I slept better last night than I have in some days. I walked about eight miles yesterday and it's a hundred stairs up to my room and it is 225 steps down to some of the subways. I am making up for all the exercise I lost the past six months with a broken leg. The jet lag does not seem to be an issue to me. I did barely make it to breakfast after sleeping over the wake up call because I stayed up until 2 AM. After eating I took the tube to the West End to be sure I could find the Drury Theater and collect my ticket. It proved within walking distance of the National Gallery so I went there and soaked in the images of Rubens, Durer, Turner, and the like for a couple of hours. The place is so vast. I did not even attempt to enter most of the galleries, lest my head turn to mush from overload. I found the uniformed school children and their attentive teachers a pleasing thing to see. There were many older students sketching and painting the art works. I notice a lot of people on the subways reading ‘real’ books as well.
I am certain I had the most intense day of entertainment in my life. While walking back over to the Drury Theater I hear magnificent operatic arias being sung. I detoured and found a man and woman singing fabulous street opera with really good musical accompaniment. The whole market venue where they were basically acting as buskers was spellbound. A hundred people cheered every song and I did drop ten quid for a CD. I left that market place and the next one had a string quartet doing romantic folk songs from Italy. My timing was perfect. I had an hour of free time before needing to be at the Drury. I started off the ‘formal’ part of my entertainment with a three-hour plus run of “My Fair Lady” in the afternoon which proved magnificent. The Drury Theater proves a spectacular venue for plays. I was given permission to photograph the public spaces so will have to show you the inside of the place when I get home. The place is opulent beyond our concepts of theater interiors.
As it turns out my photo editor on my laptop is lousy so I am not going to do anything to my images until I return. Everything about the show was exceptionally well done. I have a hard time getting used to the opulence of the stagecraft. I could sure enjoy building sets if I had the space and money these theaters have. The craft budget for the last show I built (Chicago) was $500. I even had pleasing snippets of conversation with a family sitting next to me during “My Fair Lady.” I had a brief Lebanese dinner before going to see “Chicago”. It was not my favorite of the shows we have done at Electric City Playhouse but since I had built it, I wanted to see the differences between a community theater version and a big budget London show, and especially the stagecraft differences. I actually liked our concepts for the staging much better. Most of the stage here was filled with a monolithic bandstand, leaving very little room for the actors to dance. There was no sense at all of what kind of space the venue was supposed to be. The band, lighting, and music were very well done but the actors were lost visually for most of the show. I do sure enjoy black box as a venue better than these huge halls with four tiers of seating. During this show I met a man and his wife from Atlanta plus three girls from Cornerbrook in Newfoundland. They were amazed that I knew of their town and had been in the Maritimes. The three girls are theater majors here for two months with a course requirement to see twenty shows. Life must be very hard for them. I had pleasant chatter with them about technical theater.
Tomorrow is a ‘work day’ in that I plan to carefully photograph two major cathedrals for additions to my church architecture workshop. Life is good and there is no rain here. It is warmer than when I left Atlanta.
I walked forever again today and it was 250 steps from the subway trains to the street level and I did this about five times today rather than using the elevator. I am having no residual from my fracture and feel most privileged to be whole of body and able to walk the streets of London. It was not so long ago that I could not do this.
I hope you are enjoying the emergence of spring there.
Craig Johnson
I am certain I had the most intense day of entertainment in my life. While walking back over to the Drury Theater I hear magnificent operatic arias being sung. I detoured and found a man and woman singing fabulous street opera with really good musical accompaniment. The whole market venue where they were basically acting as buskers was spellbound. A hundred people cheered every song and I did drop ten quid for a CD. I left that market place and the next one had a string quartet doing romantic folk songs from Italy. My timing was perfect. I had an hour of free time before needing to be at the Drury. I started off the ‘formal’ part of my entertainment with a three-hour plus run of “My Fair Lady” in the afternoon which proved magnificent. The Drury Theater proves a spectacular venue for plays. I was given permission to photograph the public spaces so will have to show you the inside of the place when I get home. The place is opulent beyond our concepts of theater interiors.
As it turns out my photo editor on my laptop is lousy so I am not going to do anything to my images until I return. Everything about the show was exceptionally well done. I have a hard time getting used to the opulence of the stagecraft. I could sure enjoy building sets if I had the space and money these theaters have. The craft budget for the last show I built (Chicago) was $500. I even had pleasing snippets of conversation with a family sitting next to me during “My Fair Lady.” I had a brief Lebanese dinner before going to see “Chicago”. It was not my favorite of the shows we have done at Electric City Playhouse but since I had built it, I wanted to see the differences between a community theater version and a big budget London show, and especially the stagecraft differences. I actually liked our concepts for the staging much better. Most of the stage here was filled with a monolithic bandstand, leaving very little room for the actors to dance. There was no sense at all of what kind of space the venue was supposed to be. The band, lighting, and music were very well done but the actors were lost visually for most of the show. I do sure enjoy black box as a venue better than these huge halls with four tiers of seating. During this show I met a man and his wife from Atlanta plus three girls from Cornerbrook in Newfoundland. They were amazed that I knew of their town and had been in the Maritimes. The three girls are theater majors here for two months with a course requirement to see twenty shows. Life must be very hard for them. I had pleasant chatter with them about technical theater.
Tomorrow is a ‘work day’ in that I plan to carefully photograph two major cathedrals for additions to my church architecture workshop. Life is good and there is no rain here. It is warmer than when I left Atlanta.
I walked forever again today and it was 250 steps from the subway trains to the street level and I did this about five times today rather than using the elevator. I am having no residual from my fracture and feel most privileged to be whole of body and able to walk the streets of London. It was not so long ago that I could not do this.
I hope you are enjoying the emergence of spring there.
Craig Johnson
