"I have sailed the world, beheld its wonders from the Dardanelles to the mountains of Peru, but there's no place like London! I feel home again!"

I have been pretty horrible about updating this blog because of the insanity of my fall semester of senior year. Being involved in two productions (Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw and my senior cabaret) was very rewarding and time-consuming at the same time. However, one thing that got me through the crazy semester was knowing that I was going on a trip to LONDON with University of the Arts over winter break! Not only was it a London trip, it was a London THEATER trip where we would see four shows, have three backstage tours, and spend New Year's at Grim's Dyke, the home that Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan lived in! What more could a Broadway baby who yearns to travel ask for?

I went on the trip with fourteen other theater students and our teacher David, who is originally from England and had a full theater career in London. We stayed in a wonderful part of London on Glouster Road, which was a block away from the tube (aka the subway) that was minutes away from all the theaters and the center of London life.

I had a lot of specific expectations about London and my trip, some of which were fulfilled more than I ever could have imagined, and some that were not. One of my hopes was that London would be filled with tons and tons of productions of classical texts. This past semester, my acting studio was entirely classical texts and I fell in love with it all, from Shakespeare to Shaw to Wilde. As I fell in love with these texts, it saddened me that the New York theater scene does not tend to do these classical pieces. It always seems that the Shakespeare plays that come to Broadway are only scheduled for a limited run and seem to have a star vehicle (such as Jude Law in the production of Hamlet this past fall). I was very hopeful that it would be different in London. After all, Shakespeare's plays were first performed in England and people tend to say that British are much better at these heightened texts than Americans are.

While there is the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare's Globe Theater that both perform Shakespearean plays on a regular basis, I was overall very disappointed that there wasn't even MORE of this classical theater. I went to London's TKTS booth and saw listings for shows such as The Lion King, Wicked, and Mamma Mia, all of which are currently playing in New York City. Now, I am not knocking shows such as those because there most certainly NEEDS to be a place for these musicals in the theater world, but I don't want those mass audience appeal shows to be the only ones that are playing in London or New York City.

I saw four shows on the trip: War Horse, Twelfth Night, Billy Elliot, and 39 Steps. The first three were plays that David had arranged for the group to see together. We were required to see a fourth show of our choice and I picked 39 Steps. I was a bit reluctant to pick 39 Steps because I wanted to pick something that I could not see in NYC, but my first choice (Moliere's The Misanthrope, the one other classical piece playing in London) was unfortunately not at the London TKTS booth.

War Horse was the first show we saw on the trip. It originally performed at the Royal National Theatre in 2007 and was revived at the New London Theatre in March 2009. It is based on a book by Michael Morpurgo and was adapted into a play by Nick Stafford. It takes place during the outbreak of World War One and is based around a young man named Albert and his horse Joey. Albert's father sells Joey to the army and the play tells the story of Albert and Joey throughout all of this. As you can see from the picture, War Horse is very innovative because they have life-size horse puppets controlled by three people. These puppets are made out of a type of wood. The horses need to be light enough for these three people to run around with them throughout the show, but strong enough for a full-size men to ride them. There are no words to describe the genius of these horses. Handspring Puppet Company, who created these horses, made every single little gesture and twitch that horses have so incredibly specific. I literally felt like I was watching actual horses. Even though I could see the people controlling the horses, I didn't even notice them. I was so engaged and impressed by these horses. If only the rest of the show had been that way. At intermission, I asked David what he thought and he said, "If the actors were as good as the horses, we'd have a great show." I couldn't have agreed more. The acting was very unspecific and the man playing Albert couldn't carry the show. At the end of play, I was very touched, but more by the subject matter of war, and less by the acting. As weird as it is to say, it almost didn't matter that the acting wasn't fabulous because the stars were the two horses. I don't know how a show like this would do in the United States. It's certainly a spectacle, but it has a lot of Britishness to it that maybe wouldn't carry over in the USA. However, plenty of British shows, such as Billy Elliot, do extremely well in the States. More on that later.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare was the second show we saw. It was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This was my favorite show of the trip, partly because it is my favorite piece of text of the bunch and partly because it was the most well-acted of all the shows. The Viola and Olivia were especially strong, which was inspiring as I would love to play either of those roles. The Viola was the most convincing "boy" I have ever seen when she had to disguise herself as Cesario. Also, it was the one show where I had the clearest sense of "the world of the play." In my acting classes at UArts, the idea of the world of the play is emphasized. In a play, it is important that every member of the cast live in the same world. Part of the burden to make sure that happens falls on the director because the director establishes the world he wants presented in his interpretation. It would be pretty awful if one cast member was living in a world of the 1800s and another was living in a world of 2010. That is an extreme (and humiliating) way of a world not being consistent among all the actors, but there are of course many more subtle ways for casts not to all be in sync with each other. It is especially crucial that Twelfth Night have a clear world because it takes place in Illyria, a ficticious place. What is Illyria? That is up to interpretation. This production had a clear world, using inspiration from the days of the Ottomon Empire. Even the servants who had only a couple of lines were a part of this world. A few days later, Richard Wilson who plays Malvolio came and talked to us and told us how the director made sure everyone was living in this world. He explained that all these servants are the understudies for the major roles, but the director wanted them living in this world, even when they were playing their less major roles. Theater is a collaborative art form and this world was effective because the design team also was living in the same world.

The next show I saw was 39 Steps, which was very entertaining and fun. It does have a lot of British humor, so I did like seeing the show in England, instead of the USA. Based on the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, the production is very different from the film, but is still loyal to the film. I really appreciated that because so often the adaptations of movies either completely butcher the movie or are too identical. The play has a cast of only four people, who play all the different roles. The transitions of the scenes and the characters were incredibly impressive. I found the sound design the most innovative of it all. It was a small show, but very amusing. I would have wanted my choice show to be another classical play, but this was a really good choice (and not too expensive for a really good seat!).

The final show we saw was Billy Elliot. I was very excited to see this show because it's most certainly the hot ticket in New York City. Almost everyone I know who has seen this show has raved and raved about it. It started in London and then the production expanded to Broadway, so I figured if it's great in NYC, it's got to be great in London. All I will say is, I haven't the slightest idea why this show is doing so well on Broadway. It was by far my least favorite of the four shows. In fact, I actually hated it! Even though I thought the young boy who played Billy was an extremely talented dancer (especially considering the fact that he is only 12!), I could not stand the show. I thought the music and script were awful and I did not care about the characters the least bit. David had seen the show in NY and really liked it there. He felt that the execution in this production was not up to the Broadway standard and that was why almost everyone in our group hated it. However, I just couldn't see how that would be the case because it wasn't really the performing that bothered me. Yes, I would have liked some of the performances to be more full, but I don't see how the best performers could have made that show significantly better. Part of Billy Elliot's plot deals with the UK Miner's Strike in 1984. Having not lived through that strike, I could not relate to it. However, I think it is a show's responsibility to help people who did not live through historical events still connect to the plot. I did not live through the Vietnam War and the draft, but I still connect to Hair. Clearly the United States audiences have not found the Miner's Strike distracting to their enjoyment of it, so I don't think that was why I hated it so much. But I'll put it this way. I couldn't come out of the show humming one song from the show. It was an absolutely horrendous score. So overall, Billy Elliot was extremely disappointing.

In addition to the shows we saw, we got backstage tours of three theaters: The National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and Theatre Royal Drury Lane. I loved all three of these tours for different reasons. I loved the National Theatre because it has three theatres in it and I really appreciate the mission and values of the National. According to its mission statement, it aims "to re-energize the great traditions of the British stage and to expand the horizons of audiences and artists alike. It aspires to reflect in its repertoire the diversity of our culture." While I did not get to see a show there, I certainly got a sense that they achieve their mission because they do a wide variety of shows from Shakespeare to contemporary pieces. Their facilities were beautiful. Unlike the Royal Shakespeare Company, they hire actors for each play individually as opposed to having a company that performs in every show. Their designers tend to work on every show, which must be such a wonderful opportunity to work on such different styles with costumes, lighting, sound, and scenery.

Shakespeare's Globe Theater was also a great experience. While it is not the original Globe Theater where Shakespeare's plays were performed because that theater was destroyed in a fire, it is an exact replica to what it is believed that the theater looked like. In fact, when this modern theater was built, they did not use any modern tools to build it because they wanted to keep it as authentic as possible. In their current productions, they do not use microphones because obviously they didn't use microphones back in Shakespeare's day. I loved that theater because of all the history about Shakespeare. There was a huge exhibition that had a lot of history about Shakespeare and his plays that I loved looking through.

Theatre Royal Drury Lane is the oldest theatre in London, even though it also was destroyed by fires. The reason they are able to say that it is the oldest theater is because they still performed plays outside the theater as Theatre Royal Drury Lane when the theater was being re-built. This tour was probably the most entertaining because the tour guides were playing historical figures such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and David Garrick who were involved in the early days of the theater. Currently at the theater Oliver! is playing, which probably would have been a better choice than Billy Elliot. Similarly to how the 2007 Broadway production of Grease was cast, the Nancy was cast through a reality television show. During our backstage tour, we got to see a few minutes of a rehearsal for the replacement cast. This theater was enormous. I could understand why some people would bring binoculars.

New Year's Eve was also a very unique and fun experience. The home of W.S. Gilbert was about an hour outside of London in a much more rural and isolated location. It is approximately 40 acres and has beautiful gardens and buildings. Even in the winter, I could see how gorgeous the landscape was. Our dinner was a black-tie event and a several course meal. In between meals, various singers would perform these Gilbert and Sullivan songs. While some of the performances were fairly average, it was all part of the experience. And it showed how I know a lot more than I give myself credit for. We spent about a month on Gilbert and Sullivan in my musical theater performance classes last year and some of the performers were struggling with some of the exact same things that my teachers guided me and my classmates away from. The funnier part about New Year's was that the UArts students were by far the youngest people at this event. The next youngest person was probably 65. It was amusing, but of course also disappointing to know that Gilbert and Sullivan are another team of composers who are losing audience members as that older generation continues to get older and not introduce this style of music to my generation. The UArts musical theater majors got ambushed by one of the performers to sing back-up to one of the Gilbert and Sullivan songs, which was a lot of fun.

In addition to all these tours and shows, our very informative tour guide took us around London and gave us a ton of general history and theater history about London. It was a very good balance of history that I had retained from my theater history classes in college and stuff that I didn't already know. So much of theater as we know it today began in England because they expanded so much of what the Greeks initially created. Musical theater has a very American feel to it, but it's thanks to England's creation of theater that I can love all the musicals I do now. I left London yearning to read, see, and write plays. I also left yearning to make sure classical theater doesn't die in the USA or England. There is so much theater history that is fascinating and is important that it doesn't die. So much of the history of England is reflected in these plays and it is very informative to know the history and read these important plays.

So I am back in the USA, 2 weeks away from starting my final semester of college and filled with new inspiration to knock the real world dead. Long live the theater!