Still genuinely amazed that Encounters was able to pull this off. How on earth did they get Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman in Bristol? Madness. A good discussion led by Alice Bliss, whose harsh prelude to the audience Q&A is appreciated. Michel Gondry is like a French James Murphy, discursive and willing to engage. Charlie Kaufman is, true to character, more taciturn and complains a lot about the acoustics. Gondry has no qualms in saying that Kaufman is difficult to work with to his face, but the admiration between them is clear. A lot of fascinating insight into the writing process of the film.
Fun to see this again so quickly after Edinburgh. It’s moved on a bit, even if I cannot exactly specify where it has changed, what’s been removed, what’s been added. It’s the first outing in a while, and you can sense him find his rhythm again, which is interesting to watch. Amazing how he’s able to switch that depth of emotion on.
A play that is definitely in no way, no sir, about Fleetwood Mac making Rumours. I was vaguely under the impression going in that it was a musical, not least with how prominently they were pushing that Will Butler (the non-sex-pest one of the brothers Butler) did the original songs. But they very minimally appear, and very rarely in anything other than piecemeal or skeletal forms. I remain broadly ambivalent about the whole thing, neither loving it nor hating it. It’s not bad. It’s long, and it’s a lot of people just arguing with each other quite loudly and shrill-ly, and if you consider that to have inherent dramatic momentum, you might love it, but for me it just gave me a headache. Maybe the Thanksgiving episode of The Bear is a useful litmus test. It also absolutely didn’t need to be over three hours long. The premise was great, there were some fun bits, but some clunky acting at time didn’t particularly ever make me feel fully invested in it, as if it had never quite really got going. Ah well.
It’s a weird confluence, finding Dylan Moran exhibiting his artwork at Stanley Donwood’s gallery in Bath, explicable by apparently (as the man working the gallery told us) Moran and Donwood living near each other in Brighton. And, more specifically, Moran being in Bath playing Bottom at the Royal Theatre. Despite feeling a bit under the weather on the tail end of a cold, we make our way into Bath for it, and find a relatively small room with art up around it. The pieces are reminiscent of the doodles Moran used to project during his shows, and could easily be explained by being fragments of speech overheard in the world from which he’s extrapolated. We end up buying one (“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will be fatter”) which seems perfect for the kitchen, and as such I’m allowed to hook a bag from the window which contains a stuffed cat. Never say you don’t get respect as a patron of the arts.
We’ve overdue a catch up with Zac and Martha, and they suggest the Bee and Pollination festival (of course they do, Zac being a keen amateur beekeeper) up at the UoB Botanical Gardens, an institution I never knew existed and I studied there for four years. Wild. I pick up some locally made honeycomb, marvel at a beeswax Millenium Falcon model, go for a tour of the gardens in the absolutely tipping it down rain, and end up slightly banjaxed into a talk about the impending dangers of the invasion of the Asian hornet. Which does, to be fair, sound terrifying! And the woman who sounded awfully like Pam Ayres doing free verse certainly sounded compelling. A cheeky bit of cake from the Chandos Deli-supplied tea room never hurt either.
Once again we end the Fringe with a Jordan Brookes show, and it’s another Fringe show that is nominally a WIP but has clearly found its shape quite happily. We’re closer to I’ve Got Nothing than Fontanelle here, high concept musicals begone and concentrated discomfort back on the menu. Nominally focused around him eating a croissant on a train (duh), obviously it spirals. At one point I distract him by checking whether I’ve still got my camera in my bag, which even knowing both him and what he’s doing still throws me. As ever with Brookes, the marvel is similar to Eddie Izzard - how does he manage to take what is, if you focus in, pretty much just observational comedy, and turn it into something so distinct and disconcerting. He just keeps hitting.
She’s found the perfect skirt suit, and she’s not afraid to show it off. It’s hard to believe that I saw Sam Nicoresti in my first ever Fringe in her split bill with Tom Burgess, and then missed (in Fringe terms) her emergence as a major force in comedy, but it’s not hard to understand how that’s happened. I must watch Wokeflake at some point, but Nicoresti has written a follow up in Baby Doomer a wonderfully understated show about the profundity and mundanity of the trans femme experience (and, to be fair, the general trans experience) that quietly builds to big things, with heart and excellent jokes (a joke about how much straight people like cats is still lodged in my brain). I’m going to throw of the pretence and admit that I’m writing this post her Edinburgh Comedy Award win, and it was both well-deserved and eminently predictable. Lord knows what she does now, but I can’t wait.
What a delight to get to see Leila absolutely own the stage (shipping container) with Relay, the story of how they and Priya ended up conceiving a beautiful baby. I got to see an early version of this at OPPO quite a while ago now, when they were still working out what this would be, and to see it go from a loose collection of thoughts to a full-on show, with props and a keytar and songs, is a thrill. Leila is a naturally but spikily sympathetic performer, and to watch the audience just fall in love with them over the hour was wonderful, especially as this performance took place about half an hour after they were told by someone in Pleasance Courtyard that their baby wasn’t really theirs then, was it. Shocking.
A last minute to both the Fringe programme as a whole and to our itinerary (or at least for me, George, and Hazel - understandably the others are reluctant to go to an 11am show after getting home at like 2.30am from ACMS last night), a firm favourite in JLR. It’s the first performance in a short run of WIPs, so expectations were duly set, but you’re never going to not have a good time. The poems are developing nicely (rodeos, the puzzle app, the gender reveal all being favourites), one song which doesn’t fully explain why he’s brought a keyboard with him but I’m sure that will develop over time, and he’s still able to recall previous shows on demand, so we are treated to a chunk of A World Just Like Our Own, which is always a pleasure. A fun way to spend a morning at the Fringe, and the pre-show Sparks playlist certainly doesn’t hurt.
Another night of carnage at ACMS. Thom and Alwin Solanky hosting in delightfully ramshackle fashion. Other acts include a faux boy band, a salon owner, the Backwards Man, and a whole host of others including a surprising number of songs. I do Crow, which - while I think it did ok, all things considered - I feel confirmed my doubts that it was a tad too not-alt, both compared to other acts and also in noticing how much the things that might stand out in a smaller gig as being a bit weird are just par for the course in even the most bog standard Fringe show. Back to the drawing board for next time.
Vintage Key, utterly inimitable but for the fact that any material I write for the next week will be in his voice, and I must make sure I don’t do anything with that. Loganberry sees him bullwhipping between vigour and serenity, always keeping the audience on their toes. He’ll ask his tech to stop the music so he can talk to someone clearly, then be happy to cut them off at a moment’s notice. The new poems are great fun as ever, and the overall device of him grappling with a midlife crises spurred by Gabby Logan inviting him onto her podcast is a delight. A difficult show to watch just before doing ACMS and realising that I am in no way properly alternative and that everything I thought was interesting about Crow is just table stakes at the Fringe. Ah well. Who better to learn this from?
This is, as Bec is at pains to point out, not a show. For a comedian whose shows are typically elaborately put together pieces with great structural care and thematic/narrative precision, this is a difficult thing to bear for her. If not a show, then, it’s more a forcing function to do something after 6 difficult-sounding years away from the Fringe where the next show simply wasn’t coming to her. Judged on those terms, I hope this is a success for her. The flip charts are, as ever, a lot of fun. There are a couple of other strong standalone pieces, and admittedly a few less so, but such is life. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of this material gets lost to time, but hopefully this is the catalyst for whatever the next show turns out to be. More than that, it’s just nice to see Hill back at the Fringe - she’s always been an excellent comic with a very precise mind and voice for things, and I can’t wait to see her back at full strength again.
Another masterclass in joke writing from Glenn Moore. If it doesn’t perhaps quite hit the heights of his 2022 show, that’s because those were some very high heights indeed. The narrative feels ever so slightly crowbarred in a way that other comedians make a bit more natural, but it mostly functions as a frame from which to hang everything, so I’m not particularly complaining. There’s a lovely conceit around this as well with the list of jokes to get people back on side and the joke that will turn everyone away, which would maybe work nicer more divorced from the narrative. Still, the clip of the jokes is astonishing, they’re almost all excellent, and sometimes jealousy inducing. Happy to be back.
It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Helen Bauer, but my god she remains an absolute force of nature to be reckoned with. One of the most naturally energetic stand-ups around at the moment, bounding with it and simply unable to wait to tell you what she wants to say. It’s a compelling hour about what it means to be single, being a larger woman, going to therapy, listening to podcasts at all times because otherwise you’re being left alone with your own thoughts and excuse me what. All the hits, but excellent written and delivered, lightly conceptualised but minimally instrusive. Big fan.
Ahir Shah finally comes to Edinburgh with a WIP that actually feels like a WIP, after 2023’s main-prize-winning effort. That’s not a criticism! I’d be loathed to talk too much about details given it’s a WIP, but I’d say there’s a lot of big laughs, a lot of big thoughts, and right now those two exist in broadly separate sections of the show. Not quite two disparate circles in a Venn diagram, but close. When he gets the structure right, this could be better than Ends. Of the big thoughts, they’re eruditely written and performed, and I found them oddly affecting at times, the devotion to the idea of having the person who loves you the most in your life day after day.
Reprising the Soho Theatre show from last Christmas (or indeed, this January for me), it’s hard to imagine that this didn’t originate as a late night Edinburgh show, to be honest. That being said, this is a much more tightly sprung show than free-form knockabout. It’s got some of the stupidest best jokes of the Fringe, the exact kind of thing I like. Adam Riches has nailed playing variants of himself, even when that variant is nominally Michael Ball. John Kearns plays hangdog beautifully. I never want to see the real thing.
Frankie’s back! There is, to be fair, a lot of overlap comedically with the first show (broadly summed up in an introductory animation, but I do still wonder how anyone who hadn’t seen that show makes sense of most of this, or even if they’re supposed to) but when those comedic ideas are so good, why wouldn’t you. He’s certainly happier in the character’s skin, so the other variety acts are out, but the audience game playing and dog puppetry are all here to stay, but remixed and built upon in some exciting ways. It’s just so much fun to be in Frankie’s presence. I’m very excited to see what JKW does next, either in figuring out how Frankie can survive long term without relying on people having seen every show, or whether it’s something different entirely.
Within 5 minutes of Busy Body, Amy has correctly identified my social label shift over time from “nerd” to “sex god”, and as Alasdair is not there to contradict, the audience is forced to believe. It’s a relatively freewheeling show, which suits Amy’s style to a tee. It’s not quite a “getting old” show - at pains as she is to point out how irritating that is when someone young complains about it - but it’s certainly a show about settling into who you are and recognising how that happened. Lots of fun routines, a more serious bit about the rise of transphobia in the UK, and some operatic chops thrown in for good measure.
Phil Ellis is about to be a contestant on the next series of Taskmaster, and judging by this show, he knows what that means. This is still classic Ellis, but with half an eye on how this is going to work with an audience that might not know him as well (or, as John Kearns found out, might not care to get to know him either). The result is a quietly sentimental show underneath some uproarious laughs, audacious routines (featuring a number of… let’s say supporting artists), and it’s wonderful to see him finding his place with hopefully impending mainstream notice.
I will never turn down an opportunity to see ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is my fourth time, and I’ve got two nights booked when Masli comes to the Old Vic in October. It’s a communal experience like no other, held together by the absolute guilelessness of Masli as the Victorian clown agony aunt, sincerely and desperately trying to solve the audience’s problems. It’s a shame that, tonight, the audience aren’t matching that sincerity or offering the depth required. They don’t trust her enough, and having seen this show firing on all cylinders all the previous times, I don’t think that’s her fault. The only way to make this show as good as it can be is to give yourself over to it, to just answer and let her work with it. When that does happen tonight, magic occurs. There’s this slow build of spinning plates that every now and then you realise the insanity of and then realise how little you’ve otherwise been thinking about it. I walked away, as ever, in awe and hopeful, but more specifically this time with one fewer sock than I came in with. What more could you want?
I’m such a big fan of Lachy. Voices Of Evil from a couple of years ago was an incredibly assured debut, he’s done OPPO a few times and has always been brilliant, and is just the loveliest boy. So it’s a delight to see him follow all of that up with a show that cements him as one of our most impressive acts on the scene right now. WonderTwunk is a beautifully macabre ventriloquism show, stepping up from the distinctly light-hearted Brew the witch to the genuinely quite sinister father figure here. The world building is immense, in terms of both situation and aura. It feels lived in. There’s a Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared air to the whole thing, the undercurrent of something not quite being right and grotesquely revealing itself to be so. Lachy’s ventriloquism is excellent, his vocal flexibility and ability to switch between voices is astounding. He’s such a committed performer. And then, underneath it all, it’s a clearly heartfelt expression of lots of different things, most obviously - to me, at least - the terror of feeling like touching someone you love could hurt them, and so not. How lucky we’re going to be to keep seeing new things from him.
The first show of the Fringe! What a pleasure to spend it with Sharon Wanjohi, one of my favourite up-and-comers, having seen her at Party and booked her at OPPO. In The House is ostensibly actually a sales pitch for Sharon’s self-help book, which is a lovely conceptual device in that it is both a framework for her to deliver some overtly written pieces (one of my favourite things in stand-up) and to open up more thematically about the show’s subtext, without ever being weighing too heavy that she can’t just do stand-up for most of the hour. Clearly the last few months have been a lot for her, and it’s impressive how this is handled emotionally but without turning into the typical 45 minute turn, instead being well threaded throughout. Sharon herself is a powder keg, bursting at the seams with ideas and unstoppable in trying to get them all out. It’s wonderful stuff and a really strong debut.
Back again to the same show, this time as tradition with the family. I think, honestly, I took more from the show a second time, potentially just in knowing the shape of the thing and getting to enjoy the subtleties of it a bit more. It’s interesting to see it a second time, getting to notice some of the seams of the show. There are also additions! At least compared to my recollection from May, there are two really nice new toppers being added that add a bit more structural cohesion to the show. The specific moments that took my breath away the first time still, broadly, do that. One of them remains I think the most impressive technical trick he’s done, even if the joins are a bit more visible the second time around. But, just, overall, I really love what the show does and says, and it’s not that how it says that is secondary, but I have found myself thinking about the questions it asks of you an awful lot since.
This is the second year now that Richard has managed to get an HPE representation at the Bristol Pride March, and it remains a lot of fun. A decent turn out from the office, lots of face paint and rainbow merch, and a banner that really next year could do with some sticks to hold onto. It’s a blisteringly hot day - shorts, sun cream, hat, the works - which makes for a fun if sweaty march. Slightly more bottlenecked than last year, causing us to take a while to get started and get through the route, but in general just a really fun morning.
The next in this financial year’s quarterly socials at work takes us to Circomedia for a circus workshop. We did this last time a couple of years ago, so there’s a faint feeling of familiarity coming back to this old church (the high ceilings being perfect for the acrobatics). There is no cringey introductory perfomance this time - instead, we’re straight into a buffet lunch and onto the activities. Split into groups, we get to do some balance exercises (alas, this time I do not get to be the head of a human pyramid, but I am at least in the middle); some tightrope walking; some trapeze (no flinging ourselves from bar to bar, just some posing); and last but not least, some plate spinning. I manage it exactly once. I’m thrilled.
Having long been a fan of John Finnemore in general and of Souvenir Programme in particular, and having listened to every episode ad infinitum to help fall asleep (not the damning with faint praise that that might convey!), it’s a genuine thrill to sit in a horrifically unconditioned old church hall(?) amongst maybe, I don’t know, 60 other people to watch almost all of the cast (minus an absent Laurie Lewin) run through this year’s JFSP special. The first surprise was whether this would take the form of the 2023 special - a standard collection of sketches as per the first 8 series - or the 2024 special - a more experimental piece, a la series 9. In the event, it turns out to be the former. We get a slightly updated and topical sketch from a few series back for this room only, and then into the rest of the new sketches. As it’s effectively a WIP, it seems unfair to dig into the details too much, other than to say they are exactly what you’d hope for from this style of JFSP. Fun premises, actual punchlines, the usual hangups and recurring underlying obsessions that clearly fuel Finnemore. Whether it was because it was yet to be written or merely to not spoil every sketch for us, for the Since You Ask Me… we were treated to the classic Treasure Island (“Polly wants a bison!”) edition from the first series, which is impeccable on the radio and even more fun live. My primary thought as we headed back to Paddington was mostly that it was very weird putting faces to the voices to which I’ve been listening for 10 years on the radio. And that’s a hard one to explain with my aphantasia. It’s not like I can see them when I listen to it now, but there is a difference somehow between the old state of not knowing what they look like and the new state of, well, knowing what they look like. This isn’t even a complaint about how they look, they are all very handsome. Just… a new familiar to find.
I am sadly less impressed with War Horse than I wanted to be. And I did want to be! It’s obviously not a new play at this point, was well regarded at the time, and I’m aware that I’m seeing this as a touring production down the line and - with no offense intended to the touring company - that does potentially leave a certain gap between it and the original. The direction and puppetry are both impressive - there is a thoughtfulness to the staging, and it is always incredible how quickly you stop seeing the puppets as puppets and start seeing horses instead. But there are some pockets of pretty abysmal writing and acting: at one point, as bells ring in the town square in an otherwise bucolic scene, someone exposits “You know what that means: the German kaiser has refused to withdraw troops from Belgium”. I mean, bleak. It lost a lot of narrative momentum in the second half, becoming oddly unfocused. But! The final moments are incredible effective (although this is very much a “hitting my direct trigger” thing (see A Monster Calls)), so I will give it that. Nonetheless, though, a shame.
Oh boy. This is something that I have been looking forward to for something like nine months now. The idea of Thom Yorke pulling apart Hail To The Thief and putting it back together again around Hamlet is so up my street that I’m still not quite I’ve not manifested it into existence. Quite late in the run, we make a weekend out of Stratford upon Avon and my god was it worth it. The set, beginning with blazers hung from the ceiling, is comparatively minimal but brought to life through multiple levels and amps in place of theatrical blocks. The lights go down, the ominous tick of the drum machine behind 2+2=5 kicks in, and we begin. It’s a tightly edited script, bringing a 4 hour epic into about 1h40, and so it does rely on some familiarity with the play, but I found it an effective abridgement. Musically, the band are obviously not quite Radiohead, but they are good. Yorke’s arrangements/orchestrations do the whole thing justice, and I’m fairly certain every song but A Punchup At A Wedding is accounted for in one form or another - some, like The Gloaming, get used as ambience; others like Scatterbrain and Sail To The Moon, both in emotional peaks of the show, get treated pretty much in full. I think the highest praise I can give HHTTT is that it would absolutely hold its own as a top class production of Hamlet even without the Radiohead involvement, never giving the impression of a cheap, quick crossover. The cast are top notch, the direction zips it along nicely, and the production values are incredible. As the bombast of the second half of A Wolf At The Door rises in volume and intensity for the final crescendo of the show, it’s hard not to feel swept away.
Love a good book talk, me. Normally that’s a trip to Bath to go to Toppings, but tonight! In our very own Old Vic, we have Tim Key talking about his new collection of poetry and dialogues, LA Baby. He’s done a few of these now, for this and the last book (Chapters), and it’s always a surprise who he’s going to get to do the interviewing. John Kearns, Jessica Knappett, and Sam Campbell have all popped up before. Daniel Kitson’s doing it in Exeter a couple of days before. Who’s it going to be for us? Delightfully it turns out to be Amy Gledhill, a firm favourite. She has a wonderful ability to play both sharp and naive, which is fun in this kind of setting. Lots of good chat about what was actually going on for Key at the time - filming the new spin-off of The Office (U.S.) - a few poems read out, a belter of both an audience Q and indeed A (“is the spin-off any good?” “to be completely honest, the jury’s out”).
Once again we mark the passing of another two to three years with a Derren Brown show. Once a familiar staple in the family routine (and indeed still so - I’m seeing this show again with them later in the year), this time I’m going to see it in Bristol with Alasdair, which is a treat. More so than any other thing I write about here, I don’t know how best to write about this without spoiling anything, so here we go. I don’t think it quite lives up to Showman as a conceptual whole, but that is a very high bar. There is, though, a central set piece - that is somehow not the finale! - that impresses both on a technical level (how are those two objects that identical?!) but in ambition also. For the lucky participant, the show is briefly all about them, and I think leaves them with something really special. It’s an interesting intersect of his later TV shows, more focused on self-improvement (although can it be called that when he’s improving someone else’s self?), and his live work. Meanwhile! In a routine around dousing, Alasdair gets swept along with the crowd and by the end of the first half he has moved from our seat in the circle to being in the aisle in the stalls. He is disconcerted; I am delighted.
Last year, across a combination of performances at the Fringe and an afternoon in Pleasance London, I managed to see all but one of John-Luke Roberts’ ten Edinburgh shows. The missing one was the elusive It Is Better, a show first conceived as a record during lockdown and very rarely performed live post-Covid. It is a record I own three times over, for various reasons, but have never actually listened to, so I was delighted that Luke was coming to Bristol on tour (and excited to have had advanced warning of that fact by virtue of him messaging me to ask about good venues) with that very show - the collection is complete! So, racing over to the Alma Tavern after an excitable and bruising 30th birthday sports day for a friend of ours, we start with the greatest hits and some new material (including, of course, some of the Spice Girls), and then onto the main event. It’s a lovingly put together show that to some degree brings Stdad-Up and Builds A Monster full circle, with the re-emergence of the Dad “character”, the result presumably of a pandemic spent processing. A typically JLR-esque framing device holds it all together, some beautiful interior jokes, and a surprisingly affecting ending. Superb stuff, and I should really listen to the original.
What a happy accident to discover that, when Nish sends out a mailing list blast noting that there are very much still tickets available for his tour show in St Albans, that is on a night that I am in the area as a result of the Spurs stadium tour. An easy diversion to spend a weekend at home and swing by St Albans on the way. In the event, the day finishes unexpectedly early so I get to go back to Harpenden, have a nap, and then head out again. This is the same tour Alasdair and I went to see last September, but it’s wonderful to watch it again, updated to account for the world somehow becoming more terrible in the interim, but all the central points still holding. Nish is such an excellent comedian - has been for at least 10 years at this point, of my seeing him - but he’s just going from strength to strength right now. His writing is so well considered, the material absolutely sold by the confidence and fluidity of delivery, the passion and fire evident in every word. So few people are doing this kind of angry, impassioned left-wing comedy (in the rich tradition of Marks Thomas and Steele), and we’re lucky to have him. Amy Annette does a great job in the support slot - it’s amazing how much you can get out of asking individual members of the audience what their favourite bread is. She’s eminently relatable to a whole swathe of the audience, and sets the energy levels perfectly. A quick hello in the dressing room before they need to head back to London, and god bless Mum for the 10 minute lift back to Harpenden.
The collision of two different parts of the job: one, being the Bristol intern lead, the other, working for the company that is responsible for basically all of the infrastructure at the new Spurs stadium. We’re taking the interns for a “development day”, and this - genuinely coincidentally - is the day after the Europa league final which sees a Spurs victory and thus a lot of happy if hungover faces the next day. We do the normal stadium tour, and even as a non-football fan, I do find it interesting seeing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff like the changing rooms, and the level of detail being put into the psychology (the respective temperatures of the home and away team changing rooms, stuff like that) of things through the technology is ripe for nerd sniping. Beyond that, we get a custom tour of the data centre courtesy of the Spurs CTO, a lovely man who answers my product marketing questions with good humour. Then it’s the sky walk, and I honestly don’t see why people are scared of it, but you do you. Weird to get to the top and they’re just blaring 30 seconds of anonymous songs at a time to avoid paying PRS fees.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is one of my favourite books of the year so far, so I’m delighted to see that Toppings Bath have got him in for a book talk. With the greatest of respect to whichever member of staff was on interview duty, it was not the greatest of interviews. Latronico was incredibly erudite, waxing poetically and philosophically about the events in his life and in this world that led him to writing this novel, the ups and downs of having your work translated, and the future of big tech. Unfortunately, these answers are uniformly met with a moment of silence and then a completely unrelated pre-written question, rather than responding to the thoughtful answers presented. Still, it was inspiring getting to listen to and ask a question of Latronico, and I greatly await his next work.
You could spend a day here and still not see half of it. It’s mind boggling. I have no particular nostalgic attachment to The Met from things like Night At The Museum, so I’m taking it as it is. Beyond the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, we focus our time on the Greek and Roman collection (such marvellous statues, some really good album artwork material, not that that’s the only lens through which I appreciate art), but also the history of musical instruments, featuring what is presumably just the contents of Bill Bailey’s rehearsal space. The modern art collection impressed with a giant Jackson Pollock (“it restates the negativeness of the universe…”).
I was mostly aware of Friedrich’s work through Stewart Lee using it as a reference point in his 2016 show Content Provider, but even outside of the Stewart Lee-ness of it all, I was captivated by the piece itself, even at the time. I wouldn’t have necessarily gone out of my way to see an exhibition, but finding that it was on at the MoMA when we were in New York seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. It turns out I’m even more of a fan of Friedrich’s work than I thought. The depth of colour in paintings like Ruins at Oybin are phenomenal. They took my breath away, sincerely. Obviously the main event is Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, and it is amazing to see in person.
Mostly capitvated by Maro Michalakokos’ “Oh! Happy Days”, an installation that is apparently influenced by Beckett but ultimately is just fun as two giant fluffy burgundy mounds that, given the central support structures, seem like feet.
Slightly in mind of Takashi Murakami (but, again, when all you have is a hammer…) but a bit more restrained, and as such a bit less interesting. I prefer the more strictly geometric pieces over the more abstract.
The central exhibition at the Guggenheim on our visit, wrapping itself around the building’s helix structure. The Guggenheim is one of my favourite buildings certainly in New York, maybe the world. Getting to just slowly ascend, the way the spiralling view of the ceiling transforms into the spiralling view of the ground. I take very easily to Johnson’s work. The lower levels of the rotunda are filled with culturally focused abstract art - some beautiful pieces built around shelves and books, an eventual obsession with red, white, and blue in self-portraits. But then the top of the rotunda is full to the brim with with plant life and greenery, itself taking over the whole space with hanging vines.
I can’t say I’m massively familiar with Paul F. Tompkins work, other than knowing him from BoJack Horseman, but I am aware that he is well loved by people who like the same kind of things I like, and we’re looking for a comedy show while in New York, so why not! This promises to be a good old fasioned variety show, and by god it is. There’s a live band! A guest singer in Medusa, who’s got a hell of a voice. A guest magician in Artoun Nazareth, who is perfectly enjoyable even if I’ve seen all the tricks before, with a lot of the same patter. But obviously the main event is Tompkins himself, with some fun opening stand up (including telling the needlessly overenthusiastic American audience to stop applauding people and buildings who aren’t here) and later on a timely character act of an Irish priest campaigning for an Irish pope. It ends, bizarrely, with a rendition of (Ya Got) Trouble from The Music Man, complete with Tompkins in straw boater. It’s a song maybe best known to my generation as the inspiration for the Monorail song from The Simpsons, and it’s impressively earworm-y as a result. All in all, we got the variety we demanded, and that’s that.
Alasdair wanted to spend a morning birdwatching in Central Park, and who am I to disappoint him. I, though, cannot pretend to be a keen birdwatcher. So instead, I spend a relaxing morning sitting on a bench in Shakespeare Garden reading my book. I so rarely get to go somewhere to deliberately read; it’s always just on the train or in bed or snatching a moment somewhere. To take advantage of somewhere like Central Park, with I’m sure dozens of comparative idylls to sit back and read in, is such a base pleasure to have.
We don’t have time for the whole museum, but the monument itself is in our reach. It’s a genuinely quite impressive piece of architecture and memorial, and surprisingly low-key for the Americans. When we visited, the fountains were off due to maintenance, but this had no massive impact on the effect.
It only seems right to visit, as we’re this side of the Atlantic. The monument itself is understated, some statues captured in motion in the park. The really touching part, though, is the museum itself. I found it - not oddly affecting, of course it’s affecting, but yeah. I don’t think I quite anticipated that it would hit me like that. A real monument to the perserverance of those who came before us and fought so I don’t have to particularly think much of this every day. There are a collection of books for visitors to leave specific memories in response to certain prompts. Alasdair takes the opportunity, and something stops me. I don’t quite feel able to, some combination of feeling like I’ve nothing to say, too much to say, and in either case not having the words to say it. A lot to think about.
It feels like an obvious thing to have on a New York to-do list: go to a Broadway show. We had a look at what was going down, ruled out an awful lot of shows that looked good but were 700 bucks a ticket (looking at you, Othello). But! What that left us with was a real treat - Glengarry Glen Ross, a play I’d wanted to see for some time, with a remarkable cast (Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean), and pretty much West End level prices. The dream. In the end, unfortunately, we didn’t get Bob Odenkirk due to illness, but his understudy did a fantastic job and should be rightly applauded. Everyone else is playing mostly if not entirely to type - Culkin is a ratty, overcompensating salesman; McKean is more doddery than usual; Burr is all machismo and bravado. The American audiences are atrocious for applauding every scene, but what can you do. A fine production, and interesting to see the original as opposed to the film, sans Baldwin scene. Another interesting contrast between the US and the UK: it seems much more an expected thing that the cast are obligated to do the whole stage door thing, even for a matinee. It’s just a given. Which means I’ve got my playbill signed by Burr and Culkin, so that was fun.
Very much my jam. Celebrating all sorts of fun and classic design work, from the physical (the original Macintosh, Herman Miller chairs) to the digital (Susan Kane’s original iconography, I NY). Very weird turning a corner at the end of the exhibition and being confronted with a road sign for Chiswick.
Big fan of Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites, a rainbow-coloured array of hanging sewn together soft toys that apparently emit aromas on a regular cadence.
10:30 - 11:20
So happy to be able to watch it, we came back again for more. Front row seats the moment the museum opened. Delighted to be there for a turn-of-the-hour moment, and delighted that the kept the whole of the Bad Santa alarm clock scene.
I’m a sucker for the MoMA design store, and it’s practically a museum in its own right. A fantastic collection of obscure and artistic products, with an inevitable range of Teenage Engineering synths and a whole host of kitchenware that we would absolutely kit the kitchen out with if we had either the money for the objects themselves or even the cost of importing them all.
You try keeping Alasdair away from an exhibition with a title like that. It’s not not for me, but I can’t pretend textiles are my favourite medium. I am quite enamoured by the pieces where the original sketches/designs are paired with them, and dare I say it I find the latter more interesting.
15:55 - 16:35
I was so delighted to turn up to the MoMA and find this was being exhibited. So much so that we even came back the next day to watch more. I absolutely love The Clock. It is a masterpiece. It is hypnotic and compelling and an absolute exemplar of the core medium of film, the juxtaposition of discrete images to imply causation and connection. You watch these intercut clips, knowing they are unrelated, and still start trying to unconsciously thread together a narrative; actors reoccur at different ages. The thrill of seeing a film you recognise (In The Mood For Love ) turn up. I could watch this all day.
Our first museum trip of the holiday, we head straight to the top floor for the MoMA’s retrospective on Jack Whitten. A well-staged exhibition in which I find a lot to like whilst some of it does leave me cold. The more cosmic works, taking abstract pieces, tiling them, and reassembling them in different configurations really worked for me, especially seeing how that evolved over time and remained relevant even through to an iOS influence. Other pieces do less for me, but it’s well organised and Alasdair takes to it a lot more, so time well spent.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Bristol Museum, and I’ve never in all my time in Bristol actually made it to the yearly Wildlife Photographer Of The Year exhibition. It’s nice to have Alasdair prodding me to do so. The hypocrites will not allow photographs to be taking in the exhibition, so I have no records of what I particularly enjoyed, but the overall quality is immensely impressive. The birds are typically the cutest, the bugs typically the creepiest if most detailed. Genuinely very impressed by the junior categories, absolutely fair play. I do wonder what the advent of widespread AI usage is going to mean for a competition like this, but that is beyond the remit of this not-quite-blog-whatever-it-is.
One of the word of mouth hits of last year’s Fringe that I didn’t get to see (but did have as a compere when I was performing at ACMS) now on tour. All the accolades and comparisons thrown at Kent-Walters in reviews from the Fringe are well-deserved and correct - the Vic and Bob influence, the menacing fun, it’s all there. It’s a character act that more than sustains itself across an hour, through a good use of variety (audience interaction, musical numbers, character acts within a character act) and a full committment to the back story. Kent-Walters is a generous performer, figuring out a way to tread the line of being a menacing character but keeping the audience at ease. And it’s just fun! The second half was a pub quiz, presented as a preview for his next show, which I’ll be going to see in Edinburgh, but we’ll see how well that survives. If it does, we’re in for a treat.
Once again, they’ve deigned to give us some money to take the interns out for a social event, and minigolf seems like a good choice. We go to Treetop Golf in Cabot, all blaring music and neon lights and laboured puns. There’s two courses, we do both, it’s exactly as fun as you think minigolf is going to be, no more, no less. The food is fine. I score a free game on the ball return thing, so fair play, they’ve locked me in to going back at some point.
Hrmm. I do enjoy this, for the most part. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in there, the use of dangling microphones and FX pedals adding effectively annotations to the text, the half-singing/chanting nature of Brie Larson’s delivery, the rotating stage design. I don’t, though, think it necessarily exceeds the sum of its parts, nor are those ideas necessarily well linked to what the play is trying to say. Not well versed in the play, at times I am just having to vibe out whatever’s happening and hope it will all make sense in the end. It’s a staging that is trying very hard to hit you on a gut level, and it does manage that in a way. Brie Larson is excellent, as is Stockard Channing, duh. I can imagine that, were this a two act play, the audience return rate would be interesting to watch. I think, in the end, I enjoyed it as an experience, but not quite as a play.
It’s always a question, isn’t it, as to how well stage adaptations of TV shows can be. I came into Stage/Fright with a tendency towards the benefit of the doubt for Shearsmith and Pemberton - Inside No 9 is the kind of ceaselessly inventive show that implies a lack of being beholden to a singular idea of “what it should be”, the death knell of any attempt at adaptation. Beyond a macabre and slightly tricksy script, the audience in Wyndham’s would have expected very little. The opening scene, with Shearsmith mercilessly killing every annoying member of a theatre audience around him in a set of auditorium seats mirroring ours, was a happy early convincer that I was in good hands. For the rest of the show, there’s a slight over-reliance on fan service in the form of pretty much just staging Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room (a fine episode, but a touch overrated in my humble opinion, or at least the fandom bangs on about it more than they need to), but then sometimes that’s transformative, as in the precursor to A Quiet Night In, with a new guest star each night (for us: Sarah Hadland, barely able to get through it without corpsing). The second half is more cohesive (albeit with another of their oddly prevalent instances of non-consensual touching) and plays nicely with a lot of tropes of film and stage. It feels like there could have been more done with the setting, and maybe it’s just high expectations of two writers who are well-minded to that kind of thing (consider the live episode, or 3x3), but while it wasn’t inherently lacking, there’s the gnaw of not quite living up to potential.
We managed to get through most of the Bristol Light Festival installations this year, and we managed to do so together, which is a change on last year. I’ve broken out my Sprocket Rocket camera for the first time (and have yet to get them developed, so we await with baited breath) but do also take some photos on my phone. There are a lot more music-based ones this year, which is fun, but are also more enclosed, which means I am forced to reckon with the general public’s unerring sense of selfish lack of self-awareness. Alas. The creatures outside St Mary Redcliffe are fun, as is the squidgy black hole creator in Broadmead. It’s all good fun, and you get some photos out of it. I don’t think it’s ever really much more than that, though.
For some reason, someone in Oslo has booked Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborn to perform The Ballad Of Roger And Grace, a show they did 20 years ago. Understandably, they want a bit of practice, so obviously the answer to that is to do it in Bristol at the Wardrobe. Well, I’m not complaining. The first thing I ever saw of Daniel Kitson’s was another of his and Osborn’s story/song shows, Stories For The Starlit Sky, and that remains one of my favourite things I’ve seen live, so, y’know, more of that? Yes please. Roger And Grace doesn’t quite hit that same high for me, but it’s an awful lot of fun, and (at least against my fuzzy recollection from 2015) the songs are more integrated into the narrative than Starlit Sky. As ever, Kitson is just enchanting to watch on stage, the natural ease of it all and the clear consideration for the immaculately written bits somehow balance each other out, and he and Osborn have a wonderfully worn-in rapport. I hope the Norwegians love it as much as I do.
An idea from a pub conversation that has got massively out of fan. Stupidly fun. I forgot how intense Adam Riches’ eye contact is. Enjoyed how much John Kearns enjoyed Alasdair enjoying a line about the agricultural revolution. Spent the whole show very conscious that Ed Gamble and Rosie Jones were in my eye line on the other side of the stage.