Theatre Breaks to Warhorse

I was chatting to some folks in deepest Essex the other day and it soon became clear that for them, an evening trip to a West End show was not really a viable idea. They had been to see Warhorse and couldn’t speak highly enough of the show. But they said they’d think twice before going to the West End again.

They live just over 50 miles from the centre of London but getting in and out of the city at night is no easy matter. Usually they drive to a train station, park the car there and hop on a train. Driving in the city means congestion charges and parking nightmares so they try to avoid it if at all possible. However, travelling into the city centre by rail at the right time means going against the flood of commuter traffic and paying the peak time fare (4pm to 7pm).

You don’t really want to battle with the peak time tubes either so a black cab also adds to the cost. Most shows start around 7:30 but you want to be there a little early to pick up your tickets, maybe have a pre-theatre drink and order something for the interval.  This means you need to eat early (a special pre-theatre menu in one of the West End restaurants perhaps). If you try to wait till after the show to eat then you’ll have much less choice and you may well be rushing to catch the last train home.  The trains do run quite late but it can be 1am or even later before you get home.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it!

Here’s a glimpse of what Warhorse does best – some amazing life sized puppetry:

I gently suggested they might be better booking a theatre break next time and that was when I discovered people have some funny ideas about theatre breaks!

Three Myths about Theatre Breaks

1. Expensive!

My friends went to see Warhorse. A theatre break with top price tickets to see Warhorse a central hotel with breakfast the next morning starts from  around £120 each. Most sites will let you book your rail fare with a good discount. With  a hotel near the theatre you can  walk and avoid paying for a cab and  most sites offer a special price on a pre-theatre supper. By the time my friends had paid for all their little extras there really wasn’t much in it.

2. Bad seats

My friends could only get single seats that were not next to each other. They were top priced seats and very nice, but not together. Most theatre breaks websites have better access to seats than the general public. You can often choose from a range of seat prices. You always get to sit together. The lesser known fact is that these sites often have tickets for top shows (like Warhorse!) that are reserved for theatre breaks customers.

3. These internet sites are dead dodgy!

Buying stuff online is part of all our lives these days. My friends are sensible. They bought their tickets from a well known site that they have used before and trusted. That same site also sells theatre breaks!  If you are worried about how secure a site is check out this advice. (Book Theatre Breaks On Line with Confidence)

So next time you are thinking about booking theatre tickets for the West End do check round first before you assume that theatre breaks aren’t a better idea.

Theatre Breaks in the Holidays

January is a peak time for West End theatres in general but specific dates around the school holidays always have a high demand and booking tickets only will very soon become impossible for most of the popular musicals and plays.  Not everybody realizes though, that theatre breaks packages will still be available for top shows with good seats and plush central London hotels, long after the scramble for individual seats has subsided. That’s because the holiday and theatre breaks companies block book seats in advance and have priority arrangements with the hotel groups, In this way they can still offer top  seats for London theatres and best affordable rooms in the most convenient hotels for a price that is nearly always better value than that you could put together yourself, even if the dates you wanted were still available.

Top Musicals for Theatre Breaks

So which are the top five musicals for theatre breaks in London this season?

Top new musical for 2011 is GHOST with fabulous rock music by Dave Stewart

Ghost

musical: Ghost
starring: Richard Fleeshman, CAISSIE LEVY, SHARON D CLARKE
	Book Now: Ghost theatre breaks
opening night:24 June 2011 booking until 13 October 2012.

Top Family Musical, also new for 2011 is MATILDA

Based on Roald Dahl’s dramatic novel.

musical: Matilda The Musical
starring: Paul Kaye
	Book Now: Matilda The Musical theatre breaks
opening night:25/11/2011 booking until 12th February 2012

LAST CHANCE!

Priscilla Theatre Breaks

musical: Priscilla Queen of the Desert
starring: Ray Meagher
	Book Now: Priscilla Queen of the Desert theatre breaks
opening night:March 10 2009 booking until 31/12/2011

Perennial Favourite

Wicked Theatre Breaks

musical: Wicked!
starring: Rachel Tucker
	Book Now: Wicked! theatre breaks
opening night:2006 booking until Open Ended

More Wizards and Witches in the West End

Wizard of Oz Theatre Breaks

musical: The Wizard of Oz
starring: Danielle Hope
	Book Now: The Wizard of Oz theatre breaks
opening night:March 1st 2011 booking until Sunday October 28th 2012

This article titled “Backbeat – review” was written by Lyn Gardner, for The Guardian on Tuesday 11th October 2011 18.08 UTC

Does London need another jukebox bio musical? No, and it doesn’t get one either in this intelligent, multilayered and often touching account of the Beatles’ early days in Hamburg and Liverpool and the “lost” Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe. The epitome of cool, Sutcliffe was John Lennon‘s art-school buddy and a gifted young painter who abandoned the group for art and the love of Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who took some famous moody shots of the band and originally styled their mop-headed, collarless look. Sutcliffe died aged 21 of a brain haemorrhage, just as the Beatles were on the brink of success.

Based on Iain Softley’s 1994 movie, Backbeat is – despite all its raucous energy and high levels of amplification – often quite downbeat. It’s all the better for it. More a play with songs than a fully fledged musical, this is not a show threaded through with familiar Beatles’ hits: a brief glimpse of John improving on Paul’s faltering attempts to write Love Me Do is about the closest we get. Instead we see the boys in their Hamburg days when they were essentially a covers band playing in a seedy nightclub, perfecting their sound and skills on hits such as Twist and Shout and Please Mr Postman.

The music is delivered with some panache that does eventually lead to the inevitable dancing in the aisles, but it’s a mistake to think that Backbeat is about the music or is indeed the verifiably true story of the early days of the Fab Four. In David Leveaux‘s moody, often painterly production it is much more about art and ways of seeing. There is a small, quiet scene where Sutcliffe contemplates the changes wrought by a lighthouse beam.

Oh and it’s about love, in particular the love between Andrew Knott’s arsey antagonistic Lennon, who claims that all art is “dick”, and Nick Blood’s charismatic Stuart, who sees the band as a diversion and is forced to make the hard choices about who he should be with and what he should do with his life. “You’ve got to let me go,” he tells John, and it’s as if he is trying to disengage tenderly from a lover.

It’s a small show wrapped up big for a West End theatre, and there are moments of clunkiness in the handling of the ensemble in the Hamburg scenes. But it’s always visually arresting and, finally, a little bit heartbreaking too.

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Some of the shows announcing 2012 booking dates extensions are the following West End musicals and plays:

We Will Rock You

Wicked

The Wizard of Oz

Billy Elliot the Musical

Blood Brothers

Dreamboats and Petticoats

Jersey Boys

The Phantom of the Opera

Mamma Mia!

Legally Blonde the Musical

Ghost The Musical 

Les Misérables

Shrek The Musical

Disney’s The Lion King

Million Dollar Quartet 

The Mousetrap

The 39 Steps

Stomp

Thriller Live

War Horse

The Woman in Black

Rock of Ages 

Matilda The Musical

Caissie Levy stars in Ghost the Musical

Ghost has been a great hit with the Manchester audience during its pre-West end run and one of the firm favourites of everyone who has seen it is Caissie Levy. Caissie plays Molly Gordon, the female lead of the show. Caissie is a Canadian with a gorgeous voice and good acting skills. She needs them both during Ghost. This is a very demanding role as Molly’s character goes through an amazing range of emotions as the show progresses.

We saw Caissie on the West End stage last year in the visiting Broadway production of Hair. Although Hair is a very much an ensemble piece I felt when I watched it that Cassie’s performance really stood out. She played the idealistic Shelia with real conviction and her voice rang out in songs like Good Morning Starshine. I think this bodes very well for her performance as Molly.

Caissie’s other most famous role is probably as Elphaba in Wicked in the Broadway production.  In recent interviews she has drawn parallels between Ghost and Wicked. She felt that the range both of vocal skills and acting required of Molly and Elphaba were rather similar. When asked she agreed it was possible that, like Wicked, critics would not like Ghost and it might be a show that would appeal more to audiences. This wasn’t true of the Manchester critics who gave the show  great reviews but London can be harder to convince.

Caissie has a gorgeous voice and I thought you might enjoy a sample:

Can you see Rachel Tucker and other London West End theatre stars in the flashmob?

This article titled “Irish Blood, English Heart – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 4th May 2011 22.04 UTC

Darren Murphy is clearly a generous man. We go to the theatre expecting one play and he gives us at least three: a psychological study of sibling rivalry, a social portrait of the London Irish and a meditation on the nature of narrative. But, although some would argue that nothing succeeds like excess, I would gladly have settled for half.

At first, we seem to be in familiar theatrical territory. Two brothers converge on the Southwark lock-up where their father, an emigre Irish cab driver, apparently killed himself. Con is the struggling one who followed his dad into the cab trade and whose wife, Peggy, dreams of opening a restaurant. The other brother, Ray, is the success story who has written a bestselling novel and TV film that cannibalises the family history. While Con is anxious to honour the dead dad, Peggy’s main aim is to extract compensation from Ray for appropriating their lives in a piece of fiction.

Behind the play lurks the formidable shadow of Arthur Miller: the fraternal rivalry is straight out of The Price, and lines such as “A man is more than the worst thing he’s ever done” strive to achieve a Milleresque resonance. But I feel Murphy’s real preoccupation is with stories and their ownership. Does one, he implicitly asks, possess the copyright on one’s own life?

A comedian once expressed his bewilderment to me that it was the author, rather than the subject, of a biography who got paid; and it is such a provocative issue that I wish Murphy had explored it in more detail. Instead, he gets carried away with the brothers’ re-enactment of past familial wrongs, and even introduces a totally implausible fourth character to remind us that the dead father was himself a monstrous fantasist.

I will say this for Murphy, however: he gives his actors plenty to chew on and, in Caitriona McLaughlin’s nicely cooked production (which transfers from Southwark’s Union theatre), they clearly relish the emotional feast. Ian Groombridge exudes a nervy anxiety as Con, seeking closure on the disordered narrative of his dad’s life. Howard Teale has the right sheen of success as the brother who has adopted the name of Ray Suede and whose whole career is a form of self-invention. Although Con’s wife is marginalised in the later stages, Carolyn Tomkinson invests her with a fractious energy.

In the end, the play seems to suggest that the Irish capacity for fabrication and storytelling needs an element of formal restraint. Though it is a perfectly valid message, I wish Murphy had followed his own good advice.

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This article titled “Be My Baby – review” was written by Alfred Hickling, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th May 2011 21.00 UTC

The 1960s are so firmly associated with sexual liberation that it’s easy to forget the generation of unmarried mothers who never had it so bad. Illegitimate children were often born secretly in church-sponsored homes, before being given up for adoption. There’s very little research on the subject: until the 1970s, such facilities remained an undiscussed yet ubiquitous phenomenon.

Amanda Whittington, who was the first writer to give this subject dramatic treatment, is an undiscussed yet ubiquitous sort of writer. There’s rarely a point at which a regional playhouse isn’t performing one of her plays, and the text of this one has quietly slipped on to many GCSE reading lists. It must be hard for today’s teenagers to fathom a period of history in which sex education was delivered not so much through teachers as through Ronettes‘ singles. Yet Whittington cleverly coats the bitter pill of her characters’ experience with the sugared naivety of popular girl-group routines.

The story focuses on Mary, a well-to-do 19-year-old whose single indiscretion has landed her in a dour dormitory with only her portable record-player for comfort. Given the current tendency of female singers to emulate the lacquer-and-lashes look of 1960s pop stars, she has a surprisingly contemporary style: very up the Duffy, one might say.

Esther Richardson’s sensitive production features fine work from Emily Alexander’s ever-optimistic Dolores, Jenny Hulse’s distressed Norma and Michelle Jate’s jaded, been-here-before Queenie. But the evening belongs to Jessica Clark’s exceptionally poignant Mary, who begins the play no more than a child and heartbreakingly ends up leaving without one.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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