T'eyla Minh

As if falling back into Frasier, Farscape and X-Files wasn't bad enough - and also Buffy as Denise and I progress further through that re-watch - I am still periodically flailing about POTO. :P

I went to Denise's on Saturday, initially because we were going to continue the Buffy-athon, but instead I inflicted shared the POTO 25th anniversary concert (and latterly the 1925 silent film, just for comparison purposes).

POTO is a really weird thing. I fall in and out of it regularly, and the the only time I fall back into it is after actually seeing/reading some version of it. I finished "Whisper" in a creative flurry after my first viewing of the gala concert; "Freedom from Darkness" (my first proper POTO fic) and its sequels came from the germ of an idea after I first saw the show in Birmingham, aged 16; and my Mary Sue story / A-Level creative writing assignment was written following my first reading of Susan Kay's Phantom. When I'm not flailing about it, though, I kind of forget the power it has over me. I'll go for months - even years - without reading/writing fanfic or even thinking it about it at all. I still count it as a fandom, of course, and it's always there in the periphery of my mind, but until the point when it actually takes over my head again I tend to file it away somewhat as one of those frivolous fandoms of my youth.

Although if the recent rewatches have proven anything, it's that those so-called frivolous fandoms of my youth were more important than I gave them credit for. ;)

Anyway, the point is, it's the most horrendously addictive thing in the world. I can remember listening to the soundtrack almost constantly on several occasions in my teens and 20's, and nowadays, each and every time I've watched the 25th anniversary gala, I am overcome by the desire for MOAR PHANTOM.

That being said, because it's been 1.5 years since the gala concert and because I've watched it three more times since then - which isn't much in the grand scheme of things but if I were still a student I imagine that number would be more like 300 - I felt like doing an entry about some of my favourite things about the performance...

( POTO 25 Awesomeness )

I shall now come out of the cut to briefly mention this other, semi-related thing which I discovered on Saturday whilst we were watching the 1925 silent film, which commoncomitatus will also appreciate. I was IMDb-ing to find out where they'd filmed it, because the Palais Garnier interiors were so accurate (soundstage 28, apparently, where many of the sets still remain and which is rumoured to be haunted), and in the process of reading the trivia page I learned the following exciting nugget of information.

The ornate bed in Christine's bedroom is the same one used by Gloria Swanson 25 years later in Sunset Boulevard. Which explains why it was so bloody familiar!!

These fandoms are content to remain intertwined, apparently. :D

Okay, I think this is long enough. I might come back with exciting POTO screencaps at some other juncture when I have more spare time. Watch this space. :D

OKAY. Second attempt at this, as we had a power cut at work and it ate my first draft (and I had to finish it at home because I was busy). Thankfully I hadn't written very much in the way of Actual Thoughts...

And, before I properly begin - HOLY CHRIST IT'S HOT. Apparently it's meant to snow by the end of the week, after averaging about 30 degrees on Saturday just gone. I second flatline2010's Facebook status - the world is broken.

Anyway, we - Paul, David, my mum and I - went to see Phantom of the Opera last night for its 25th anniversary performance at the Royal Albert Hall - via Vue at Star City, I should say, as tickets for the Albert Hall were £25 for standing only - up in the gods and riiiiight at the back - and £250 per person for a box seat. Frankly, none of us are that rich. :P

We had seats at the middle in the back, which actually were okay because it was showing on Screen 1. I suspect this is better treatment than it would have received at Cineworld had they gotten their grubby paws on it - their description of the plot was decidedly sarcastic on their Twitter feed, to say the least...

The concert / show is being released on DVD and Bluray in November so be warned that if any POTO fans on my f-list are reading this, there will be specific, performance-related spoilers... It was streamed live around the world in any event (and apparently not-so-live as I think there are further showings this week), though obviously taking time zones into account, people may well have missed it.

( Review / Ramblings - probably LONG and contains SPOILERS. )

I totally wish Sunset Boulevard were so popular, but alas I feel a 25th anniversary performance of it may be a distant dream. Although at this rate the movie version is never going to get made either, so I suppose that's a blessing in disguise. ;)

Needless to say, I am now suitably reinspired to finish "Whisper", my latest POTO fic, though I may have to change tactic slightly. ( Fic spoilers / boring stuff )

Watch this space; I might even post it soon!

I was looking online for a photograph to post with this entry, but thanks to the 2004 movie being so prevalent, I failed. In any event, I was going to post a picture of the moment Erik draws Christine through the mirror, or more specifically the moment he actually appears, because basically it's the sexiest thing EVAR and I just... do not know why. Something about the cape and the mask and the smoke, I think; either that or I've finally gone mad. ;)

On that note, I shall flee.

(Last post for a while, honest...)

Just been to the website for The Woman in White.  Michael Crawford's barely recognisable. :D  Look!!

It has, however, had some wonderful reviews so far, and as I've said all along, Lloyd Webber really knows how to do Victorian melodrama, and I have absolute faith in him.  And at any rate, seeing anything on the stage it's designed for makes it three-hundred times better than any tour could be, and now I'm really starting to get quite excited... And quite frankly, I think I'm going to dissolve when Michael sings anyway, so the show won't really matter. :)

*squees*

andrew lloyd webber on the tour of 'sunset boulevard', when he saw it in plymouth:

“There have been some extraordinary performances of Sunset. Glenn Close was pretty unbeatable, and Elaine Paige was marvellous in her way. But I have to say that Faith is bringing her own version to it, and there’s a sexuality about her that makes the relationship with the young man almost more dangerous. I mean, the end of the first act was pretty electric – pretty strong stuff. Stronger, I think, than the original production.”

see? it wasn't just me after all :P

(anyone who's not reading this through their friends list/someone else's friends list, yes, i've had a slight change of layout. the other one was interesting, but really, really frelling irritating when i get comments on longer posts, because the main entry boxes get squashed. and i've also just discovered that brinkster is another place that doesn't allow remote loading of pictures. so i'll just have to keep refreshing my account at clubphoto.com every 3 months. ah well, i can cope with this...)

anyway.

apparently, going to bed between the hours of 5.00 and 6.00 plays havoc with one's subconscious. now, i admit i have very odd dreams at the best of times. but they don't usually have this much of a freaking out effect on me...

if i can actually manage to put these into words (and, in fact, remember them), i'll be amazed...

1) from satruday night/sunday morning:
first of all, i was with, i think, my mother. we were at what i now recognise as the american adventure theme park, which, not only have we not been to since the accident on the way there in 1996 (i think), but, as anyone who's been will know, has a large helter skelter slide in the shape of a giant snake (again, i think). so. there was indeed a large helter skelter slide, but whether it was snake-shaped, i couldn't tell you. the slide had two methods by which one could get to the top - a staircase up the middle, as expected, or a lift.

first attempt - we use the stairs and slide down. no problem. second attempt - we use the lift. this is when it starts getting decidedly... well... weird.

the lift, it transpires, leads to another helter skelter, one which has been around since about 1935. it's an old dilapidated thing that nobody's used since the sixties or possibly earlier than that. it's made of brick, and the mortar is all cracked with little bits of grass growing through it. it's only about two bricks wide. for some reason we decide to slide down it and my mother is now my grandmother, or some elderly aunt (and if so, not one i know), but she's not my mother now, and she's telling me all about this thing and how it used to be popular with the local children. this is when i realise i'm not in kansas any more... sorry. american adventure... sorry...

for some unknown reason i'm wearing my school uniform (the old design with the skirts nobody could move in), thus making the sliding down damn near impossible. it's also not actually helter skelter shaped, it's just long and windy and very not slidey in any way. but i manage to slide down it. and the strange grandmother/auntish person behind me is, of course, an absolute pro because she spent her childhood days sliding down the thing, and she keeps telling me to hurry up.

the slide, or, for want of a better word, long row of very uncomfortable crumbling bricks, is surrounded on all sides by overgrown grass and weeds and, at one point near the bottom, a canal. (this, of course, being the time i nearly fall off the thing and end up in the water.) it actually resembles the canals in netherton, but worse - run down and not maintained at all. somewhere on the way down, we decide it would have been easier for me if i'd used a mat (remember, kids? you had to use a mat on the helter skelter...)

at the bottom of the thing... i can't remember. there's a blur, then, suddenly, i'm in a big city with a friend. no idea who, though. but the city is identified (probably wrongly because it looks more like new york) as LA (that'd be SB coming to haunt me.) then again, since i've never been anywhere in america, i wouldn't know. anyway, we're trying to figure out, via the use of roadsigns and what little i know about US geography, how far it would be to walk to seattle. i'm probably correct in assuming that it's a frelling long way...

and that's pretty much it. but it was tres bizarre indeed. the image of the strange brick slide keeps coming back to me. freaky.


the second part of the dream was a little more normal, but also very strange. by my standards it was normal... i'd moved into my new halls, and was attempting to figure out how to use the washing machines because they were different. and rebecca lahert was there from school and she was being all aloof and holier-than-thou... and then later on, i appeared to share classes with debbie (also from school) and we were on our way and met hamira (her friend) in the corridor, and it turned out i'd been in a film with johnny depp...

don't ask me, i have no idea!

2) last night/this morning
this one was just as bizarre.

i'm in a hotel in some country somewhere, but i have no idea where, and lots of my friends are there. at the start, i remember rachel, definitely, and possibly stephen, although i'm not sure. anyway.

we're all in a room. there is flour or chalk dust on the floor, and we're having a chair race. this entails one person sitting in the chair (and they're just your usual, common or garden dinner chairs, no wheels, nothing, just wooden chairs) and another person pushing as hard as they can to see how far they can slide it. due to the slippery floor, most of them reach the far wall. the person who wins is then accused of not going in a straight line - they use the marks in the floor dust to prove this fact.

then more people turned up for the same gathering, or whatever it was, that we were there for. one of them is salma, another is tina, neither of whom i've seen for about two years. salma, for some reason (and this is just weird because she was never the most forthcoming person about her inner secrets) has something very, very important to tell me. whenever she tries to, however, someone keeps interrupting us. i never do find out what she was going to tell me.

at one point, while walking along the upstairs corridor past her room (the door's open), i see the moon. this wouldn't usually be anything particularly odd. however. imagine a sunset, where the sun is half-set and semi circular. imagine it also being one of those absolutely huge ones where it seems to fill the entire horizon. now make the sky black and the sun bright white, and you have the moon as i saw it in my dream. this is quite freaky enough, without it moving through the sky (or, i suppose, around the earth) at about 40 miles per hour to the naked eye. basically, as soon as i stand still to look at it through her window, it's moved on past the window...

everyone else has spotted it, and we're all outside now chasing it around the building. it shows no signs of letting up. this is obviously some kind of odd new phenomenon. on a whim, i check the calendar to see if it's actually meant to be a moon day - it is - it's also supposed to be a half moon, which is just as well. if the moon was full at that size, it would probably swamp the frelling sky...

oh yes! i just remembered something else... there was a part that was set one morning and we were all going downstairs en masse to get breakfast, post, etc (apparently we were going to be there for a while) and for some reason, irish steve (or "that strange irish person" as he got known) from halls last year was there as well...

the novelty of this wears off after a while when a bunch of people spot a UFO. we all run to a front bedroom to stare at it. there's lots of planes going across the sky as this is a holiday resort so it's tricky. at first i can't see it. i'm also incredibly hyper for no apparent reason. police arrive, thus proving this is no joke (although quite what they're planning to do escapes me). i manage to see it... and it turns out to be an airship, rather like the hindenberg but much smaller, on fire... as it slowly incinerates, everyone loses interest...

that was more or less it. i also have a vague recollection of gemma being there... and her writing me a letter wanting to be friends again. but i woke up soon after that, so i never actually read the letter... possibly this is symbolic ;)


so. my dreams. i think, for this reason if nothing else, i'm going to try and get my sleeping back on track!


oh! final note. i just watched a shortened version of an episode of "open house with gloria hunniford" that had andrew lloyd webber as the guest, along with don black (one of the lyricists he's worked with) and gillian lynne (choreographer of "cats" and POTO and, i think, most of the others, too.) he talked briefly about how he got started, writing joseph for a school production back in the seventies with trevor nunn, and about "cats"... but no mention of why he closed it...

he also talked about his latest production, "bombay dreams". i had no idea this was his. i probably should have guessed, though, since it's advertised on the RUG site... d'oh. my suspicion is that he needed a theatre for "bombay dreams". specifically, he probably needed new london theatre with it's revolving stage. hence, "cats" gets kicked out.

in that case, i hope the damn thing flops :P

all right, i don't. i'm just still bitter about it... however, if it's not staged there (although i really suspect it is. a quick trip to ticketmaster would tell me) "sunset boulevard", if it ever returns to the west end, would be fantastic with that revolving stage... especially with the staircase... wow... *grin*

i apologise for the long post... didn't intend to ramble. also didn't realise how long those dreams were ;)