see an obviously experienced baker endorsing the oven thermometer.
  9. I wouldn't bother about which version it is - from my TV listings it's the usual RB performance with Muntagirov/Nunez/Osipova, and I find I have four recorded it four times, once when it was supposed to be Acosta/Rojo/Nunez ...
  10. In that case perhaps it's worth investing in an oven thermometer to see if the thermostat is working properly?
  11. I'm not an expert baker (indeed not a baker at all really) but fan assisted electric ovens need a lower temperature than an ordinary electric oven to achieve the same effect. So simply converting gas mark something to celsius won't be correct. Online conversion tables will give you the detail but I do know that for recipe temperatures of 200 degrees C you need to set a fan oven to 180 C. Whether that would be enough to avoid your burnt bottom I can't say! Good luck for next year.
  12. Very much agree about some of these although I loved Wedding Bouquet. I described Two Pigeons as embarrassingly twee (from start to finish for me) and have survived, which is a testament to the tolerance of different views by BalletcoForum readers. I stick to my guns and don't book to see it.
  13. I have a worryingly clear memory of Squirrel Nutkin nearly plunging into the orchestra pit a few feet away from where I was sitting, Stalls Circle right. I think Ashley Page was the squirrel.
  14. As a confirmed non-fan of this ballet, I must admit that melodrama is its most accurate description for me, almost regardless of cast. I only saw the original cast on film and clearly the stage performance must have been more convincing. Without wishing to offend anyone, I have always caught a whiff of silent cinema and I half expect a speech bubble, "Alas, I am undone", to appear at some point. And please, if and when it comes back, let it not be as part of a triple bill, especially as the middle piece.
  15. That's a relief! I have avoided it for some years so wasn't aware of design changes. However, wigs aside, I have always found it old fashioned and curiously uninvolving (Tamara Rojo an honourable exception).
  16. Can I tentatively add Marguerite and Armand to the list of stylistically outdated? Even if I am alone in my opinion it surely counts as a ballet that has aged badly on the grounds of giving offence to wig-makers.
  17. Mummery is a kind of mediaeval street performance of plays or ceremonies. The performers (mummers) wear extravagant costumes which disguise their appearance and the performance is usually of an overwrought, exaggerated and even ridiculous or mocking kind. So in the context of England on Fire the three performers in the rag-and-bell costumes make more sense as mummers than as Morris dancers.
  18. I notice that Louise Leven in her Financial Times review calls them Old English Mummers. Even though I thought of them as Morris dancers, Mummers makes far more sense.
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