There and Back Again... A Hart Family Tale, Part 1

Well, we're back from the longest vacation of my life... in time not in a negative sense. We left Sitka on 25 May, just a day after Meg and Charles finished school and we returned last night(14 June). Long plane rides in big planes(my first ride in a 747). We did massive quanities of things both in Paris and in England. We felt sometimes that we would walk our poor feet off.

I'll start off with one of the main reasons for this trip... Meg's "16th Birthday" Trip. Yes, she is almost 18, but then she did turn 16 while in Italy. As our resident drama queen, Meg opted for an opportunity to see Theatre instead of a cruise. But, rather than accept the "lights of Broadway" she wanted the ultimate theatre experience...London/England. This worked well with my conference in Manchester, England.

We were able to attend 5 productions... all of professional quality.

First, while in the home of William Shakespeare... Stratford-Upon-Avon and home to the Royal Shakespeare Company... We managed to get tickets to Shakespeare's King Lear. Although sold out for the whole season, we waited in line for "returns" and ended up with some great seats. What made this special was that this starred Sir Ian McKellen(Gandalf from Lord of the Rings) as King Lear. Other than the old, demented king dropping his drawers and revealing more of Sir McKellen than we wanted to see.... it was a wonderful perfomance in a really nice theatre.

When we got to London we did a tour of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre... a true as possible re-creation of the original.We also returned for Othello. I won't even try and summarize it here as I barely could keep up with the twists of the plot myself. We were on a side and had a pillar in the way for parts, but it was till wonderful.

The show that we weren't sure of was a musical version of The Lord of the Rings. We couldn't figure out how they could pull hat off. Well, we were all impressed. With appropriate song placement, great staging, and just plain fun it came off extremely well.


Next came Meg's current favorite... Wicked the story of the witches of OZ. I thought it was really good, but I don't like the idea behind it. Meg loved it, but was a bit put-off when the ending was different than the book.

Finally came "something completely different". Spamalot, the farce of a farce with even more bad jokes than the Holy Grail film. Sadly, there were no witches burned due to insurance concerns, but there were bits from other Python movies and sketches.


So we spent a lot of time in English theatres. The 3 musicals had binoculars for rent. One set for every 2 seats. For 50p you had the use the binoculars for the duration of the evening. Nice concept. The staging was really good in the London theatres. It is weird to us Americans(outside of NYC) to see a theatre that is exclusively set up for one show for several years. They end up building the decor around the theme of the production.