the third edition: dated 14.09.25

The Weekly Blabbette

I’ve been out of the country for a good four weeks. Slumming it up in Europe, or the equivalent when you blow a portion of your savings on staying in various hotels in three different countries while trying to rediscover yourself and experience a return to home country. Home continent? As a white man, I belong back on those European shores, even if the last three generations of my family were predominately born on Australian soil. I remain in the family of immigrants. A child born out of the promise for a different life, a better one, because certainly moving from the United Kingdom is a proper decent choice for anyone. But I jest: being cruel and impolite towards the land of the Brits is done predominately because the economy is awful and it takes near-enough to an entire day to fly all the way over there. I was born in the land down under, though, so I suppose I bear the brunt of every holiday destination being such a journey you have to take into consideration how your vacation time will be bookended by bouts of exhaustion so depressing and overwhelming you will end up standing in the tiny airplane bathroom staring at yourself in the mirror wondering why the hairs between your eyebrows inch closer and closer to being a unibrow and why you were put on this miserable planet if human beings had not yet solved the conundrum of why flying for thirteen hours straight has to be so god-awfully uncomfortable.

The answer might never be known: thirteen hours is merely one half of the travel time on your journey from Brisbane to London, and back, and airlines want to make the most profit possible over the course of the two flights by making you uncomfortable. You want to be happier, spend more money. You want to be saner, stay on land. You want to get sleep while in Europe, invest in some hard drugs. I spent more time annoyed I was awake too early, or struggling to fall back asleep, or feeling two types of ways about going to bed than I did waking up in peace. Never did I sleep until the alarm, but of that no one is too surprised. Sleeping in Europe felt akin to attempting sleep on a plane on hour eight of thirteen: it doesn’t matter that the room is dark.

My time in Europe was segmented into three, although ultimately I was there for almost four weeks. Near enough to. In plotting out what I would be doing once I returned home, once I attempted to return to a sense of normalcy, I thought about writing on my travels. Picking the newsletter back up and adjusting it for size. Taking it in at the waist, fitting new buttons, adding a belted accessory. I was quick to realise the original segments hardly bore relevance, but neither do I. This is an opportunity for me to tell the stories of my travels in Europe without feeling compelled to write fiction inspired by reality, or without ruining my voice repeating the same things over and over to anyone who has ears to listen.

Bear with me as this will take time. For now, let me talk on the first week of my time overseas, abroad as they say. The first handful of days staying in London, England, where I realised the wisest people sometimes are the children, who say London really is a big city.

Keeley Talks [about things that quite literally occurred to him]

wherein I recount the ways in which I was a tourist in whichever part of Europe I found myself in.

Wednesday the 13th of August:

I landed in London sometime in the morning. After the two flights, I was exhausted, felt gross and unclean, and greeted a new airport, a new city, with the hunger that had been quenched by the various meals I was fed on the airplane. Since I couldn’t check into my hotel—The Strand Palace Hotel, in the heart of West End—until 3pm that day, I explored the city with a backpack on my shoulders and an impossible feeling. I was there in London. In Europe. My feet were walking on the earth of an entirely different continent and already I noticed the differences—it was hot, there were white swans and squirrels and those pelicans with the yellow instead of the black, and I was being charged to go urinate in public. Aside from public transport from the airport, one of my first “purchases” in London was entry into a restroom in the park for what probably amounted to a $1.25. Converting my Australian money into pounds was a depressing reality already. In order to give myself, say, 100 pounds, I spent double and then some. Over $200 and your bank account certainly felt it. But I was distracted enough to not worry so much over how much I would inevitably end up spending over the course of my time in Europe on vacation. There was Big Ben to admire from below, people’s sanity to question when I saw the gargantuan crowd gathered around Buckingham Palace nearing the changing of the guard, and an entire city to scope out in person. You don’t realise a place is more than an idea, or a poster-board, until you stand there amongst it. And you realise instead that it can be thrilling, but also realistically depressing.

My first impression of London: people flock in hordes. A thrum of people and cultures, which merely invites in a certain level of uncleanliness. Cigarette butts everywhere on the street—although that was every country I visited in Europe, I would eventually realise—and trash discarded at random. Everywhere nowadays is filthy. But it is the human impact—we cannot keep everything clean, because we cannot pause for long enough to clean it. Humans make new mess to hide old, unwanted mess. We are lazy people, which implies we should all love thirteen-hour flights. I don’t want to be lazy, but sometimes I get overwhelmed. Lately I’ve been getting overwhelmed.

When I could finally check into my hotel room, I wheeled my suitcase out of the elevator on the sixth floor and into the tiniest of rooms I have ever had the pleasure of staying in. Compact and designed for a loner, the hotel room was a single bed, a TV, a table and chair, and the separate bathroom. I felt squeezed in, as if the hotel had made a profit off a closet, but this was all I saw need for. The bed to rest my head, the bathroom to get clean. Enough space on the floor to unzip my suitcase. This was the space I paid for and needed, simply needed. I give a lot of thanks to The Strand Palace Hotel—what I lacked in the hotel room I selected to save on spending copious amounts of money, they made up for with a welcoming gift. Chocolate, a reusable red water bottle with the word ‘London’ on the side, a pop-up card, and a 25 pound gift certificate for a meal down in the hotel’s restaurant. The most I had ever been gifted from a hotel in the past was the WIFI password. These gifts felt like a proper welcome to my time overseas, as cheesy and sentimental as it could get. The plastic scarlet-red bottle would become indispensable, sitting by my bedside every night so my throat wouldn’t be dry when I woke up in the morning. It was also the only bottle the filter near the elevators recognised to the point it would stop before the bottle overflowed and water went everywhere.

Keeley’s Blunder: Every day I am certain to make at least one (1) blunder. Think of it like Keeley’s Law, much like how Murphy’s Law dictates that everything that could go wrong will somehow eventually go wrong. Keeley’s Law dictates that every day cannot go through without me making at least one embarrassing mistake. On the 13th of August, I was half an hour late to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane’s production of Hercules. Why was I late to the theatre, a place I hold incredible reverence for and am typically at least half an hour early for? Because I passed out. Jet lag. My idiotic self was not previously aware of how absolutely vengeful jet lag is on a body. I missed the first half an hour of Hercules and came in around the time Hercules was realising his mother found him on the street. I am deeply embarrassed and have previously only told one person this happened.

Thursday the 14th of August:

[why did I commit to writing so much, lunatic escaped mental patient]

I have a routine, a habit, of visiting a zoo on the first day of any sort of holiday or vacation. Except, for some reason, while I was in London. I think a part of my logic stemmed from the idea I would jet lagged and tired, and would rather delay going to London Zoo by a day and instead criticise the British and their ethics around pilfering and stealing artefacts while listening to an audio tour at the British Museum.

It is important naturally to say “stolen” every time you see something that doesn’t belong to the English empire, but it is equally important to know I still have access to the audio tour and could regale you with various facts at the drop of a hat, like how the Hoa Hakananai’a, from Rapanui (Easter Island), has depictions of the Birdman cult, wherein men competed to be the Birdman and represent the god Makemake. Now, with this understanding of what the figures represent, we can understand these overly large figureheads paint more of a picture of how the people of the island lived and worshipped beyond merely having statues. Maybe if I am bored and lonely and in need of history facts, I can put on the dulcet tones of a British man talking about the various things I got to witness all those days ago in London.

Did you know the Rosetta Stone is on display in a museum despite how incredibly consequential to understanding language it was? Now it is something to be ogled, something to be photographed, and I felt wrong standing there watching it be paraded like that. Maybe it is the written word nerd in me, but the importance of the Rosetta Stone felt to me in that moment like it deserved to at least be surrounded by ropes and not merely glass with finger-marks on it. This is a monumental find—the Rosetta Stone meant hieroglyphs could be translated by white people! Our entire understanding, as non-Egyptians, of Egyptian history, mythology, and the culture of past and present—what remains—is thanks to this text inscribed on a rock, but the significance of *this* rock feels muddied when people are just snapping a picture of it.

The British Museum is gargantuan in size and it feels never-ending, and on this Thursday in August, it was stifling hot and crowded. For one thing, I am not well-adjusted to a hot August, but wandering through a museum surrounded by people sweating my tits off was certainly a warm welcome to being in London. Certain rooms were obviously airconditioned for the art they housed, but I was surely sweating while wandering through the Egyptian hall a second time. See, the truth of the British Museum is trying to cover everything without skipping a room somehow. Through the audio tour, I meandered through various floors of the museum skipping past rooms entirely, and by the time I was finished listening to a British man speak, I was trying to make sure I saw the room containing…whatever I had missed. I want to believe I saw absolutely everything. But I went insane in the process.

In the afternoon, I wandered off to London’s own queer bookstore Gay’s the Word. The world deserves more queer bookstores, or I do, and around the corner from my house so I can buy more queer fiction because I am severely lacking and unfortunately didn’t buy any then because I was so early into the trip I didn’t want to be spending a lot of money so I only bought two pins but now I own a pin with the progressive queer flag on it and a pin with my pronouns (they’re he/him). There was a small asexual section in the bookstore and sure it’s broader than being an aegosexual but I still felt seen, because it’s nice to see confirmation it is perfectly accepted to not want sex.

Friday the 15th of August:

I didn’t know much about London Zoo, except the knowledge that at least one person thought it underwhelming, half-empty and in need of a sprucing. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt: I am not a critic, writing reviews of zoos, but I consider myself at least a connoisseur. A lover of fine animal parks. For my first zoo in Europe, I think I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, I understood the “under construction” of it all—there were multiple sectioned-off areas in the process of being built, but neither of those took away immensely from my experience. I liked the zoo, although in ranking the four I visited while overseas it would come in last for the sheer fact the other three were exceptional examples. London Zoo is broken into three sections according to the map, but there isn’t necessarily strong theming between them: the pink section is through a tunnel and on the other side of the road from the blue and orange sections. I could hardly begin to give them definitive features beyond that.

My plan of attack for a zoo will always be to go in the direction no one seems to be going. Foolishly, I hadn’t studied the map enough to realise the direction I was head, the pink section, could be reached by a tunnel literally beside the entrance, so I inside wandered off in the direction of the penguins, stopping to admire them and their cuteness before reaching the mongoose, the dik-diks, baby’s first sloth in person (!!), and eventually some warthogs, amongst other things. The Rainforest Life house in London Zoo was the absolute standout for me. It housed various species of monkey, like the beautiful white-faced saki, as well as the sloths, some tortoises, and an impossible-to-spot armadillo.

I saw my first flamingo, saw some charming red river hogs, pretended I was home for a brief moment with the emus, and soon enough made my way out of the zoo and off to another bookstore to spend zero money because again I am frugal !! But Daunt Books in Marylebone is a fascinating store indeed. The largest section of the store is arrayed out by country, from France to Australia, from Korea to Egypt, and everywhere in between. It was interesting to see a visual representation of each country’s identity in literature and in the physical book in general. Alas, Malta is too miniscule to warrant an entire section dedicated to it alone, but we’ll get our Maltese representation eventually.

The National Gallery is open late on Fridays, so I squeezed myself into seeing art in the evening after a quick dinner. It’s a spacious gallery with works ranging from Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to portraits done by Hans Holbein the Younger, with everything from Monet to Michelangelo in between. I will never claim myself a studied historian of art, but I feel connected to viewing art in such a way to inherently understand the importance of getting to view what The National Gallery in London has in its collection. Sometimes, in the modern world, you can feel like becoming a part of the horde, the crowd, of people who aim their phones towards every artwork they find striking or relevant. And true, I have a collection of my own on my phone—works I was captivated by, predominantly, because I am drawn more by how an artwork resonates with me rather than whichever name is attached to it. The collection of phone-captured images I have stored from my visit to the National Gallery serve as an opportunity to experience again what I love about seeing art, but it all pales in comparison. Seeing these artworks in person can render you speechless. Sometimes there is an awkward shadow in a picture of a masterpiece. Or someone’s arm sneaks into the shot, which you could crop out, but that is half the point.

You can’t claim to witness the spectacle from a couch in Australia.

Saturday the 16th of August:

My first weekend in Europe, although I had hardly been on the continent for that long. Adjusting to London was proving to be uncomplicated—everyone spoke English, and as much as I had a disdain for how much money I would be spending to simply exist, my third official day in the city was shaping up to be a compelling one. The original plan was thrown out the window eventually, or rather sharply while I was figuring out the plan of attack…but my frugality overtook me when I realised they wanted to charge me thirteen pound for a ferry ride. That’s over twenty-six dollars to cruise down the river to go see another museum, and my time in Europe was indeed littered with museum trips. So, without further pondering, I culled the Tate Britain from my plan, restructured the day, and set out across the river towards the Tate Modern, its contemporary art sibling which I could reach by simply using the lanky legs I was gifted from birth. Not the thirteen pound I needed to save for my dinner.

The Tate Modern is absolutely ginormous, but not all of it is accessible to the public. The gallery is stretched out across two buildings, which are connected in the middle by a large warehouse-type hall and an overhead bridge that makes you feel like jumping. I’m kidding, and I hardly could conceive it—the bridge has what seems like temporary construction fencing on either side of it. The art in the Tate Modern is oftentimes impossible to explain without seeing it—I will include some images below, but the various exhibits included a catbus fashioned after My Neighbour Totoro, the lobster telephone, the infamous Fountain (which is of course a urinal), a colossal tower made of radios and speakers all simultaneously playing different stations, various fruits and vegetables staged on rocks, and Andy Warhol’s treatments of a picture of Marilyn Monroe, of course a highlight of mine because of my adoration for Marilyn herself.

By now I was beginning to get a little peckish, so I meandered towards the Borough Markets, a sprawling marketplace in the heart of the city where you could very easily get mugged if you weren’t as cautious about your belongings as I was. Grateful to not be whacking a backpack into random strangers, I explored the Borough Markets with the giddiness of a child. Everything you could possibly want from a marketplace was there, and frankly, I considered coming back on multiple occasions to try all of the different things my mouth watered over. I hardly have photos of the food, except what I inevitably bought, but it was all so inviting. People wandered around with plastic cups of strawberries covered in chocolate. I ordered some mac & cheese and spooned it into my mouth. The mac & cheese had a thick layer of cheese on the top and it was heavenly. The idea of getting freshly-made mac & cheese from a large simmering pot was truly to die for, but I was only halfway through my spiritual journey through food. A stall sold various croissant hybrids, including a crookie—cookie dough baked into a croissant—but I caved for the crownie, a brownie baked into a croissant, and it was the closest thing to heaven I had so far experienced in the old continent. I was drooling, that much seemed certain. It was so delicious I was envious of Londoners for having easy access to something so divine.

Every time I attempt to explain Barbican I come up short of accurately describing it. Barbican is an estate of high rises and apartment buildings in London with a specific architectural style and aesthetic. It is brutalist and somewhat like a fortress, offset with the lush vibrance of greenery and the pond fountains. I think if I lived in London I would love to live in Barbican, but there is merely an idea, a germination. I imagine my writing could thrive there, I imagine it is the sort of place an artist can creatively thrive, but I have no intention of moving to a country wherein my savings will go down the toilet the moment I decide to stay. Barbican is impressive, and also boasts a performing arts centre, but it represents the illusion of a different life. One where I pretend my existence is constructed of nobility.

Sunday the 17th of August:

For my very first excursion out of London, I took the train to Bath, a historic village somewhere in England, I don’t know maps. People like to make the joke of “did you bath in Bath?” But the truth is I did not even step near the famed Bath baths because I did not feel like spending 30 pound on the entrance fee. Frugal as to be expected. But before then, before I even reached Bath, I was obsessing over how well-organised the train trip out from the city was. I had pre-booked the ticket weeks before, months even, probably not months though because I planned this trip in like two months. I had an assigned seat, and above the seat was a small screen with details of where the seat was reserved to. For example, my seat was reserved from London to Bath, and then assumably it either became available for anyone or reserved from Bath to somewhere else. It was a spoiler for how several of my other train journey would go, but it felt nice having a specific seat, even if I had to sit beside someone who ate for the first half of the trip and looked suspiciously like someone I still lowkey have feelings for but don’t talk about because nothing will ever happen and we hardly even talk anymore.

Bath is gorgeous. Spectacular. Like stepping back into the past, except there is a Five Guys on the corner and everyone has cellphones and I’m wandering around with a camera around my neck instead of trying to avoid getting publicly flogged for, I don’t know, accidentally looking at someone funny. It was in Bath I really began to settle into the vacation. I became less terrified of spending money, less unsure about being in the country and on an entirely different continent to the one I had grown up in. I think u started to feel less terrified of everything, and I thank Bath for being the welcoming sort of place to truly initiate me. The entirety of Bath is World Heritage listed. There is nothing like it here in Australia and it is without question a beautiful, and needed, excursion on my vacation.

I mean, I saw where Jane Austen lived for a time in Bath, and let me tell you, they are obsessed with the knowledge that Jane Austen lived in their town for a brief period of time and wrote about it multiple times. They’re like, that’s our girlie, despite the fact she was not born there, did not die there, and eventually moved away. But that’s their girlie!

They will never deny that.

It was in Bath, where I started to calm down about spending money, that I bought for a beef and Stilton cheese pasty, perhaps the best pasty I have ever had in my life and maybe ever will. I don’t know, pasties in Australia seem to be…disappointing? They look miserable. This one from a store down an alleyway in town was absolutely delicious and frankly I could have bought at least three more for the road. Or for later. For sometime. For my suitcase if they would have kept until then. I also bought a flapjack—sort of like an oatcake—and periodically obsessed over it over the next few days. It was Eton Mess style and cracked slightly over the course of the day but it was slightly warm in Bath and I could have done with a bath, you’re not wrong, person in my ear whispering the joke one more time.

Perhaps the most impressive thing I would do in Bath was something entirely unplanned. I had time to kill before my train in the afternoon, since I had pre-booked my ticket beforehand for the return too. So, instead of being bored wandering the same streets or sitting at the station with a book, which would still have been productive but less so while I was in a town I would perhaps never see again if I die in a month, I hiked up a mountain. There is an incredible lookout of Bath up behind the train station, and after walking in the peace of the woods, reminding myself I am in the peace of the woods in England, I started up the stairs. Mind you, at this point I had done a lot of walking across the day, and across the last few days, so the light in the lantern was certainly already growing dim. The view from the lookout point was breathtaking. Bath is human perfection. A city constructed to be perfect, to be gorgeous without fault. I will perhaps never stop talking in awe about Bath.

But the day was coming to an end, as was the week. For my first magic trick, I pulled enjoying London out of a hat, and soon I was realising just how incredible my life could be when I stepped away from everything cruel and wandered the streets of a new city taking pictures of every theatre I could see.

Which is in fact the perfect segue…

Curtain Call

wherein I give my unfiltered opinions about the theatre productions I saw on the West End…

While in London, one of my absolute priorities was seeing as much theatre as reasonably possible. My one regret while in London was not seeing more theatre, but alas, I am not made of money or time. Over the course of two-ish weeks I saw five musicals, but within my first five-ish days of the holiday, I saw three productions: Hercules at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane; Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club at the Playhouse Theatre; and Evita at the London Palladium. What follows will be my personal reviews of the productions, from casting to set design, songs to the script, and even the question of which theatre I found the most gorgeous. Places everyone, it’s the curtain call.

HERCULES at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Firstly, keep in mind I was half an hour late to the performance because my exhausted self passed out in the hotel room, but otherwise I was conscious and willing to enjoy the show.

I love Hercules. The music, the storytelling, everything under the sun that is Greek mythology related. The animated movie from the 90s is a treasure from my childhood and Greek mythology is so ripe for musical theatre I will welcome every idea. Hadestown is perhaps my favourite musical I have seen live. Seeing Hercules on the West End at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London was always going to be an incredible experience, and we can overlook my inability to talk about the first half hour of the show. Once I was ushered to my seat during a break between songs, I could take in the gorgeous theatre and settle into watching the musical.

I think one of my primary worries for how Hercules would be adapted to the stage surrounded the large, monumental set pieces. The final conflict between Hades and the gods and goddesses of Olympus was never destined to be squeezed down to size on an indoor stage. Perhaps in some gargantuan amphitheatre, but Drury Lane can only contain multitudes to an extent. Having actors in costume for the Titans would never have been impressive or on a grand scale, but their decision instead to restrict the action to only Hades as the opposing force is…odd. It reminds me of how, in a panic to make the finale more accessible for a Broadway stage, and touring and previews etc., Moulin Rouge the Musical strips away the excess and centres its final climax on…two people arguing in front of a backdrop. It is frankly embarrassing and makes you wonder where the interesting ideas went. Hercules could have done *something* different with how they approached Hades’ assault on Olympus. But hey, at least they spent some of their budget on puppetry and didn’t just bore me to death with a play about gangsters. Because I am sure the underground of Paris in the early 1900s was incredibly exhilarated to hear about more white men.

Adapting a Disney animated movie will always present challenges in character design. Oftentimes characters are bursting off the screen, with intricate costumes and they might not even have human characteristics or be anatomically correct. Not everything on stage can be a puppet, or at least not necessarily in the way in which Disney musicals operate on stage. There are therefore certain characters in Hercules that have been altered significantly—Pain and Panic, Phil, and the complete erasure of Pegasus. I don’t know whether I can really say I get the changes. Losing Pegasus doesn’t completely alter the story, but having a human Phil who hardly bares a physical resemblance to the film’s Phil is odd. The actor in the role did a fantastic job, and this is not at all against him, but losing Phil’s defining physical appearance makes him feel more ordinary beside Hercules. Similarly, though, Pain and Panic appear more ordinary beside Hades too—in large part because they are no longer Pain and Panic, imps of the underworld, and are instead just two dudes with Christian names. They’re Johnny and Bobby now, Tommy and Steve, Joe and Larry. I don’t remember, I don’t care. They served the same arc in the narrative, but their character designs were lacklustre and irrelevant. Gone were the visually-recognisable minions of lord Hades, instead replaced with some dudes. One can only pray the first half hour of the stage production clarified why they now appeared so generic. [As an aside on character designs: why is Hades wearing only red now? Where is the fabulous black gown? The flaming hair? Is it too expensive to make interesting, accurate costuming?]

While I have my reasons to mumble, I still thoroughly enjoyed seeing Hercules performed on stage and would love sometime to not miss the first half an hour of it! The Drury Lane theatre is absolutely gorgeous. The cast was incredibly talented and while no one was necessarily the standout of the night, cohesively they worked brilliantly together to honour the classic Disney animated film we know and love. Definitely worth catching if you are in London, or when it inevitably makes its way to Australia in a decade’s time.

CABARET at the Kit Kat Club at the Playhouse Theatre

There is one rule at the Kit Kat Club: no photography. Period. When you enter down a staircase into the basement of the building, they offer you free alcohol and cover your phone camera with a sticker. Typically, I take an obligatory picture of the stage when I settle into my seat, sort of a digital souvenir, a reminder of where I am and where I have been. But I sat there in the intimate theatre refusing to disobey the rule, and I have no photographs of anything inside the Playhouse Theatre in London. No pictures of the performers playing their instruments in the basement, no pictures of the gorgeous men one step from being intimate with one another for an audience on a balcony above one of the theatre’s many bars, no pictures of the stage. Only the memory, only the wish that I could accurately represent how impeccable the design of the Playhouse Theatre is for this production of a musical I adore so profoundly.

Cabaret is an exceptional musical. I adore the film, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles, but the stage production differs quite noticeable from it. There was never a doubt in my mind that I would travel the distance to the West End and not partake in seeing Cabaret. There is no question to which musical I enjoyed the most while in London—Cabaret made me emotional, left me speechless, and found the piece of me from within that begged for an encore. I could have watched it again the very next evening. Rob Madge is a spectacular Emcee and truly blew me away—it makes me wonder how atrocious that other Emcee was. Hannah Dodd is fantastic as Sally Bowles, but naturally I wish I could time-travel to September 22nd to see the incredible Eva Noblezada in the role. The casting for Cabaret is so phenomenal that Daniel Bowerbank as Clifford is the weakest link and he is by no means awful, just a tiny bit stilted.

I have some off-the-cuff thoughts I wrote down, and I would like to repeat them now:

“Not them worshipping a pineapple”
“The gasp we all probably collectively gasped when the one man took off his jacket and NAZI” [he had a swastika arm band]
“Imagine being a prude coming to see this”
“It’s like the second song and they’re pretending to fuck one another”
“I’m depressed”
“The staging I’ve seen for the stage production version of the song Cabaret makes so much more sense in the context—Sally is a puppet, controlled by the growing Nazi regime, told to perform”
“The delivery of you wouldn’t even know she was Jewish at all was so masterful and powerful” [Rob Madge delivered the line with such an intensity I was taken aback and honestly might have gasped]
“It’s so painful to applaud some Nazis”
“Not making the gorilla costume laughably feminine means you take her for what she is: a gorilla, an ape, not human. The kicker is the Emcee screaming Jewish in her face.”

Cabaret had me truly captivated. An experience I will not forget or take for granted, and mind you, this is just how I talk about theatre I absolutely adore on a daily basis. In terms of theatre productions I consider to be of highest regard when I saw them live, I rank Hadestown, Cabaret and Come From Away as my absolute favourites. I could be forgetting something, but truthfully I just adore theatre, and this was such an unforgettable experience. I left the theatre pulling the sticker off the back of my phone, entirely speechless.

[Cabaret is a musical that touches on the rise of the Nazis but is handled with such nuance and care. The film, if I recall correctly, is less blatant on the Nazism but equally effective. Not two of my favourite musicals touching on incredibly harrowing and traumatic events in history.]

EVITA at the London Palladium

Anything for Rachel Zegler.

The moment I realised I could see Rachel Zegler perform live in Evita while I was in London, I bought a ticket. It didn’t matter if I hardly knew Evita, I was paying for the opportunity to see her perform and everything else came second. To clarify: I did not enjoy the film adaptation of Evita starring Madonna when I watched it for the first and only time. It felt clunky, awkward, with lyrics that weren’t well-written or structured to actually feel like a song. Prior to seeing the show on stage, I only ever cared for two songs: “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “Buenos Aires” and I predominately listened to the Glee covers like a lunatic. I was also warned Jamie Lloyd’s Evita could be confusing if you lacked an understanding of the show, so I sought out a little context and waited for the most insane opportunity to see Rachel Zegler live.

She was truly incredible. Phenomenal. A star. Without question. Despite the lack of staging and costuming for the most part, this revival at the London Palladium is a force to be reckoned with in terms of its casting. Beyond Rachel Zegler being absolutely captivating as the titular Eva Peron, Diego Andres Rodriguez is an incredible Che and gets covered in paint or colourful something at the end of the show with his shirt off, which is of course fantastic albeit confusing. Bella Brown’s solo moment in “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” proves why she is Rachel’s understudy—she has a beautiful voice and truly I am so excited to see what the future holds for her.

I think the cast allowed me to overlook the issues I have with Evita. The songs overall still feel clunky to me, although I have definitely added “Rainbow High” and “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” to my arsenal of Evita songs I actively want to listen to. The cast sells the work—and that is absolutely what Andrew Lloyd Webber needs for like, most of his musicals, because what is going on with that man. [Side note: I will never entertain the Sondheim vs Lloyd Webber arguments because only one of those men consistently wrote music and lyrics and did so effortlessly. I will forever be team Sondheim. The Phantom of the Opera is popular, sure, but Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t even write the lyrics for it.]

Perhaps the strangest thing I noticed about seeing Evita was just how long they wanted to bow for. We clapped and clapped and they bowed and bowed. Every other musical they bow a maximum of three times, but it was like everyone else in the room wanted to attempt to set a record. I adore Rachel Zegler, so applauding her for longer seemed like a worthy, noble cause, but after a time I started to get tired and exhausted and my hands hurt and it was time to wrap that up. But I think it invites in a discussion about the relationship between audience and celebrity. Again I literally couldn’t stop giggling about the fact I had just witnessed Rachel Zegler perform live in front of my own eyes, but we could all stand to be less obsessive over celebrities and give them some room to breathe as human beings. Don’t even get me started on stage door culture.

NEXT TIME: we talk about the final two musicals I saw while I was in London and hand out some accolades. Stay tuned.

Go Forth...

I love to recommend things. As someone who consumes a lot of media, lots of art, I am always brimming with something to recommend, something for someone else to ingest...even if their opinion on the thing, the art, the media differs from mine. It is always important to remember that tastes vary, and one person's snide disapproval of something you adore does not diminish the fact you love something. So, go forth and ingest something from me to you. Sounds like I'm regurgitating into your mouth.

Films: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and Frances Ha

Books: Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante [did you know Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for a completely anonymous author who is still up for debate?]

Music: "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret and "Letter to My 13 Year Old Self" by Laufey.

Television: Australian Survivor's "Australia vs the World" season and His Dark Materials [even though I have only watched five episodes].