The Play's The Thing

The Play’s The Thing, Saturday 3/4. [Photo: Sir John Poster.] Another sunny day. This morning several shells, from 8-man to single sculls, went back and forth on the far side of the Thames. It might have been sunny, but it was still barely above freezing. Stout fellas.

We decided that since we had the opera this evening, we would make a test tube run to the Leicester Square station and see how long it took to get to the theater. During the trip we heard news of a “man under a train” that closed one line. We noticed that many stations had a multi-gated wall that would prevent people from falling on the tracks; perhaps this is planned for all stations. Our ride was accident-free. It was also very crowded towards the end, and everybody wanted to get off at our stop.

Leicester Sq. dumps you in the middle of the theater district, next to a discount ticket seller. It’s non-stop theaters and shops. We found the London Coliseum a few minutes away and clocked our trip at 45 minutes. We decided to see if there had been any returns for the sold-out Flying Dutchman, and we scored two seats front-row center! This was turning out to be a great day.

The rest of our first day was a walking tour from Trafalgar Square down to Whitehall where I was posed in front of the most recent statue, Winston Churchill, across Westminster Bridge and by the London Eye. This immense Ferris-type wheel is pooh-poohed by londontourist.org who say that a view of London from on high isn’t that great, and you’re better off with the free view from the Greenwich Observatory. Plus, those glass cages can get very hot in the sun. And boy, was it sunny. We photographed and moved on.

Across the river in Southbank we found a recommended restaurant but it was closed for lunch. We took a chance on Chez Gerard and it was just fine. Three times as expensive as the Trafalgar Tavern, but they served actual food. Then we walked to Waterloo Station and came home to a tremendous traffic jam, making us add a mental half hour to our opera trip.

The shower in our flat has to be added to the not-so-good half of the ledger. The cold water pressure is so low that any hot water overwhelms it. The result is that if you don’t want to be burned, you have to set the water flow so low you could drink it as fast as it comes out. I had a bush shower in Malawi that was more vigorous than this.

The trip back took an hour. We spent some time mastering the coat-check bicycle locks in the theater and found our seats. The Coliseum is very ornate, not quite up to the Paris Opera but thematically stronger. There are Roman busts lining the base of the ceiling dome expressing awe, fear, laughter and amazement; gilt chariots with riders and four (!) horses in the front corners below the dome, a few SPQR standards here and there – you get the idea. Lots of gilt and again, the feeling you were inside a very fancy piece of Wedgwood. We were on the floor, and I think there were four balcony sections.

But, the play’s the thing. “Sir John in Love” is why we came, after all. Instead of being set in Elizabethan times, the producer put the players in Edwardian dress. Falstaff wore tweed plus-fours and had a very Edwardian mustache. Ford was in a pinstripe suit and played, in the beginning, a rather dull businessman. It didn’t seem to matter. As the program pointed out, this version of The Merry Wives of Windsor was about middle class mores and is more or less timeless. The set was a pair of wooden houseframes that moved and turned to change scenes. Trees came and went, and Windsor Castle was a silhouette on the backdrop.

The opera was wonderful. We knew only one artist, Robert Tear, and only one other seemed to have made it as far as San Francisco. They were all excellent actors, good to excellent singers, and it worked perfectly. Ford (Alistair Miles) was particularly fine, and I was a little disappointed that the beautiful aria he sang as “Mr. Brook” was played for laughs (and it was funny). If there is a problem with the opera it is that none of the melodies are allowed to last very long. It could have done with show-stopper treatment a few times.

Andrew Shore was a great Falstaff. He sang well, went over the top just enough, and also managed to chug-a-lug a pitcher of ‘sack’ without missing a step. It may not have been beer, but drinking anything during a performance is a risk. The audience appreciated it. The biggest laughs, other than from Falstaff, came from Dr. Caius (Robert Tear). I can only surmise it was because he was playing a silly Frenchman and the audience was English. We thought he was mildly amusing; the audience was enthusiastic. One of the musical surprises for me was his singing of the French chanson d’amour that didn’t really impress me on the old recording; Mr. Tear did it beautifully (they stopped laughing, thank goodness).

The final scene at Herne’s Oak was where they spent all the design money. During the orchestral interlude the huge oak descended, backlit by Windsor Castle at night with a starry sky. The fairies, imps and goblins were dressed Arthur Rackham style, with lots of rough-cut gauzy clothes and faces that looked like the turnip and jicama bins at the farmers’ market. Falstaff tried to escape by climbing the oak, but they set fire to it! It was a grand ending to a great night at the opera. Our trip is already a success.