Don't Dream It, Be It...

Yes, yes, I know - I'm now over a week overdue on this... This is last week's post - I will do this week's once I've had a chance to play with photographs :-)

The reason for overdue-ness is a combination of being insanely busy over the last week and also, when we were at home, an almost complete Internet fail - in the end I spent an hour talking to two nice people from Telecom (I got transferred to the 'Complex Internet Problems' department - it's always nice when it isn't just a 'turn it off, turn it on again' issue which makes you feel very silly when it works!), fixed the problem (with the DNS connection) on Windows, and then had to work out how to do it with the two Linux netbooks. I did get some help from a friend - he sent me over how to do it in another version of Linux, which gave me enough pointers to work it out on our versions - slowly but surely I'm getting a little geekier!

So - last weekend, we had our trip to see Richard O'Brien in the Rocky Horror Show. I've been bouncing about this since it was announced in August - Rocky Horror is one of my favourite musicals (and, though I love the film, I much prefer seeing it live), and the chance to see R.O'B. in the Criminologist's role was too good to pass up. We had fantastic seats - right in the middle of the row, without too many tall people in front of us. We went for the 6.30 showing, which may have been a mistake - we had got dressed up, but there weren't that many others! There wasn't any audience participation (again, another symptom of the early showing - hearing from other friends who went to different shows, we were a very quiet night!), but, after the initial disappointment (I do like hearing how the different actors respond to the heckles), it was a great show.

There were some lovely takes on the scenery - my favourite was the mini versions of the castle which were wheeled across the stage during 'There's a Light', progressively getting bigger, until the largest one, which was on a ladder to allow Riff-Raff to sing his solo through the top window. The model also reappeared at the end when the castle takes off...

Juan Jackson as Frank was probably one of the best I have seen - one of the reviews claimed he was "too butch", but I disagreed! He had a great take on the role and a fabulous singing voice - I'd gladly watch him in the role again.

R.O'B. was great as the Criminologist - not quite as slow paced and drawling as I'd hoped (I'd imagined him playing it in the same vein as the 'host' in 'The Crystal Maze'), but still just stunning to see on stage. The audience went wild when he first came out (as they apparently had done in every show). He had an interesting take on some of the part - he sang a number of the lines, which I wasn't expecting. He did stay in his denim suit and tails for the whole show (which I was glad about - I don't think seeing seeing him at 69 in stockings and suspenders would have been the best vision of the evening - memories of Neil and Christina Hamilton come to mind!). However the absolute screaming moment for me was the curtain call, when he came out carrying his guitar and performed the TimeWarp - the whole audience was on its feet, even those who hadn't really worked out what to do!

Overall, it was an amazing evening - I'm looking forward to the next time it comes back to Wellington!

There are photos and videos at this website - none of R.O'B. as he only had one rehearsal with the full cast before the run started in Auckland!