Matt in London: PADDINGTON, INTO THE WOODS, STARLIGHT EXPRESS & More

Summary

Broadway Breakdown: "Matt in London: PADDINGTON, INTO THE WOODS, STARLIGHT EXPRESS & More"

Host: Matt Koplik
Date: January 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This special episode of Broadway Breakdown chronicles Matt Koplik's latest theater trip to London with his mother. Instead of the usual career-deep dive with a guest, Matt delivers candid reviews of the new and classic shows he saw on the West End, including Starlight Express, Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, Playboy of the Western World, Into the Woods, and Paddington the Musical. Throughout, he interjects his "foul-mouthed" analysis and theater history insight, punctuated by direct audio clips of commentary from his mom.

The episode is structured show-by-show, blending personal anecdotes, reviews, and vibrant discussions about both the productions themselves and the larger state of British and American theater.

Ad reads, lengthy intros, and outros omitted per guidelines.

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Key Segments and Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|------------| | Opening, Housekeeping & Review Shoutouts | 00:22–07:53| | Starlight Express (with Mama K) | 07:54–22:54| | Christmas Carol Goes Wrong (with Mama K) | 23:09–36:00| | Playboy of the Western World (with Mama K) | 36:03–52:49| | Into the Woods (with Mama K) | 53:11–80:05| | Paddington the Musical (with Mama K) | 80:06–88:46| | Final Thoughts & Outro | 88:47–end |

(All times approximate for key content breaks.)

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1. Opening, Housekeeping & Listener Reviews (00:22–07:53)

• Matt opens the episode with signature sass:

  "Hello all you theatre lovers, both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown..." (00:24)

• Announces upcoming live shows, including the Sondheim/Webber birthday event, Broadway season recap, and Tony Awards live taping.

• Reads out select listener reviews, including UK and international feedback. Notable for their praise of Matt's "intelligent, informative and entertaining" style and for highlighting "warm energy and conversational way of speaking" as a point of connection for listeners.

• Joke about food/body comments in early episodes—Matt offers anecdote about feedback from a Hinge date who disliked body talk, saying:

  "He was like, so I listened to those older episodes. I really don't like how you two discuss bodies and food, so I don't think this is gonna work out. I don't think you're a very nice person." (06:51)

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2. Starlight Express (07:54–22:54)

With Mama K (Matt’s Mother)

• Why finally see it?
  "You wore me down. Not only that, but I thought we had an extra night. What the hell? We're here. Let's do it." – Mama K (08:20)

• Audience Moment:
  Heartwarming story of the young man with cerebral palsy sitting in front of them, joyfully engaging with the cast.

  "He stuck his hand out and everyone gave him a five, a high five as they skated by. It was just a really beautiful moment." – Mama K (09:21)

• Queerness and Camp:
  Matt and Mama K discuss the "gay-ification" and camp elements in this revival, including newly gender-fluid characters and lesbian relationships.

  "They kind of gayified it, which was fun. Right. Elektra was now clearly fluid. There were others who were fluid. It was very camped up... It didn't take itself seriously." (10:38)

• Comparing Past & Present
  They note this staging is smaller, more intimate, and more engaging than when they'd seen it in 2000.

Matt's Solo Review

• Physical Production
  Praises the Wembley Park Troubadour Theatre’s immersive setup:

  "It's this giant venue that they recalibrated for Starlight Express...we felt very close to the action the entire time. And I think that helps with the energy..."

• Queerness Summed Up:

  “It's Xanadu as performed by Trixie Mattel in Thorgy Thor costumes.” (16:25)

• Casting Notes
  Highlights standout:

  • Rusty (Gavin Adams)—"really fantastic, quite the dreamboat"
  • Electra—strong and fluid performance

• Weaknesses / Critique

  • Show runs a bit long (“should be 90 minutes, not a fuck ton happens”)
  • Vocals: men stronger than women, generally

• Overall Take:

  "We really were surprised by how much we liked it...it's just a purely fun time. And that is all I really have to say about it. I don't have a lot of details that I remember about the show, more just the feeling." (21:20)

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3. Christmas Carol Goes Wrong (23:09–36:00)

With Mama K

• Expectations:
  Only knew Mischief’s reputation, expecting “a Noises Off kind of a situation...havoc and chaos and all of that.” (23:37)

• Personal Connection:
  Matt’s own musical is being directed by Matty Decarlo, involved with the West End run.

• Favorite Gag:

  “There's a turn of phrase early on when they're doing auditions...supposed to be 'of Christmas yet to come', and he calls it 'Christmas who's about to come.' That one really got me. I'm a child and I love a good sex pun.” (25:01)

Matt's Solo Review

• Structure / Improvements
  More character-driven and plot-layered than other "Goes Wrong" installments—more like Noises Off.

• Observations:

  • Comedy is very physical and also good with wordplay
  • British audiences are more tolerant of running jokes or catchphrases

• Critique:

  • Jokes start to wear thin as the show goes on; prefers more fully-developed Mischief shows like Comedy About Spies
  • Production value cleverly splits the difference between "West End sets" and "community theater style"

• Notable Quote:

  “Bookended with auditions in rehearsal, and then they have the epilogue where you find out...how the cast comes together and how the director redeems himself and all these other things. And it's fun. It's really nice. I would love to see another Comedy About Spies, or rather another not Goes Wrong show from them. That's just sort of me.” (34:58)

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4. Playboy of the Western World (36:03–52:49)

With Mama K

• Pre-Show Knowledge:
  None, but drawn by cast (stars from Derry Girls). “I had no idea what it was, and so I came to it fresh.” (36:22)

• Cast Praise:

  • Siobhan McSweeney (“Sister Michael” from Derry Girls), enjoyable as “a major vixen MILF cougar.”
  • Less enthusiasm for Nicola Coughlan’s and lead actor’s performances.

• Set / Design:

  • “Felt like it was a little dinky to me. I don’t know how to say it exactly. Like underdone.”

• Comedy?

  • Shock at idea this is considered a comedy:

    “Never.” (40:41)

• Best Feature:
  Poster art:

  “It’s sort of a rendering of our floozy Widow Quinn...her red skirt looks like a curtain and it’s draped and she’s got her hands on her knees. It’s...both provocative and artful.” (39:54)

Matt's Solo Review

• Plot Rundown
  “A young man named Christie shows up...having claimed he murdered his father, ends up becoming the hunk of the town, but twist: his father isn’t dead.”

• Production Critique:

  • Design takes up space but feels too big for the piece, which feels “blown up for this stage and just cannot fill the space.”
  • Direction added Irish ritual and music, making it lengthy and lacking in comic energy (“there wasn’t a single laugh for the first 30 to 40 minutes”).
  • Lead performance (Eanna Hardwick): miscast/misinterpreted, too “touched” and lacking necessary charisma or progression.

• Food break

  • Local dining recommendations: Prosecco at Forza Wine Bar (cauliflower fritter & rice pudding with rhubarb).

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5. Into the Woods at the Bridge Theatre (53:11–80:05)

With Mama K

• Pre-Show Attitude:
  Not typically a fairy-tale fan; only recently started to enjoy Into the Woods through past productions:

  “I went in maybe with very lowered expectations.” (54:47)

• Reaction to This Production:
  Overwhelmed, especially by Kate Fleetwood as the Witch:

  “She just mesmerized me. I mean, she was strong and sexy and all these things at the same time, and I just...she had a great, great voice.”

• Set/Design Praise:

  “They absolutely created the woods on a smallish kind of stage. ...I thought it was fabulous.” (56:31)

  • She mentions the impactful stage transformation after the "giant and the tree falls" moment

• Comic Princes:

  • Noted homoerotic energy in this production:

    “They really did [amp up] the over homoeroticism. It was really quite obvious. It was funny.” (57:20)

Matt's Solo Review

• Historical Context & Production Trends:

  • Laments tendency for directors to “take a hit of acid and go to town” with concepts for Into the Woods (61:30)
  • Praises recent Broadway revival for "just doing the show"
  • Bridge Theatre's production, directed by Jordan Fine, stands out for design creativity

• Performance Notes:

  • Kate Fleetwood (Witch):

    “She is, without a doubt, the best live performance of the Witch that I have seen and the best Witch since Bernadette Peters.”

    • “Her Witch...she’s kind of like a British Elaine Stritch in the body of Gollum.” (64:30)
    • Her “Last Midnight” interpreted as “an extension of just how over it she is.”

  • Other Cast:

    • Baker (Jamie Parker): “very sympathetic”
    • Baker’s Wife (Katy Brabin): technically strong but “over sung” and “humorless”; wishes for someone with “Joanna Gleason” sensibility
    • Cinderella (To Sima Dornford May): notable for belt, less for soprano, gave the character a refreshing awkwardness
    • Princes (Oliver Seville & Rice Whitfield): “so fucking funny...an overt, almost incest vibe...It is played up for a very intensely sexual comedy.”

• Design Observations:

  • Effective use of a deep but intimate stage and trick lighting; scenic trees strategically moved to create variety
  • “Transitions sometimes...were a little slow, especially in Act 1” (70:20)
  • Noted new harmonies (e.g., “Ask the tree and you shall have your wish” in three-part harmony)

• Overall Verdict:
  “A really memorable production for right now...If I could plop Sara Bareilles into this production and...tighten up some of the transitions and maybe ask for one more go with the Witch's transformation, I think that this would be an absolute stellar production for the ages. As it is, it's a really memorable production for right now, which is...a major compliment.” (73:15)

• Audience and Staff Praise:
  Shout-out to Bridge Theatre staff and merch team: “You were so professional, and you were so courteous, kind, and personable. And I hope they recognize your value at the Bridge...” (73:56)

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6. Paddington the Musical (80:06–88:46)

With Mama K

• Prior Knowledge:

  • Knew the “sweetest, cuddliest” Paddington from movies
  • Watched the “Peru” film on the plane

• Reaction to the Show:
  “I wanted it to be the absolute high point and...I loved it. I thought was. It was great, but it’s a little. It’s like a piece of candy, you know, it’s just...very sweet.”

  • Noted outstanding puppetry and mystery of how the bear’s face moves
  • Immediate standing ovation from the audience, but not excessively effusive throughout—markedly more reserved than an American crowd
  • On marketability: it works because it’s “motivated by kindness and goodness...motivates you to do some good in the world and be better to other people. Even if it’s...a simple story for all ages that can still be very magnificent in its own right.” (82:51)

• Paddington as UK Cultural Hero:

  • Observes that Paddington is a “national hero” in the UK: "To a lesser extent here...Almost like Doctor Who—sizable and passionate fan base, but not universal."
  • Matt and Mom trade ideas about American equivalents (e.g., Cat in the Hat, Wizard of Oz, but nothing quite the same.)

• Fun Detail:
  Matt recounts buying Paddington merch (sweatshirt, cap, magnet), with Mama K critiquing his “body dysmorphia” over sizing.

• Airport Encounter:
  Both met a fellow Paddington enthusiast at JFK, wearing a Paddington-blue toggle coat, who joined in the fandom joy.

Matt's Solo Review

• Went in Blind:
  “[I] didn't want to know anything about the music. I didn't want to know anything about the plot...I did my best to forget all about [the bear design]...”

• Plot Summary:

  • Essentially the first Paddington movie: bear emigrates from Peru, is adopted by Browns, chased by the villainous Millicent Clyde (played, in the musical, with “the right amount of whimsy...and menace” by Victoria Hamilton-Barrett).

• Production & Score:

  • Score by Tom Fletcher (of McFly): “wall to wall bops...really impressive...Pop music. Loud, exciting, brash...”
  • Blends projected media and physical sets for “visceral” and candy-coated effect, reminiscent of the films

• Bear Puppetry:
  “Mind blowing...an intricately mechanical face that is manipulated by the actor who sings Paddington and performs all his dialogue.”

• Critical Praise:

  • “This is a show that really is trying to go for the highest caliber of full family entertainment.”
  • Acknowledges it could be trimmed by 5-10 minutes for tightness, especially if it transfers to the US

• Universal Appeal:

  • Noted that, like the movies, it “does not cheapen Paddington to go for the lowest common denominator...they want both parent and child to like it, and that is where it succeeds so brilliantly.”

• Casting Shout-outs:

  • James Hamid (Paddington)
  • Victoria Hamilton-Barrett (Millicent Clyde): “a phenomenal actress...smoky belt...this role was tailor made for Jennifer Simard, but [Hamilton-Barrett] is SO special.”
  • Amy Booth-Steel (Lady Sloane): “knows how to steal the spotlight...without being rude to her castmates...the way she says 'Are you a member?' is just so funny.”

• Favorite Line:

  “Boss, is this bear endangered?”—“It is. Now.” (From Millicent, directly quoted line from the movies as well as the musical.)

• Emotional Impact:

  • For Matt, this was the highlight: “Paddington for me was such a delightful, heartwarming and confirming show. I wanted it to be good and it was good. I want to see it again.” (87:20)

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7. Memorable Quotes

• On the new Starlight Express:

  “She gay. Starlet Express is quite gay. Partly, it is the attitude of this production...it’s Xanadu as performed by Trixie Mattel in Thorgy Thor costumes.” – Matt (16:25)

• On Christmas Carol Goes Wrong (sex pun):

  “Supposed to be ‘of Christmas yet to come’, and he calls it ‘Christmas who’s about to come.’ That one really got me. I’m a child and I love a good sex pun.” – Matt (25:01)

• On Into the Woods’ Witch:

  “She is, without a doubt, the best live performance of the Witch that I have seen and the best Witch since Bernadette Peters.” – Matt on Kate Fleetwood (64:30)

• On Paddington’s significance:

  “If you are in London, if you have the opportunity to absolutely see it...it’s such a delightful evening...they really took the time to think it through and make it the best it could be. And I want more people to think that as they go forward, creating works—especially for children.” (88:40)

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8. Overall Episode Takeaways

• Matt in London episodes are unique for their blend of honest in-person reactions, critical analysis of both creative choices and audience dynamics, and personal theatergoing anecdotes.
• This episode was more conversation-based, with much airtime given to Matt’s mother for another viewpoint.
• The London theater scene is portrayed as lively, experimental, more reserved in audience response, and, in shows like Paddington, deeply tied to British cultural identity.
• Matt's approach: opinionated, humorous, honest ("least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts"), and unafraid to cuss or call out mediocrity.
• Into the Woods and Paddington received highest praise, with Paddington the surprise personal favorite for Matt.

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9. Additional Recommendations

• Dining Tip: “If you’re ever going to The National, make sure you get a nice fried cauliflower fritter at Forza Wine Bar.”
• Live Show Alert: Sondheim & Webber Birthday Threesome at Green Room 42, March 6th (see link in show notes).

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For Further Engagement

• Join Matt on Instagram (@MattCopley), Substack, or the podcast’s Discord for follow-up questions/discussion.

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This summary captures the flow, major discussion points, flavor, and notable lines of the episode, organized for easy reference and clarity. Advertisements, intro theme, and non-content sections were omitted per instruction.

Transcript

[A]

I'm just the fastest thing you'll ever see that streak of lightning, you just miss me don't stop now you've gotta keep it going all night. Hello all you theatre lovers, both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history und legacy of American Theatre's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koflik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And we are back with another Matt Lo trip, everybody. Woo. This episode is gonna be a little different from the last two London episodes. I did go with my mother again, but due to. Due to. Due to some scheduling with us post landing, we haven't really had enough time for both of us to sit down and record together. So I recorded a quick sit down with her and got some. Got some takes from her on the shows that we saw that I will be inserting into the episode before I get to my own personal takes. So just that's something for you all to recognize. But before we get into any of the London stuff, guess what everyone? It's our favorite word of the day. Housekeeping. Woo. We got some housekeeping to do. First things first, major announcement. We've got another live show happening at Green Room 42. Holy fucking shirtballs. The live show we did in November, which we will post some audio of in the next couple of weeks leading up to this next live show. The live show in November went so well that Green Room 42 was very eager for us to come back and do some more. So we are doing some more. The first one is Friday, March 6th at 7pm if you're on the Discord channel, then you saw me post the link and the show art for that. Or if you follow me on Instagram, you saw me post that recently. But yes, live show. It is also being live streamed. So if you can't make it in person, you can absolutely buy a live stream ticket for that. And the great news about the live stream is you do not have to watch it at the exact moment it streams. You have up to a week to watch the livestream if you have a ticket for that. But only that one week. If you wait too long then you will miss your window. This show is themed. It is the birthday month for Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and myself. So it is Broadway Breakdown, Sondheim Webber, A birthday Threesome. And we will be celebrating the works of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber as well as having a little bit of fun poking at those works and all within the theme of a nice little birthday party. So please come for that. We have some guest stars showing up for that one as well, if you can make it for that one. We've got another Broadway Breakdown live show which will be May 3rd at Green Room 42. That will be a musical recap of the entire 20252026 Broadway season. Tickets for that will go on sale in a few weeks and then after that on Monday, June 1st will be our Tony's live episode, All Things Tony Awards. Also Green Room 42 and you will get a link for that as well once tickets go on sale. Next bit of Housekeeping we have had some new reviews on the podcast. Now the I was I had some reviews that were posted while I was in London that I found on Apple Podcasts. But then the other day I went digging because I remembered that I can only see the reviews posted on Apple podcasts that are posted in America. I can't see any international reviews, so there are other websites I can go to to find them, but I have to kind of dig. And so for poops and giggles I said oh, let's see if anyone posted anything in the last few months that I was unaware of and some of you listeners did and I want to give you your due. So apologies for not doing this early when you first posted, but I didn't know at the time. And those of you who are American and posted your reviews more recently, I will read those reviews in a few weeks at the at a later episode. So first please cue the Light and the Piazza Overture. The Best of Times the best Broadway podcast I've discovered so far is rapidly becoming my only Broadway podcast. This is intelligent, informative and entertaining. What I love most is that Matt actively encourages his listeners to explore have a point of view whilst whilst clearly expressing his own. Whilst that's you can tell that this was written from the uk. Theater opinions are not right or wrong and I don't agree with everything Matt says, but I do agree with a lot. Thank you. My oldest school friend and I come to New York every year for a five shows and four days trip and try to see productions unlikely to transfer to London and these reviews have informed and influenced our decisions. Keep up the good work. P.S. hope you enjoyed London and loved Benjamin Button as much as we did. Oh, so this is back from the last time I went to London and we saw Benjamin Button. Yes Richard, we did enjoy Benjamin Button. Okay, next up, Diva of the highest order. Oh my. This podcast has been very helpful as a young theater Lover trying to study the sacred texts. It can be difficult to get a sense of the energy and emotion surrounding a past piece of theater solely through reading articles, but great podcasts like this really give a sense of at least some of those nuances. The only qualm I have wouldn't even be a problem for most people. But if, like me, you struggle with food, be conscious when revisiting to older episodes episodes because there are some uncomfortable comments related to that. However, they drift off over the years and aren't a big deal. I also love Matt's warm energy and conversational way of speaking. As someone who's a bit of a loner, it's nice to feel like I'm listening to someone I know talk about their interests. Keep up the good work, diva. Thanks, Emmy. Just so you know, fun fact. Those earlier episodes when it was me and John with Scavage and we would do our. We would do bits for anyone who's curious as to what that meant about earlier episodes, we. We would do bits where we would be kind of vapid gaze with each other and talk about like, I ate too much today. Very Jen and Megan and death becomes her. And we never really meant it. At least from what I recall, we never meant it. And I don't know how it came off. But the funny thing is that when we were all in lockdown, I didn't really have any new episodes up and I was talking to a guy I had met on Hinge and I had mentioned the podcast. He was like, oh, I'm gonna listen now. And so he listened to some old episodes with me and John and then he eventually texted me and he was like, so I listened to those older episodes. I really don't like how you two discuss bodies and food, so I don't think this is gonna work out. I don't think you're a very nice person. And we didn't speak much after that. So thanks, John Miscavige, for ruining any chance I had at love. Last one. This is a black hole. Jesus Christ. The title is just this is a Black Hole. I used to have a balanced podcast diet, entertainment, news, politics. Then I tried one episode of Broadway Breakdown and now all I do is binge the back catalog. Hope there's life on the other side. Thank you so much. Binging diets. I didn't realize this was gonna be such a food focused episode today, but here we are. All right, thank you so much, guys. So let's just jump right into it, shall we? I was in London from January 14th to the 22nd. So first we're gonna talk about Starlight Express because we're gonna go in order of which of the shows that we saw. So before I get into Starlight Express, let us listen to what Mama K has to say. What was your expectation going into the.

[B]

Show for Starlight Express? My expectation was, I've seen this before. It's gonna be a little tedious because it's just roller skates. And we're doing it just because we have the night and it can be fun. That was my expectation going into it.

[A]

Well, so this was our third trip to London together, and Starlight Express had been playing at the previous two trips. Why was it on the third trip you finally said yes to it?

[B]

You wore me down. Not only that, but I thought we had an extra night. What the hell? We're here. Let's do it.

[A]

Well, let's.

[B]

It's my new fun me.

[A]

Yes. The new fun you. New Year. New you. And so once we got there, what were your feelings during the show? Any immediate thoughts after the show? Like, what was your ultimate impression walking out of Starlight Express? Now that everyone knows what your lead up to it was?

[B]

I think there are different facets to it. I was amazed that they could construct this great race course in such a fairly tight space. Or maybe just we were tightly packed and it felt like a tight space. But I was just really impressed with the physicality and the fitness of the skaters. The costumes, they've livened it up a bit. I thought the kid was good. I just. I really enjoyed it. It was just sort of a bon bon. You know, you don't expect a whole lot and then you get pleasantly surprised. So it was fun.

[A]

Yeah, there was a lot of energy and the young man in front of us was.

[B]

I was just about to go there.

[A]

That.

[B]

That was. That was like one of the nice takeaways. That was an extra. You know, it's like the asterisk. There was a young man in front of us with his mother, and he had cerebral palsy or something similar. And he couldn't. He could make himself understood to his mother. He couldn't really articulate, but he was really into it. He was clapping and he was sitting on the aisle. He stuck his hand out and everyone gave him a five, a high five as they skated by. It was just a really beautiful moment. It made it feel really intimate. Even though this is a big show.

[A]

It re emphasized that I talk about, which is with theater, you know, it's hard to say when something's good or bad objectively, because there's always something that means something to somebody. And I don't think either one of us has ever felt that Starlight Express was a meaningful show to us, but clearly it means something to other people. And that was a person who was directly in front of us, who that show clearly meant the world to him. Cause also, it felt like he knew the show going in. He was aware of sort of where things were and what was gonna happen. And that was really fun to see, to see such a super fan who was also polite enjoy the show right in front of us.

[B]

And his mom was very gentle and very loving and very patient. And, you know, they seemed to have a very tight bond. I don't know anything about mother son.

[A]

Bonds, you know, but, yeah, we can't relate.

[B]

I thought they had great crowd maintenance because they had sort of yellow tape on the aisle so you wouldn't disturb the skaters as they went by. They also kind of modernized it a little bit. You know, the shtick of the. Of the skating. Okay, we've seen that. It's been around for a long time. But they did sort of. How can I say this? They kind of gay ified it, which was fun. Right. Elektra was now clearly fluid. There were others who were fluid. It was very camped up in a way that I don't remember it being before. It didn't take itself seriously.

[A]

Yeah, there was a big old lesbo relationship in there, too.

[B]

That's right. It was really good. And I have to say, the kid was pretty good. Of course, you know, he just has to go, control, control, control.

[A]

Well, now that we know that there's a lesbo relationship in the show, is this gonn to be your first date with Rachel Maddow?

[B]

I don't know. I. I know she's pretty much unavailable, but, you know, it's.

[A]

Since when does that ever stopped either one of us?

[B]

That's true. Yeah, that's true. No, she's still on. She's still on my list.

[A]

Do you remember anything about the first time we saw it in London?

[B]

Yeah, I think it was fun. It was loud. But I don't remember the characters very well.

[A]

Do you remember the reason why we saw it in 2000 in London?

[B]

You wanted to see it.

[A]

Yeah. Do you remember what my reasoning? No. When we saw it in London, it was summer of 2000. It was you, me, dad, Laura, and Grandma. Grandmama. And she had already bought us tickets to Mamma Mia. And so we had time for one more show, and everyone was Sort of like hemming and hawing. And I said, I want to see Starlight Express because it wasn't playing in New York anymore. It never was going to play in New York anymore. And I said, this is my only chance to see this show, and it's important that I see it. And we went. Now, Boo Boo argues that that was not the reason why we went. Or rather he says, I don't believe you said that. And I said, can you give me another reason why all five of us went to see Starlight Express? There's no other answer. It was me. And at 10 years old, it was the first time I was ever able to truly speak my mind in a way that convinced everyone.

[B]

Well, here's an interesting factoid then. It was attack on then, and it was attack on with us this year. Right. It wasn't originally planned, and it was tacked on.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And today. And. And this trip, it was also tacked on.

[A]

Although the first time, everyone kind of regretted it. And the second time, I feel like you and I didn't regret it.

[B]

No, we didn't regret it. You know, you have to take it with all of its context and just understand what it is.

[A]

You know, I also just remember we were so far away the first time. It was such a huge theater. And I do remember this part, the first time we saw it. In the second act, when Rusty, you know, the steam train that can choo choo, is singing the Big Starlet Express number in Act 2 with mother, or I think it was Papa in the first one. There was a bunch of teenage girls in the orchestra who were, like, screaming like they were at a rock concert. Be like, yo, Rusty, we love you, Rusty. And with the women we had at our show this year, I'm like, do white women love Starlight Express? Speak on that.

[B]

Well, I think they liked the music, and maybe they have some nostalgia for it. But what I will say is, because the other one, you know, you just hit something that it was so big, it was hard to connect with it. Here you were face to face with these actors, and because of the smaller environment, you kind of cared a little bit about them a little bit more, and you got into the personality of each one. I don't remember that from the first time seeing it.

[A]

This is true. All right, so that's Starlight Express. Thank you very much, Mama. All right. Thank you so much, Mother. Now it's up to me. Starlight Express. Starlight Express. Are you real? Are you there? I think those are the lyrics. I can't Remember, Starlight Express is not a show that I know super well. Saw it the one time back in 2000, barely remembered it, listened to it maybe once or twice over the years, but that was really it. And I didn't know what I was going to think about this production. It had been playing the last two trips that I took to London and everyone I knew was like, oh, my God, you got to see it. It's so mind blowing. It's so campy. It's so fun. And I kept saying, like, yeah, sure, maybe. And my mom was very hesitant, but then because she's in her yes and era right now, she finally agreed to it. And the fact that the show was closing in May, so we took the Tube out from Farringdon out to Wembley park, which is where. Sorry, no, let me. Let me rephrase. I don't actually know exactly what the situation is over there. There's a football stadium there. Wembley. Wembley Stadium, I guess, is what it is. I don't know why I was about to say all this. Like I knew what I was talking about. I'm not from London. I'm not a sports person. What the fuck cosplaying was I about to do there? Just saying, like, let me tell you a little something about football. Fuck me. Fuck me. And. Right in the ear. No, but this is the Wembley Park Troubadour Theater, or whatever it's called. So it's in that area where the football stadium is very easy to get to, very easy route from the train station to the theater. And it's this giant venue that they recalibrated for Starlight Express. I'll be very interested to see how it's used again. Post Starlight Express, we felt very close to the action the entire time. And I think that helps with the energy of the show because there's not so much distance from the action. You feel more caught up in. In a. The plot of Starlight Express. For those who are unaware, a young boy who we call Control has a late night excursion into his dreams, into his mind, into his imagination, where he thinks about all the toy trains in his room and he makes them race against each other. And there's a big race at the start and then there's another race towards the end of Act 1. And the train that no one thinks is going to win, Rusty, who's a steam train, wins. And everyone is confused, but then everyone is happy. And that is the story of Starlight Express. Of course there are, I'm not going to call them intricacies. But there's weaving in and out of characters because. And everyone is kind of having relationship issues. What I wasn't expecting about this version of Starlight Express, directed by Luke Shepard, by the way, who most of us would know from his work from. And Juliet. And you'll hear his name later on in the podcast. I wasn't expecting this Starlight Express to be so queer. And I don't mean like you're a queer one, Julie Jordan. I mean like gay. She gay. The Starlet Express is quite gay. Partly it is the attitude of this production. It is very tongue in cheek, you know, oh, we're just doing a big old drag show on wheels and having fun. It's Xanadu as performed by Trixie Mattel in Thorgy Thor costumes. I would say that's sort of how I best describe it, but also just. Yeah, there's some gender reassignments to roles. There's a character that used to be known as Papa that's become Mama, who's sort of the parental figure to Rusty and a few other discarded trains. And the character of Greaseball, I think is the name. Yeah, Greaseball used to be played by a male presenting actor. Sort of like in a semi Elvis Presley kind of a way, like a rock Elvis Presley. And now that's played by a female presenting performer. But they still have their relationship with the character of Dinah, who's female presenting. So like that's kind of inter lesbian relationship. I know we talked about that a little bit with Mother. And then Elektra, which is has always been the name for that role, is. Has always been played by a male presenting actor. This is a bit more of like a non binary turn for Elektra and it's yeah, like kind of gender sexually fluid, the whole thing. It's not. When I say sexually fluid, I don't mean like there's not a lot of sexual heat to this show. I don't think that's possible in an Andrew Lloyd Webber get up. Even when he tries to do shows about sex, they're not very sexy. Look at aspects of love. But there is sort of a all inclusive dynamic to this that I really enjoyed and didn't and didn't really expect. It is such a silly show. It is such a light hearted show and I appreciate that. This production really emphasizes, you know, light and energy and joy. It's not trying to make it more important than it is. I think that if I had a major qualm, it's like, yeah, the show should be 90 minutes, not a Fuck ton happens. And I don't think that all the music is great. Some of it is quite good and gets overly repeated. Rolling stock, you know, catchy as that is, it's just like over and over again. Do, do do do do do do do do do do. Rolling stack. And then also they've added a whole new bit for hydrogen, which is a new character in this production, or I guess replaced an old character in this production. And the theme for that character is it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when for hydrogen. And I swear to God, the reason I know it that well is because they sang it 10,000 goddamn times. Is all to say this was quite an enjoyable show. We really were surprised by how much we liked it because we went in promising ourselves that we would not be overly judgmental and like, work hard to have a good time. And I think that's what surprised us was that we didn't actually have to work that hard. This is not a mind blowing revival, in my humble opinion. I don't think that this is like extraordinary theater. It's the design, while well done, is not mind blowing special effects. It's not this rethinking conceptually of the show. This. It's not as if that the staging itself is so intricate and mind blowing. It's just. It's. It is very well done. Fun. It feels a bit leaner, it feels more colorful, it feels more optimistic and. And not bombastic, but like, I don't know, you look at footage from the original productions in London and on Broadway and in Vegas, and there's a harshness about it and a grittiness about the aesthetic to the. To those product. And this is much more, I hate to say Teletubbies, but like little Teletubbies, you know, it's fun. It's just a purely fun time. And that is all I really have to say about it. I don't have a lot of details that I remember about the show, more just the feeling. And I know that my mom and I talked about the audience and the young man in front of us, and that was a really moving experience. The actor who played Rusty was definitely the standout for both of us. We also enjoyed the performer who played Elektra. And because this is two years into the run, it's not the entire original company that opened the show, but I do think some people have stuck around with it. So as I take out my program, I want to make sure that I know who I'm. Gavin Adams was our Rusty. And he was really fantastic. Quite the dreamboat, too, if I do say so myself. It's hard to tell with everyone underneath all the makeup, but you could tell with Gavin, like, oh, he's a cutie patootie. And Hydra was Jaden. Vine V I J N. And Jaden, I thought, really understood the assignment of just enjoying themselves and vibrating in their own skin and opening themselves to the audience in that way. And I think that's sort of the best way you could describe it. I mean, of all of the shows we saw, this was vocally probably the weakest one. The men I found to be stronger vocally than the women in this. But it still. That did not detract from the enjoyment that we had of Starlight Express. So we're going to move on from her now. That's the. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the program here and also, you know, all the lovely, colorful art in here. So well done, everyone, on Starlight Express. Next up, we have Christmas Carol Goes Wrong from the Mischief Company. Mischief Theater. Mischief comedy, or they just call themselves Mischief. I don't know. I'm not a scientist. So before we get into Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, we are going to have a little quick talk from Mama K. What did. Did you know anything about this going into it?

[B]

Well, the only thing I knew that it was. It was that it was the same company and the same writers as what we had seen comedy about Spies, and that the play that Goes Wrong is sort of an ongo fixture that's. That's been around and then there are iterations of it. So I knew that, but I really didn't know what to expect because I hadn't seen that. The only thing that I could think in my mind, if I had to conjure it up, was sort of a Noises off kind of a situation. You know, you can just imagine havoc and chaos and all of that.

[A]

And of course, also we knew someone involved with this production.

[B]

We did Matty decarlo, who is extended family now. He's Matthew's director for yours truly. And another surprise thing that may be coming down the pike.

[A]

Well, we could say what the thing is. We just don't have to elaborate on it.

[B]

Does it have a name yet?

[A]

No.

[B]

Okay. Matthew has been writing a musical, which is very exciting. Multi talented son here. I couldn't be more proud. But I'm also proud of Matty. I think it's great. I think this gives him real street cred and wings and, you know, the sky's the limit. For him. So this is a wonderful experience.

[A]

Two West End shows in less than a year. And we. And we've seen both.

[B]

We have seen both. We're on the cutting edge here.

[A]

One of the things that they do in Mischief that I think doesn't get enough credit, and I'll talk about this more in my thing, but I think they're very good at wordplay and it's something that people don't talk about enough. People usually talk about the physical comedy with mischief, which they're all talented at. But there was there. Well, there were two, but one in particular turn of phrase that I. That really made me chuckle. Do you remember this was early on when they're doing the auditions and the stage manager's bringing in someone who's auditioning for one of the Ghosts of Christmas, and he misphrases what the ghost is and he has to be corrected. Do you remember what this one was? Yes.

[B]

Of Christmas coming or something like that.

[A]

So it's supposed to be of Christmas yet to come, and he calls it Christmas who's about to come.

[B]

Yeah, that was great. That was great.

[A]

That one really got me. I'm. Listen, I'm a child and I love a good sex pun. Thank you so much, Mama. So Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, in a way is similar to all the other goes wrongs that you might know. Like Play that Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong. The gist is a theater company is putting on A Christmas Carol, and you watch all the ways in which the production goes to absolute pieces. The difference between Christmas Carol Goes Wrong and the previous Peter Pan and Play that Goes Wrong is that with Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, we get the buildup to it. It's actually structured a lot more similarly to Noises off than the previous two shows. We open with the auditions for Christmas Carol. It's the same theater company that is putting on the play in Play that Goes Wrong and putting on Peter Pan, and there's a character overlap in all of those, so it is still in which I really appreciate. And if you're a real big Mischief Goes Wrong fanatic, you will get those character relations and their histories with each other, and they incorporate it into the dialogue in Christmas Carol, which is fun. And there's a running joke with one of the characters that he has a deathly fear of heights because of the accident that happened to him, and Peter Pan goes Wrong. So it's nice to know that these things continue onwards, you know? And so we begin with auditions and we have our director, who is a bit of an egomaniac and never thinks that anything coming into the theater is good enough for him. I'm not gonna lie, he's got some leverage there because, yeah, it's an amateur community theater and everyone's passionate, but not everyone's very good. And so he's dealing with a lot of bullshit, if I do say so myself. But, yes, we watch a lot of different auditions and we watch a product with extensive note taking and painfully rereading all of the minutes. We watch the set model and sort of how that gets fussed with. We watch rehearsals and then we go straight into the production itself and act one ends about halfway into the production of Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. And then Act 2 is the rest of that production, and then sort of the aftermath of it. So what I appreciated about this was all of these extra things added to the backstory. It's the aftermath and whatnot. Because when I first saw Play that Goes Wrong, that is ultimately what I felt was kind of missing. I am the person who saw Play it that Goes Wrong and plateaued with it. Once I realized what was going to happen and sort of what the overall joke of it was, it stopped being funny to me about 30, 40 minutes in. And I just. I was impressed by the technical elements of it. I was impressed by the inventiveness with all the ways they found things to go wrong in the show. But there's a performance that they do of Play that Goes Wrong, I think it's on the Olivier Awards, it might be on the Royal Variety Program, but they do basically like a 7, 8 minute version of the first half hour of Play that Goes Wrong and it kills. It's so fantastic. But also, I think that that kind of emphasizes what's always been an issue for me, is that in a lot of ways, Play that Goes Wrong and Peter Pan Goes Wrong are really just one joke. Shows, and there's a lot of creativity in that one joke, but still, I get kind of numb by the time they reach the finish line. And Peter Pan Goes Wrong was more successful to me in a lot of ways because that was a show where. Because we know the story of Peter Pan, we know in the show, the show within the show, how things are supposed to go. Whereas Play that Goes Wrong, it's an original piece, and so we don't really know everything that's supposed to happen. Now, of course, that gives a lot of leeway for the writers to create dialogue and story for the show within the show that can bend to whatever they need the joke to be like when the Female lead gets knocked unconscious and they have a whole scene where they're telling her, stop being hysterical, stop screaming, get back into this room. But she's laying unconscious on the floor. Harder to do when you're going within the confines of a pre written story. But I also think that within confines you find a lot more creativity. And I also think that's the case with Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. But I also think that by having a backstory with the actors in the show, that actually opens up a whole new box of ideas for Christmas Carol Goes Wrong in terms of jokes and. And repetitive themes. Not repetitive, but like, you know, recurring themes. Because we learn, you know, sort of what the dynamics are within the company. We learn who likes who, who hates who. We learn about the actor who's trying to overturn the director playing Scrooge so he can play Scrooge himself. That's. That becomes a recurring joke. That's funny to us because we already know that going in. And there's already a joke that we learn when there's a production meeting with the set model that gets fussed with and then broken and the company's trying to fix it before the set model goes to the shop to get, you know, the real life set built. And because we see them fuck around with it, there becomes a reveal. Two reveals. Actually, the first reveal is with a enlarged box of Maltesers, which is a chocolate candy, if you don't know. And it's a very, very funny sight gag that I think is earned because 25 minutes earlier we had seen that check get written. So to see it get cashed is even more fulfilling to us than just like a random gag. And then there's another one of Those in Act 2 with the set model as well that I think some people forgot about. And so when it came back, that was really nice reminder for them. It's a really strong company. We had a few understudies. I want to give them their do. So let me pull out my phone for a quick second and find the froters. In the role of Sandra, we had Ashley Tucker, who I thought was actually really fantastic. She really held her own and she really understood the tone. We also had Alex Bird in the role of Max, who did a really lovely job. And then Colm Gleason as Trevor. Well done, all three of you. My thing about Christmas Carol Goes Wrong is also my thing just with the Goes Wrong series in general, which is that once you get to the show within a show, the gags can start to wear off after a While. And that's something that is both an American versus British sense of sensibility when it comes to comedy, I do find that British audiences are more susceptible to repeating jokes, repeating punchlines, repeating catchphrases. You see that all the time on things like the Catherine Tate show, where there is a lot of humor there, but sometimes the punchline is a character she has saying their catchphrase, and it's used. Well, it is funny. But I don't think that kind of stuff would land as well here in a larger American audience. And with Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, it is a lot of the same thing of, like, oh, we're. We're kind of milking a lot of the same jokes over and over again. They're good jokes, but also, I think I'm unfairly comparing it to Comedy About Spies, which we saw last May, because Comedy About Spies was a really fully formed play and a great deal of spectacle and had stakes that added to the comedy and was just really. I thought was just so fantastic. And that is something that really stuck with me. Christmas Carol Goes Wrong is more sort of the writers of mischief going back to an old formula and then seeing how they can do something new to it, which I appreciate. Super hardcore. On an artistic level, I love that they didn't just sort of, like, pull out their old bag of tricks and be like, oh, well, everybody likes the goes wrong. Let's just do another goes wrong. Like, they have. They've bookended with auditions in rehearsal, and then they have the epilogue where you find out sort of, like, how the cast comes together and how the director redeems himself and all these other things. And it's fun. It's really nice. I would love to see another comedy about Spies, or rather another not Goes Wrong show from them. That's just sort of me. But it is a really fun time. The design is actually really clever. I was talking to Matty about it, and I told him sort of what my take on it was, which was like, you're doing a West End show and you need your audiences to feel like they're getting their money's worth, you know, production value wise. But at the same time, this is a community theater with a limited budget and limited resources to make spectacles. So what do you do? And what I thought they did, and then Matty vouched me, vouch this for me was like, they created West End quality sets, but the metrics by which they were used was done sort of community theater style. So, like, a lot of sets removed by actors. Things would Come in from the flies because, you know, it's easier to just sort of fly something in and fly it back out. So it's not like super intricate hydraulics. It's basically like it comes down or it goes up or it gets pushed on and off stage from the cast or crew, and you can sort of see things shake and wobble intentionally from the production for that. So I thought that was a really nice line that they walked. So well done on all of that. Next up, we have Playboy of the Western World Burp at the National Theater. This is written by John Millington Singe. And I did not know a goddamn thing about this play. My friend Danny told me that it was a play that he had seen a few times and never really cared for. And Danny's a major Anglophile. He goes to London honestly more than I do. And when I told him that I was seeing this, he was like, okay, good luck. And so I was a little nervous. And part of the reason why I bought the into the woods tickets was because when Playboy and Into the woods were starting previews around the same time, the into the woods feedback from audiences was so strong, and the feedback from Playboy was actually quite tepid. I was like, oh, shoot. Is this really a play that, like, you know, Danny was right about? Because Danny's not right about everything, just so you know. I don't take Danny's word for gospel, and he doesn't listen to this podcast, so he can't get mad at me. But, you know, my mom and I both really love Dairy Girls and Bridgerton. Oh, before I forget, yes, we should listen to Mom a little bit. So take it away, Mom. What did you know about this show? Going into it? Did you know anything at all? What was the impetus for us to purchase tickets for this?

[B]

Well, I was following your recommendations. I really didn't know anything about it except that it's sort of a catchphrase. You know, people use something. Something of the Western world, or, you know, the biggest mouth in the Western world, the Playboy of the Western world. I had no idea what it was, and so I came to it fresh.

[A]

Are you implying that I took your hand and forced you to see this show?

[B]

You guided me.

[A]

I absolutely took your insight as well. And this was one that interested you at the time. I'm not gonna rewrite history here, because there are two reasons why you were interested in seeing this show, and they both. And it's two members of the cast.

[B]

I didn't know they were in it beforehand. I told you, it didn't register.

[A]

It was part of the reason why you were interested. Because what is a show that we love.

[B]

We love Derry Girls.

[A]

We do.

[B]

Sister Michael and Claire. Claire were in it. And, you know, Claire is also Lady Whistledown.

[A]

Yes. I was about to say we also love, to a lesser degree, Bridgerton. We really love Derry Girls. We like Bridgerton a lot.

[B]

Right, right. But I really love Sister Michael, and to see her in sort of a floozy role was something quite different.

[A]

Oh, yeah. They gave her a really nice wig and they dressed her up as a major vixen MILF cougar. And she was. She was swaying about. She was the best thing about it.

[B]

She was. She was great. Yeah, she was great.

[A]

So. And this is your second time at the National Theater. Different venue at the national, though, because last year it was Dear England at the Olivier, which was a very large thrust stage.

[B]

Yeah, that was fantastic. I mean, I'm sure it was a flawed show, but I really enjoyed the mounting of it. And again, that probably wouldn't cross the pond so easily, but I really enjoyed it. I thought it was great and creative and really, really well done.

[A]

Yeah, no, we both really enjoyed Dear England. It was more that we didn't connect to it emotionally because it was a story that we didn't know very well. And being Americans, we don't have, like, a hometown pride about football, but we liked it. We thought it was really well done.

[B]

It's a little Ted Lasso ish, you know, so you can. You can sort of relate to some of it.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that maybe it's not the fault of Dr. Englund, because it's based on a true story. That Ted Lasso kind of stole their thunder. But this was a different venue at the National. This was the Littleton. You like the National? You enjoy that, too? I do. I love it.

[B]

I love it. I love the whole enterprise, the whole thing. I mean, it's like a world unto itself, which I love.

[A]

Was there anything about the physical production of Playboy, the Western world that either you did like or you felt less of a connection to? I don't know.

[B]

I thought the set was just kind of. It could have been more somehow. I mean, I know these are people who are not, you know, the upper crust of society, the characters, but I just felt. It felt like a little dinky to me. I don't know how to say it exactly.

[A]

Like, cheap.

[B]

Like. Like underdone cheap, but just underdone.

[A]

Okay. Like, maybe needed another draft or two. Yeah.

[B]

You know, just some sprucing Up. It didn't have much. I wasn't feeling the character. I felt like it was a. It was stiff and it was remote in a way.

[A]

I think that's fair. So, besides Sister Michael, Siobhan, the actress's name, anyone else in the company, what did we think of Nicola, Ms. Claire?

[B]

I think she was good. I mean, it was seeing her in a different kind of a role. And it was nice to see her not in Bridgerton clothes, because those are just. She looks so squat, you know, in those. But she was good. She was fine. I didn't love the play. I. You know, and particularly I didn't like the leading man.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I think the poster art is the best thing about the show.

[A]

The. The curtain. Yeah, yeah. What? Well, just describe it to us, woman.

[B]

Well, it's sort of a rendering of our floozy widow Quinn in that it's just the bottom half of her legs spread wide, but her red skirt looks like a curtain and it's draped and she's got her hands on her knees. And it's. In a way, it almost looks like the giant into the woods or a female ogre or something, because it's so huge and out of proportion. But I think it's both provocative and artful.

[A]

No, it's a nice curtain, for sure. Would you believe me if I told you that this is considered a major comedy?

[B]

Never.

[A]

How many times did you say you laughed during this?

[B]

Half a laugh.

[A]

Half of a laugh. And it was from the widow Quinn, probably.

[B]

I mean, you know, a couple of chuckles, but I didn't see it as a comedy. I found it hard to process.

[A]

It was a very long time until there was a single laugh in that show.

[B]

Yeah. If I were an ice cream eater, I would have been looking forward to the ice cream at the interval.

[A]

You really are obsessed with the fact that they serve ice cream at intervals.

[B]

I think it's great. And when we saw Standing at Sky's Edge, they brought a bottle of the seats and they were just drinking.

[A]

You can order. Yeah, you can order alcohol. Straight to your seat at the interval. It's great. There we go. Thank you so much, Mom. So the play, Playboy, the Western world is ultimately about. Hold on, what's the. What's the name of the main character here? I gotta figure this out. Never, ever say that I'm professional. You know, I'm. I am just. A little boy. A young man named Christie shows up to a village in Ireland, to a pub in Ireland, really, having claimed that he had just murdered his father and he ends up becoming the, like, hunk of the town because of this. And then the twist is that his father's actually not dead. He hit his father with, like, a shovel or some kind of item and just knocked his father out. But his father shows up with, like, a giant red mark on his head with dry blood and a giant bruise. And when he shows up, it ruins everything because Christie is now having this romance with one of the young women of the town, played by Nicola Coughlin. Her name is Beguin. And he's also. And every. As I said, all the women are fighting over him, including the sexually adventurous Widow Quinn. And that's played by Siobhan McSweeney. Siobhan and Nicola are from Derry Girls, obviously. Siobhan is Sister Michael. That's who my mother loves so much. And Sister Michael is a phenomenal character. But Christie has all these women lusting after him, and he. And he finally has Peguin, and things are coming up Christie. And then his father shows up and kind of ruins everything. And what ends up happening is he tries to kill his father again. And this time he thinks like, okay, I did it. I did it for real this time. And, no, he didn't. His father is still alive, God damn it. And. But this time, Christy kind of takes over, and he's like, okay, we'll go back home, you old fart, but I am the captain now. And so they leave with that dynamic having shifted, and everyone kind of goes back to their regular lives, except for Peguin, who was supposed to be betrothed to another man, but she broke it off with him to be with Christy. And then he leaves, and she basically says, I've lost the only playboy of the Western world. And that's how the play ends. And as you listen to me with my mother, would you believe it if I told you that this is considered a comedy? A big black comedy? It is. Now, as I said, I did not know anything about this. And if you look at the poster art for it, it doesn't necessarily scream comedy. The lighting is kind of ethereal and a little ghost like. And even though Siobhan and Nicola are clearly lusting after our playboy, the Western world here, it's not an overly comical way. It's truly, I would say, in a carnal, human kind of way. You know, Siobhan is as the widow Quinn is definitely leering at him, cougar like. But Nicola's, like, looking through the glass window here really kind of pining for him, and he's not even smirking in A yeah, I got it all kind of way. It's a very unknowable face that our Christie has over here. But I did then go on YouTube after the show and watched the commercial that they posted that this poster is tied to. And it is a much more comical commercial than I would have expected from this poster. And the commercial is honestly far more comical than the production itself. Now, this was the first thing we saw on our trip where I, when I shared it on my stories, I had. My DMs were just flooded with people who had done this, either in school or some regional production. I did not know this play had been done so much because I had not heard of it up until like, two years ago. And I guess people who've done it are very protective of it in the same way that I'm protected of something like Carousel. It's such a tricky play. It's a specific play. It feels sort of like the grandfather to Martin McDonagh plays, where it is such spiky subject matter with language that is very flowery, done with very thick Irish accents, so it can be hard to even know what they're saying. And if you don't get it right, it can be really a huge slog. And this production, honestly, was mostly a slog. It was a very. Despite what my mom says, I found it to be a very elaborate production, design wise. You know, it's middle of Ireland in the early 1900s, so it's not this exorbitantly lavish bar that they're in. It's a wide open space with, you know, the sky and the sea sort of projected in the background. But it. It does take up the entire Littleton stage. The Littleton stage is interesting because it's a. It's a versatile proscenium house, but it is also, like, you really can tell how large a space it is if a smallish play is trying to fill it up. And it feels like Playboy, the Western World is actually a rather small play that has been blown up for this stage and just cannot fill the space. So it doesn't help that this very delicate toned piece is. Is blowing itself up for a space too large for it. On top of this, the director, whose name escapes me, but I shall find her name right now. The director. Fuck you guys with your names here. Catriona McLachlan. Fuck you all. I me with me, with my stupid American tongue, you think I'm going to be able to get my tongue around all these names? Fuck you all. I was looking through the playbill and. Or program, I should say, and seeing the designs and sort of inspirations. And she talked about how she wanted to incorporate a lot of old Irish traditions in the piece. So there's sort of a major funeral wake that's done, and. And all these headdresses and old Irish ditties sort of strung throughout the production. So the piece is probably longer in this production than it normally would be because of that. But it also sets a very odd and eerie tone for the first 30 minutes. When I tell you that there wasn't a single lap for the first 30 to 40 minutes of Playboy, the Western World. And then the first laugh or two was kind of not against the audience will, but it took everyone by surprise. It's like, oh, were we supposed to laugh there? And then the laughs started to pick up as the show continued, but it never got to a raucous time. And as my mom and I had already mentioned that the actor playing Christy, his name is Ina Hardwick. I think I said that wrong as well. It's E, A, N, N, A. And there's an accent over the first E. Hardwick. So we're say Ina Hardwick or Ana Hardwick. It's. He just did a very odd performance as Christie. His. His Christie was very touched. So he wasn't really. It felt sort of like how you would see a lot of actors play Jack in Into the woods where he was a man child, but not in a way where there was any kind of swagger about him. And his character or his performance as the character never earned any swagger, even when all the women were lusting after him. And you could argue that that could be sort of the joke of this guy who doesn't have any Riz. But simply because everyone thinks he killed his dad, that is why everyone's lusting after him. But there needs to be some progression with that character, especially if he then has to get to the end of changing the dynamic with his tyrannical father. And it never gets there. Not for him anyway. So you don't really buy it. And because of his sort of oddly shaped performance, it's. It's this central ingredient that lets out even more sort of oddities in the rest of the production. Right. If, like, the. If the central ingredient is one specific flavor, that flavor is going to seep out to everything else. So even when you have people giving you the comedy that you need, it, it always gets a little tainted. So this was kind of a miss for us. It wasn't, unfortunately, bad. We didn't Hate it. We didn't walk out. I kind of wanted to walk out, but we didn't. I'm glad my mom got to see the Littleton. And it's never bad to check out the national again. We really enjoy Forza Wine Bar over there. So if you're ever going to the national, make sure you get a nice fried cauliflower fritter. And also they had a rice pudding with rhubarb on top that was really enjoyable. The rhubarb was cold, but the rice pudding was warm. And that was kind of odd. It was odd sensation in my mouth to have those two temperatures battling it out. But it was. It was still a really enjoyable dessert. That was one of my favorite places that we ate at while we were there. My mom's favorite place was the Ambassador's Club, which is an Indian restaurant on Hedden street, right off of Regent Street. But that has nothing to do with Playboy, the Western World. But that's also because I've got really nothing left to say about Playboy, the Western World. So let's next get up to one of our big ticket items here, into the woods at the Bridge Theater. This is directed by Jordan Fine, who kind of co directed the cabaret revival that just closed in New York and is still playing over in the West End. He mostly was in charge of the pre show, as that's when I come to understand. And he's using the same designer here, he's using Tom Scutt for the set and costume designs for into the Woods. This production for me was a mostly successful experience. Really successful for my mother, which I. That's worth its weight in gold to me, because she was the one who was not on board with seeing it at first, and then it really blew her away. For me, in my life, the thing with into the woods, and I feel like I talked about this when discussing the last Broadway revival, I find it really hard with into the woods because I do love it. It is a favorite show of mine. As I've gotten older, it has fallen in the ranks of favorite Sondheims. It's definitely not the best Sondheim. I think that A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd are objectively the best Sondheim shows. You can argue which one's the best score, but I think those shows, the score and the script combined are just sort of like, nearly foolproof. But also for many of us woods fans, the PBS taping of the original cast has been around now for 36 years and has defined multiple generations of musical theater performers and that original company is kind of unbeatable, and it's a bit of an unfair comparison to have other casts looked at compared to that original company, because when that taping was done, it was towards the end of the Broadway run. So everyone in that cast had that show living in their bones for minimum nine months, maximum two years. Whenever I see into the woods or been into the woods, as we're about to find out from this recording with my mother, we all kind of just are trying to chase that dragon of capturing that magic of the original company and comparing everyone to that. And that's a little unfair, but what else can you do? Before I get into this production anymore, let me now cut to my mother and let's hear what she has to say. Mother, what did you know about into the woods as a show? Going into this? And then what was your expectation going into this particular production?

[B]

I've seen into the woods maybe twice in my life. The most recent one with Neil Patrick Harris, and that was with the Milky White as the marionette, which was, you know, a novelty. It was enjoyable. Fairy tales are not usually my thing.

[A]

Do you remember the other time you saw into the Woods?

[B]

No, remind me.

[A]

It was when you saw me in it.

[B]

Who were you?

[A]

I was Cinderella's prince. Thank you very much.

[B]

Where was this?

[A]

This was at applause.

[B]

It was okay.

[A]

I'm so glad that my performance has stuck with you.

[B]

They've all blended together, you know.

[A]

Okay, everyone, this is my mother, and this is what she thinks of my talent as an actor. This is why we transitioned into podcasting, because my own mother can't remember a single goddamn performance I've ever given.

[B]

That's not true. That's not true. I mostly remember when I think about fairy tales or whatever, you dress as Peter Pan for Halloween.

[A]

Yes. Because you made the costume. So that's really a hat on your own back.

[B]

No, you were also Simba. You were adorable as Simba.

[A]

Yeah, there was a really cute photo of me as Simba. I was a very cute child Phantom. That's a less cute photo of me, but it's a fun time anyway. So into the Woods. You had seen it twice, maybe even three times, because I think you also saw the revival in the early 2000s with me and Nanny. Maybe the one with Vanessa Williams. But, yeah, fairy tales are not usually your thing. You liked the last revival at Encore because you saw it at Encores. You didn't see it, right?

[B]

I saw it at Encores and, you know, I liked it well enough. Never really connected to it.

[A]

Yeah. However. Well, so with this production, did you have any expectations going in? Did you know anything about it?

[B]

I didn't know anything about how it might be different, and I just knew the property. So, you know, I went in maybe with very lowered expectations.

[A]

Because you like it? Well, yes, I like the show. It's one of my faves. But also, when we were looking at our lineup before we left for London, I had pitched to you into the woods before they started performances at the Bridge. And I said, oh, it's the theater where we saw Guys and Dolls. And what did you say at first?

[B]

I don't remember.

[A]

You said, no, thank you. I'm into the Woods. Doubt.

[B]

I didn't say that. Okay.

[A]

Yeah. And then Playboy, the Western World, and Into the woods started previews around the same time. And the word on into the woods was so strong up front, I came into this room, the office right here, and said to you, there's a 80% chance I'm gonna buy tickets for us without your saying so. So just letting you know. And you. What did you.

[B]

I probably said, okay, you know, you're in charge.

[A]

Yeah. So, yeah, that was where we were at. So then we go into the theater. You said you didn't know really anything, what to expect. Lowered expectations.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I was wowed. I was really wowed. I just thought all the performances were great. Especially. Especially the Witch, who just mesmerized me. I mean, she was strong and sexy and all these things at the same time, and I just. And she had a great, great voice. So I love that. But what also really wowed me was the set design, because they absolutely created the woods on a smallish kind of stage. And I don't know how much was optical illusion or how much was actual physical property work, but I thought it was fabulous.

[A]

Yeah, I. Kate Fleetwood is the actress's name. She'll be getting more roses and more flowers when I do my separate section. But, yeah, it's not a terribly large proscenium. It's an intimate theater that's very flexibly used in that space. But I think the stage is relatively deep, which helps. Besides the Witch, any other performers that stood out to you or moments that stood out to you?

[B]

Well, the whole thing was just. I took it as one piece, and I. I really liked it. The princes are always fun. That's comic relief.

[A]

Except when one's played by me.

[B]

Yeah, well, yeah, but I don't remember the rivalry between you and. Who played the other prince?

[A]

The other prince when I did it. Was Alex Ratner, who's an aspiring musical theater composer. Now, we did not play the over homoeroticism that these two princes did.

[B]

They really did. It was really quite obvious. It was funny.

[A]

Yeah. Were there any revelations on the musical itself for you because of this production, or was it more your wowness? Was the production itself.

[B]

It just held together more for me and I really enjoyed it. And maybe because of the size of the theater, the size of the stage, I just felt part of it. Whereas it felt pretty remote at encores or, you know, it was just like a production up there. This was. I felt like I was in the woods.

[A]

Okay. So with final things on into the woods, specific moments that reach that you are sticking with you design wise or. Or performance wise or song wise?

[B]

Oh, design wise for sure. I mean, you know, after the giant and the tree falls, it's amazing. I don't know how they did it. I mean, it blacked out for like a second. And then this set was very different. So I think that if it. If it crosses the pond, everyone should see it because I did really love it and I thought it was such a different, inviting and engaging production. I don't always feel engaged. I felt very engaged.

[A]

I think it would be hard to find the right theater for that production here because you would need a stage that can carry the. The design but also have an intimacy with the audience. So that is tricky, but it is. I agree with you. I thought it was a really lovely production. Yeah. Kate Fleetwood is the witch we both really loved. I'm trying to think of any. You loved Jack's mom and the grandma. Any thoughts on little Red or Jack?

[B]

Jack was a little fey for me. I mean, he really. They made him out to be like.

[A]

I don't know, like foppish almost.

[B]

Yeah. Walking on his toes kind of thing. And really juvenile. I mean, as an older person, it was almost like a fluid performance.

[A]

Well, the performer themselves, I believe, is non binary. But also, do not knock light in the loafers, people. Mother. Because that you're knocking how your own son lives his damn life.

[B]

No, no, no. There's. There's. This was just sort of beyond suggestive of. Of being feminine. This was just right out there.

[A]

I think you were watching Jack and his mom on stage and you felt very uncomfortable by the very exact mirroring of our lives, of our relationship. You know that I love a cow, I love a ch, I love a hen, I love a harp. And. And you were just like, I. I can't deal with this right now. I go to the theater to escape.

[B]

You know, I respect your opinions and I think you're brilliant and I think your analysis is great and you are the most creative person I know. But right now you're handing me a crock of shit.

[A]

Thank you, Mother. The last production of into the woods, the one that was at Encores and transferred to Broadway, I liked. I liked a lot. Cast was strong. It was a production that I thought really had no style or point of view. And that's not the worst thing in the world, because I think what really kind of made that Broadway revival pop for so many into the woods fans, as well as people who did not know into the woods super well, was that, unfortunately, for the last 35 years, into the Woods has been perhaps the number one musical theater victim to directors and designers who have ideas. Because it's a fairy tale, because there's all this magic and thematic ties into the show. Directors and designers are like, I've got an idea of how we're going to do into the Woods. And they just take a hit of acid and they go to town. I have friends who went to Northwestern who told me about a student production that, like, took place in a camp. Not like a sleepaway camp, like a concentration camp, and that the giant basically was like a watch guard. And you're sort of going, huh, what? I know there was a famous production that was, I think in Seattle, maybe Portland, where the design of the witch in Act 1 was that, like, the garden was her body, so she had nectarines on her breasts and she had cabbages and celery all over herself. And so the Broadway revival, the Encores Transfer Broadway revival, I think was a breath of fresh air for a lot of into the woods fans because it just did the show. It trusted the material. It didn't do any major rewrites. They did not include Our Little World, which I appreciate, and they just did it. And many of us who loved the show and have always felt that the show was good, but was sort of clobbered by people with ideas, it was nice to sort of see the. The material itself just breathe and succeed. And for people who claimed to never like into the woods and saw this production, they were taken aback because they were like, oh, this show is good. Maybe I just saw bad production similar to how I'm kind of feeling about Playboy of the Western World, but I did also feel like people got a little crazy with that one, because while I liked it, it was not mind blowing to me. It did not change any way in how I felt about the show. There was nothing about anyone's performance. They made me go, oh, I never thought to do a role that way. That, like, totally changes the game of how I feel about that character, about this show. I'm like, I've always known this show is good. And I feel like I know these characters pretty well. And of the original cast with the. With all the laughs and. And the pathos, I'm like, I know where the bodies are buried. I know. I know how things can succeed. There were certain moments that got laughs in this last revival that I did not expect, and that was fun. Like Sara Bareilles found a whole bunch of new laughs for the Baker's Wife, which I appreciated. She's probably the best baker's wife since Joanna Gleason, and that is super, super high praise. And this production of into the Woods I found to be more surprising and exciting in a lot of ways. There are things, things where it is weaker that the last revival was stronger. I felt that the cast for this bridge production overall was really great, with one exception, which is Katy Brabin as the Baker's Wife. She's a very talented, well respected musical theater actress, and she's a well sung baker's wife, but it's over sung. When she was doing Moments in the woods, she was doing it like it was a pop concert. I mean, not like she wasn't trying to act it, but she really put an emphasis on the vocals. And I'm like, this isn't really a singer's song. It's melodic, it has some range to it. But, like, if Emily Blunt can do it in the movie and Joanna Gleason can do it, you know, you don't have to worry about sounding amazing. This is not. I'm the greatest star. This is not Dorana, My parade. This is Moments in the Woods. And Braben for me, was just sort of a humorless baker's wife. She really committed to the stakes of the situation between the baker and his wife, but never really had the humor nailed, which is a shame, because I thought everyone else kind of did. I thought Jamie Parker was a very sympathetic baker, and that's a huge task to accomplish because the baker can be so fucking whiny. And he really made you feel for him. The MVP of the show, as you heard, with my mom, is Kate Fleetwood as the witch. She was just the tits. I don't know how else to describe it. Her witch. The design for her ugly witch was sort of like a bald cap with scraggly hair was sort of like, if Nan. I know I keep mentioning Catherine Tate, but if you ever watch the Catherine Tate show or look her up on YouTube, she's got a character named Nan who's like a cursing grandma. Nan meets Gollum is the best way I would describe the design and her attitude for the witch in Act 1. She's kind of. Or rather, I should say she's kind of like a British Elaine Stritch in the body of Gollum is how I would describe Kate Fleetwood's act one witch. She's like, oh, hello. When you wanna know, my little babe? And just, like, so over it from the jump. Which I appreciated, because the witch is smarter than everybody else, which is why she has no fucks to give, which is why she's tough, which is why she's abrasive. And that energy carried over to her transformation and the regret and the confusion she had of why everything went to pot for her when all she wanted was to be happy and be happy with her daughter and not sort of recognizing her own failings and then kind of her own tunnel vision in Act 2. Just, it's. She is, without a doubt the best live performance of the witch that I have seen and the best witch since Bernadette Peters. That is how good Kate Fleetwood is as the witch. And her last midnight was so strong and so powerful. Normally, when people do the shh at the top of last midnight from, you know, your fault into last midnight, there's many ways to do it. You know, Bernadette went sort of chillingly furious. Kate Fleetwood's witch Hirsch is an extension of just how over it she is. She's been listening to them blabber on and on and on, and it's like she realizes halfway through your fault that there is no hope. They are all going to die because they had one chance to solve it, which is give Jack to the giantess. And rather than have a genuine discussion about, like, why it's the right thing to do or have an actual strategy of how to fix this, everyone's just pointing fingers to feel better about themselves. And you watch her listening to all of this, and the realization of their doom creeps in on her. And the fact that no one else can sense this doom is now also annoying her. So when she shushes them, she's like, shut your stupid face. We're gonna die. It's all terrible. And we're gonna die. And it was so good. I don't know how else to explain it. She also sounds great. Her voice is fantastic, too. And her Stay With Me is really lovely vocally. I will say this. Into the woods surprised me at how well done the music was. Everyone sounded fantastic. Some people maybe a little too fantastic, like I said with Katy Brabin. I will also say that Cinderella, who is played by To Sima Dornford May. Can everyone just be called, like, James and. And Alexa Smith from now on? Because y' all are tripping up my tongue here and it's not even the third date. But Ms. Dornford may, I will say her voice is incredible. She's got a really strong belt that actually she uses quite a bit in Cinderella than I expected. And she's got a nice soprano voice, but it's a bit thin and her break is a little high. And while Cinderella is a soprano role, it's a light soprano, and a lot of the character is sung in sort of a mixy area. And so when she is doing steps to the palace, she's very much belting, like, I would say 80% of it. And things like her call to the birds in the prologue, it just doesn't have as much power in the soprano area of her voice as I would like it to be because of just where her voice sits. But she does a really beautiful job with no One Is Alone. I must say, her voice is fantastic. It's more just a personal taste I have with women who sing that role of, like, can you give me a little bit more? I keep saying light, but yet, like, lightness, legato ness, like a straight tone. Benanti sound is sort of what I go for, which I guess you could just say is Kim Crosby. I will say Ms. Dornford May was a fun and very strident Cinderella. What I enjoy about Anna Kendrick, Cinderella in the movie, and the movie is a mixed bag for sure, but I always enjoyed husband Anna Kendrick. Cinderella is so uncomfortable in the ball gown. She's so uncomfortable being a princess. And that is something that is also true of Ms. Dornford. May is like, even though she's no longer a scullery maid and she looks beautiful, she's like, this is not how I naturally am. And it feels like a costume. And I'm just sort of an odd girl who talks to birds. And I. And I appreciated that about her. Other standouts in the company, Our Jack was played by Joe Foster, who I thought that's probably the best Jack I have seen live. Definitely the best since Ben Wright. Sounded fantastic, had the right amount of innocence and earnestness, but never was super cloying. I guess my one issue with Gracie McGonagall as Little Red Riding Hood is. Like, she did sometimes get a little too strident as Little Red. Like, her red was very bold and brash, and that's a great color to have. But it was kind of that one note for all of Act 1. And then, of course, it started to crumble in Act 2 when, you know, she finds out that Granny is gone and all of that. But it was sort of a long time to wait for that exterior to crack. And so there were times in Act 1, I'm like, okay, this is a bit much right now. Can we soften it a bit? But she also sounded fantastic. Anyone else in the company? Oh, yes, our princes. Cinderella's prince, played by Oliver Seville or Saville and Rapunzel's prince, played by Rice Whitfield. Those we mentioned a little bit in my mom's section. But, like, those guys were so fucking funny as the princes. Their agony was sort of. They were turned on by the agony itself. They were turned on by the chase of the woman, and they were kind of turned on by each other. There was an overt, almost incest vibe to these princes and their agony. It's sort of like, I am so hot right now. I. I am attractive. I am turned on by my situation, and also, my brother is hot, and. And he's turned on by his situation, and what can I do? We're just two men in heat. And also, we're royals, and, you know, royals fuck family. That's sort of always been their gig. So, like, it is. It is played up for a very intensely sexual comedy, which I appreciated a great deal, because usually when you're watching Princes and Into the woods, it's more of a play on the bland leading man, you know, vapid baritone prototype. And then other times, they go a little more foppish with it. That was sort of what Joshua Henry and Gavin Creel did in the last revival of, like, they were kind of overly sexless in that revival, and in this production, they're overly sexed. And when given the choice, I will go for overly sexed every time. I think that sex is more interesting than sexless on a stage in terms of romance and in terms of. What's the word I'm looking for? Not contrivance, but in terms of inner conflict, inner turmoil. Design wise. There's been a lot of talk about sort of the spectacle, the lavishness of this production. The Bridge theater is actually a very intimate theater, and the stage itself is relatively small, but it goes very deep. And this production begins on the thrust of the stage with a black backdrop in the, you know, into the woods title projected. And in the middle of the thrust, sort of a giant table pops up. And the entire prologue is done around this table with characters popping up behind the table, coming in from the wings and just sort of like. It's this. It's almost sort of like a pop up book when each page is a new character. So like Little Red pops up from behind the table and the witch pops up from behind the table. And it's just very. It was very tight and very well maneuvered. And again, just kept with the pacing really lovingly. The design of the show, costume wise, I guess it was sort of like medieval. There was a lot of tunics going on and like rope belts. I would say someone can maybe describe it better in the Discord Channel or maybe pinpoint the era that the design is supposed to be, but I don't, I can't rightfully say. There are certain touches that I really enjoyed, like when they. When the stepsisters and the stepmother are off to the ball. The carriage and the horses are their purses. So they are wearing purses as they go across the stage. And one is the horse, one is the carriage. And it's very clever. The prologue is the best I've ever seen that prologue done live again outside of the original production that's filmed after that. It's hard for me to say when the production hit the high of that prologue ever again, it maintained a steady stream of really strong stuff. If I had qualms to say, it would be that. Transitions sometimes in this production were a little slow, especially in Act 1, where the midnights are a constant reminder of how little time there is. We've got two midnights gone, one midnight gone. And as time is ticking away and the stakes get higher, everyone needs to get a little more frantic. And in the scenes they are. But as scenes are supposed to sort of bleed into each other, this production has a hard time getting that to happen. Part of that is the density of the design. It's not, not overly flooded with woods. It's actually kind of a trick of there are two or three items of very realistic trees that come on that slide on stage to make it appear like the stage is flooded with trees. But it's really like, I would say a third of the stage is actually covered in. In scenic trees. And it's more sort of like they. They slide into different positions to make it look like different areas of the woods. And the lighting also changes a lot to make it look like different areas of the woods. Because I had heard so much about how intricate this design was. Like, you'll never see a more elaborate production of into the woods again in your life. The woods themselves, I was like, oh, it's actually kind of sparse when you look at it. But, I mean, it's beautiful. It's beautifully detailed. But it's like, I was, like, really expecting to just see the stage flooded with trees. And that wasn't really the case. The stage also itself has levels that were sort of of rises and falls to create different perspectives. Anyone who saw Guys and Dolls there knows what I'm talking about. Like, when Guys and Dolls was done, it was done environmentally. Here lies Love Style. And the floor that a lot of the audience was standing on would rise in different sections to create new scenes for Guys and Dolls. And that also clearly is possible when shows are done in a proscenium. And that is what happened with into the Woods. So, like, there's the table that rises in the middle of stage for the prologue. But then in Act 2, when the earthquake happens with the giant, the stage then rises on both sides and lowers in the middle to create sort of like a valley, as if, like, the giant has created a footprint into the stage, which is very impressive. There are other things that kind of, I thought, could use some tweaking. The magic portions of the show are sort of lackluster. The witch's transformation is done sort of lackluster. Kay Fleetwood goes to the back of stage, whips off her robe, turns back around looking like the little girl from the Shining with very, very long, jet black hair and a white, simple white dress. And it's not an impressive look, but I don't think that's necessarily what they're going for. It feels more sort of like they're going for a rebirth of the witch's beauty rather than like that she's come out of this enchantment glamorized. It's like, oh, she's, you know, she's reborn and sort of sort of like, rather than go for Supermodel, they're going for Margaret Qualley in the substance, where she emerges from Demi Moore. It's sort of like this is her purest, most, you know, virgin birth form, and she will glamorize after this. That is sort of the vibe I got, which. Which is what happens in Act 2. She gets done up more now that she's beautiful. Also, her exit from Last Midnight is kind of underwhelming. They open up the Stage, and she retreats into it with the ghost of Rapunzel, which sounds fun, but it was just sort of lackluster in the way that it was done. But there are also, like, some harmonies that they added to this production. Like Cinderella at her mother's grave has. I think it's three women offstage singing the voice of her mother. And when they sing ask the tree and you shall have your wish, it's done in three part harmony. And when the witch is doing the end of Last Midnight, they have Rapunzel sort of singing alongside her. So that's in harmony. This is a very strong production. Overall, I would highly recommend it. I would rate it probably an 8 out of 10, maybe an 8.5 out of 10. And compared to the Broadway production, which I would probably rate a 7.5 or 8 out of 10 as well. Where the Broadway production is strongest was in pacing. It was in casting. Where this production is strongest, it's in design, it's in creativity. If I could plop Sara Bareilles into this production and if I could tighten up some of the transitions and maybe ask for, like, one more go with the witch's transformation, I think that this would be an absolute stellar production for the ages. As it is, it's a really memorable production for right now, which is, you know, a major compliment, I think, in. In the grand scheme of things. I also wanted to say thank you to the house staff at into the woods for being so delightful. You guys at Bridge really know what you're doing. And I also want to give a quick shout out to the young man at the merch stand in the lobby at my performance. You did a really fantastic job. You were so professional, and you were so courteous, kind, and personable. And I hope that they recognize your value at the Bridge because you are doing good work over there. Thank you, young man. And finally, last up, but not least, up, Badding done Baddington the Musical. Now, before I get into any of this, I think it's time that we hear one last thing from Mama Dre, Mother Mazia. Going into Paddington the Musical, what did you know? And then what were you expecting?

[B]

What I knew were the movies and the love everyone has for the bear. I have a bear, you know, he's just the sweetest, cuddliest thing and just wonderful. So I had seen the movies, and then I saw another one on the plane. I'd never seen the Peru one, and I saw that on the plane coming back. But what an endearing story and lots of for Klemp. Moments in watching just the sweetness and the innocence of the bear and the kindness of the family and all of that stuff. I just thought it was terrific.

[A]

Yeah. What did you think of the production itself, of the music, of the design?

[B]

I thought it was great. I really did. I. I wanted it to be the absolute high point and that, that I would, I would see it again. I loved it. I thought was. It was great, but it's a little. It's like a piece of candy, you know, it's just. It's very sweet. And I think that was one where there was a standing O.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I mean, there was a lot of anticipation for it.

[A]

We had two standing. Two full blown standing O's. There was. Because Starlight Express, everybody stood up at the end for the curtain call and mostly to take videos. And then Christmas Carol Goes Wrong and Playboy of the Western World had enthusiastic applause, but not standing ovations. Into the woods was a. Was an immediate standing ovation. And then Paddington was a pretty immediate standing ovation. Although both shows, I would argue, did not necessarily have raucous audiences throughout the night. There was, There was enthusiasm. But you, you wouldn't expect this, the unanimous standing ovation both got until it actually happened.

[B]

Yeah. There were no clues about it. I mean, the States, it's a much more vociferous response. And as we know, people stand and give an ovation to, you know, everything, which doesn't show much discrimination on the part.

[A]

To the crock of shit I gave you in the last audio that would have gotten a standing O in America.

[B]

That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. So Paddington was delightful. It was the. The bear actually was terrific. The physicality of the bear and the singing voice behind the bear was terrific. And I thought they handled that extremely well. I don't know how they got the bear's head and mouth to move, but that'll be a secret, I suppose.

[A]

Disney Imagineering, I suppose.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was great. It was very sweet. And, you know, is it. Is it Pulitzer Prize winning? No, but it is definitely worth taking the family to. And not even the family just going yourselves because it was, you know, and particularly in times like these, which sounds so trite, you need to be uplifted and this was very uplifting.

[A]

Well, so motivated. Motivated by kindness and goodness. It's. It's not. I don't think it's enough to be preached at or to just be carried away into escapism, to have something that actually motivates you to do some good in the world. And be better to other people is a really miraculous thing, even if it's not necessarily an exorbitantly complicated piece of theater, if it's just a simple story for all ages that can still be very magnificent in its own right.

[B]

Yeah. You know, I'm just thinking about. Paddington is so beloved in Britain, and I guess here, but to a lesser extent, you know, it's not as widespread. So it's almost like Paddington's a national hero and they do a musical, and so it's called Going to get that big, enthusiastic response. I would very much like it to come here. I think it could have legs, and it's not such specific Britishisms, but maybe more people need to see the movies. I guess there's a cult following, but we have a much bigger country, much bigger population, so it's not as immediate and it's not as compelling as it is there.

[A]

Yeah, Paddington is absolutely a national hero in the UK in the way that it is. He isn't here. He's liked here, but he's always been sort of a cultish figure here in the way that Doctor who has been here. It's sort of a very. A sizable and passionate fan base, but not on the level of. I don't know what would be. I hate to, you know, say Harry Potter, because that is also British, but, yeah, Harry Potter. I'm trying to think if we have a children's book character in America that is, like, Universal or unanimously known.

[B]

And like, Cat in the Hat was very big. Right. It was seussical. Right. Wizard of Oz, I guess, you know, a lot of children's books, but not a character that embodies just truth and goodness and purity.

[A]

Yeah. I think that the movies have helped a lot with Paddington's visibility in America. Neither movie has been a blockbuster here, but they have been relatively successful. And of course, with streaming and YouTube, they live on continuously. And of course, with me, me just carrying the torch and telling everyone that those two movies are fucking masterpieces and everyone should just be watching them.

[B]

I love them. I give Paddington five marmalades.

[A]

I mean, into the woods, you would say, was probably still, like, the high point for you with Paddington. A nice second.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I would give. I would give into the woods five magic beans.

[A]

Okay, that's. That's absolutely fair, but I think that we were very lucky to end the trip the way we did with into the woods and Paddington at the end.

[B]

It was. It was a very much uplifting thing. And the way it was a, you know, the Weather got really bad toward the end and it was nice to. It was worth the trek over in the rain and all that. It was good.

[A]

And what is currently staring opposite you right now as we record this, a.

[B]

Paddington sweatshirt that we took a lot of time to curate because we had to make sure the size was exactly right.

[A]

Well, yes, because what is it that I learned about sweatshirts?

[B]

Well, they make you look smaller when they're bigger.

[A]

We don't need to go into my body dysmorphia all that much.

[B]

What am I supposed to say about the larger sweatshirt?

[A]

What? I originally purchased a small sweatshirt and then during dinner I was like, maybe I should get myself a medium instead.

[B]

Didn't you caucus with someone about it or something?

[A]

Yeah, Danny. I texted Danny and I said, I think I made a mistake. And he said, I'll just go on exchange that. They do it all the time. And lo and behold, they were very good about it.

[B]

Very good.

[A]

Yeah. There are two other items besides my sweatshirt and the souvenir program that you're holding right now. I guess we can just call it a program because they don't do playbills over there for. But do you remember the other two Paddington items I got?

[B]

Oh, gosh.

[A]

I'm thinking.

[B]

Oh, yes. You got a baseball cap or. You're right. That was adorable. And what was the other? A magnet. Right. The magnet is nice. It's very streamlined. And we debated between two magnets. One was busy and the other was just Paddington on a blue background. And that's the one that won.

[A]

Yeah, that's the one that won.

[B]

Purist.

[A]

Yes. I'll talk a little bit more about my shopping at the Paddington store before the show, but because I did a whole. I prepped the whole thing. It was the moment. But.

[B]

Yes, you did. You went to the store ahead of time, picked out what you wanted, made sure they were going to be open, you know, timed it so that it was before, you know, and you got everything done. It wasn't super crowded.

[A]

Yes, exactly. I'll go more into detail about it on my own section. But yes, I did not come to play fools.

[B]

Well, I want to say there was. The interesting endpoint to all of this was we were waiting for our luggage at JFK and a young woman came over and saw Matthew's cap and started talking about Paddington. And she was wearing a blue toggle like jacket that clearly was Paddington. And she wasn't a kid. She was almost 40 years old.

[A]

She was older than me, she said. Granted, she also thought I was much Younger than I was, but. And that's not me pulling thread.

[B]

London climate. It's the, you know, all the humidity in the air, and it makes us look a little bit younger.

[A]

Mm. Let's say that's what it was. But when we were walking into the theater, there were grown adults wearing the panties and bucket hats.

[B]

Oh, totally, totally. It was really something else. It was almost like being at the World's Fair, where everybody. That's before your time.

[A]

Well, I mean, so I. Listen, we were at a Wednesday evening show in the middle of January, but even so, there weren't that many children. It was a lot of adults. Adults.

[B]

A lot of adults. A lot of adults. Which I think speaks to its marketability if it were to come here.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you, ma'.

[B]

Am.

[A]

So here's the thing about Paddington the musical. I went in as blind as I could be. I didn't want to know anything about the music. I didn't want to know anything about the plot. I had had the bear design spoiled a little bit for me, but I did my best to forget all about it once someone had sent me the photo and. And. And looked the other way. I even yelled at friends who were trying to send me photos of it, and I was like, get that fucking shit out of my DMs. And so I was able to pretty much avoid it. What I did not expect was that this musical is basically the plot of the first movie. Not basically. It is. It's the. It is a musical adaptation of the first Paddington movie, which is. Paddington Bear Travels from Darkest Peru. Now that his uncle has passed and his Aunt Lucy is living in the home for retired bears, he needs to find a new home and where he meets the Browns and he ingratiates himself to their family. But he's doing that while looking for the explorer who had discovered his Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pasuso and told them about London and showed them marmalade. And Paddington's thinking, this explorer might be my home now, while at the same time, there is a taxidermist working for the Museum of Natural History who is. Who has gotten wind that Paddington has arrived in London and is now hunting him. Her name is Millicent Clyde, and now that she has news that he's in London, she's hunting him. So he can be the ultimate exhibition for her display of stuffed animals. Because as we find out, her father was the said explorer who went to Darkest Peru and did not come back with a specimen of the bears, but rather treated them like the kind creatures that they are, which kicked him out of the Geographer's Guild and brought the declined family a bunch of shame. And so Millicent is trying to bring back pride to the family as well as get back at her dead daddy because she has daddy issues. And chaos ensues. But Millicent Clyde is beaten and Paddington joins the Browns as a family member. And everything is good in the end, as I've made very clear. And as you can see from my my shirt over here, I'm wearing a Paddington sweatshirt. I also have got a Paddington hat and a Paddington magnet. Paddington means a great deal to me. The books were not huge in my family. We were more Peter Rabbit and corduroy people. But we did have a couple of Paddington books. I remember the first two movies when they came out, were really what did it for me. The first movie is just such a delightful piece of media. And then the sequel, as we all know, is just perfect. And I've hung onto them. They are joy in under two hours. It's why I have my Paddington Bear and I have my Paddington notebook. And so this was a very, very important show. And I'm so glad that I bought tickets when I did because this show is a big titty hit in London. You cannot get tickets until like April over there. And even then those tickets are sparse. If you want, like a really actual genuinely good seat, you either have to wait for cancellation or you gotta buy for, you know, July or August. I'll start off with the positives because it's based off of the first movie and, and I would say borrows a great deal of material from the first movie. It is a very delightful night at the theater. The story is strong. A lot of my favorite jokes from the movie are in there as well. A lot of my favorite zingers from the movie as well are in there as well. Like when Milson Clyde learns about Paddington's existence in the song Pretty Little Dead Things. Her assistant says, boss, is this bear endangered? And she says, it is. Now that's one of my favorite lines from the movie. And it's in the show and it's great. The score is wall to wall bops. I did not know who Tom Fletcher was. I never heard of the band McFly because I'm me and I don't know these things. It is a really impressive score. I was expecting it to be more kind of of piano tinkly light hearted because that's sort of what the movies are. There's also a bit of calypso music in the movies. This is like Pop music. Loud, exciting, brash pop music. And that was. That threw me for a loop. But it didn't take away from the fact how magical it was as a score. And really dynamic musical theater writing with quite tight rhymes and really epic power ballads and fun group numbers like with the Sound of London, which is a giant company number where Paddington's learning about all the intricacies of London Town. And it's a really well designed show. It's a very elaborate show, spectacle wise. I did not expect that. It's not, you know, we're not talking Harry Potter and the Cursed Child here, but it is a really intelligent blend of projection and practical sets coming together to create a visceral world. It is a heightened, candy coated version of London, which is also what the movies do, which is what makes it so impressive. The bear puppet, as we all know if you've seen it online, is just mind blowing. It is a costume worn by an actress with a very intricately mechanical face that is manipulated by the actor who sings Paddington and performs all of his dialogue in the show. He's manipulating the facial expressions of the costume offstage, but they work together in a really seamless way. I mean, the cast overall is incredibly strong. The actor who plays Paddington is James Hamid. And the way that they sort of do it is when the show begins, they are in the shop of, you know, trinkets and whatnot, which in the movie is the store owned by Jim Broadbent. And this is where Paddington learns about, you know, the Geographer's Guild and who the explorer is and where he came from. And so this is where the storytelling device of the show, we bookend it in this shop. And when. What's the name of the store owner? Mr. Gruber. When Mr. Gruber is singing about his store, a young man comes in, that's James Hamid, and he sees a stuffed bear on a shelf. And that's where Mr. Gruber then sings about, oh, let me tell you a story about a bear. And we jump into the story of Paddington. We see the actress in the Paddington costume come out and James Hamid starts to sing as Paddington standing behind the bear costume. And we come to realize, oh, this is the guy who's going to be singing and speaking as Paddington. And this is sort of how it's going to go. And then once we crash into the rest of the opening number, he goes off stage and Paddington the bear performs solo on stage and we hear James voice offstage. And then it all ties back together at the end of the show and the Two performers take a bout together. Since they, you know, play Paddington together. There's. I don't want to go into the specifics of the plot or the score too much because I'm hoping that when the cast album comes out, people can listen to it for themselves. If you don't know the story of the first movie, just watch the first movie. It's fantastic. And the show is very faithful to the first movie. They make a couple of small changes. You know, they make it that Mr. Brown, instead of being sort of like a motorcyclist, former rock biker in his day, and then he becomes a risk analyst once he gets a family, they make it that he used to be in a rock band and then became a risk analyst, which, which they use as an opportunity for him to perform a rock number towards the end of Act 1, to show his boss and to show his family that he still has some of his old joie de vie from his youth, which I think you can do when he's used to being a rock band and not like a biker. I'm sure you can't do a motorbiking number, but this is what we would call a clever change. For the sake of musical theater, you want to find opportunities for song anywhere you can get. So if Mr. Brown used to be in a band, wouldn't you know it, he's going to perform a song from said band. Once again, other standouts in the company, obviously, Victoria Hamilton Barrett as Millicent Clyde. She has the right amount of whimsy about her and blending it with menace, she plays it. She. She basically understands that she has to play a real villain in a whimsical world. So she can't be bone chilling, but she also cannot undersell the actual danger that this character poses to our beloved Paddington because we do need to have stakes in the show. It can't just be charm all the time, always. That will wear off eventually, especially for a two and a half hour musical like this one. And she is able to bring that evil gravitas without it overwhelming the show and changing the temperature of the piece. And that is just such a hard thing to do. And if this show were to transfer to Broadway, should it transfer, they would be very wise to bring her over. We do have women here who could do it. This is a role that was tailor made for Jennifer Simard. But I think that Victoria Hamilton Barrett is so special in the role that, that it would behoove us to expose her to a wider audience here. Because not only is she a phenomenal Actress. She's a phenomenal singer. She's got, like, a smoky belt to her that adds to the menace of Millicent. The menace of Millicent. That should be the title of a book for something. I don't know. We'll figure it out. Another person I want to give a shout out to is Amy Booth Steele as Lady Sloane, among other parts. Amy Booth Steele plays a bunch of roles in the show. She plays an announcer at Paddington Station. Paddington Station is, of course, where Paddington gets his name from. And she plays a couple of other smaller roles. But her biggest role is Lady Sloane, who represents the Geographer's Guild. And she has a couple. She has one big scene in Act 1, and then she's got two or three scenes in Act 2 and a song in Act 2. And she is just someone who give a mouse a cookie and he will keep. Just like he will devour it and ask for more. This woman knows how to steal the spotlight in a way that is not rude to her castmates, but allows her to relish in what she has created for us. Her Lady Sloane from the Geographer's Guild. The joke is basically how pompous and stiff upper lip and upper class she is. And she does something that I normally don't. Always like that I often roll my eyes out. Which is the Annaleigh Ashford School for Comedic Acting, where you say a word weirdly to get a laugh. But it works here because it's not a one off. It's something that is consistent with her character. And when they meet her at the Geographer's Guild, trying to get information on Montgomery Clyde, the first thing she says to them is, are you a member? Which is important because the Geographer's Guild is very. It's a very exclusive club, and they're very pretentious. And so in order to get any information, you have to be a member. But she's always asking all the time, are you a member? But the way she says it is, are you? Are you a member? So when they ask, oh, can we have information about this explorer? Are you a member? And it's just so funny. And she keeps always, always bringing it up, are you a member? You can't do it unless you are a member. And then just like when she says, no, no, are you a member? Then, no, I don't want to hear the question now. You cannot be a member. You are not a type to be a member. And it's just so funny. And I. I will praise people who can find humor in ways that we do not expect in ways that could be cloying but aren't cloying, that are surprising. It is just props to Yamama. If I had any qualms with Paddington the Musical, it is ultimately that I would maybe shave off five to 10 minutes. Nothing about it is bad, truly. They are playing with house money here because there's not a song, there's not a scene that is underwritten or poorly. Or poorly realized. It's simply that I think it could be a little tighter, mostly act one. It takes us a while to get to our point of the Act 1 finale. And it's one of those things where I'm like, I could maybe cut a number and find ways to tighten a handful of scenes where it's like, if you shave off 15 seconds of four scenes, that's already a full minute shaved off, and then shave off 15 seconds from another four scenes, that's two minutes. And then if you cut a number, then we've got five and a half minutes off of act one and we're tight as a drum. And then act two, I would also maybe shave off another five minutes. It's not overly long. It's. And it does. It's not so much that it drags is like, you can. When you're watching it, you can sort of feel where there's a little bit of air. And if this were to come to America, the best way for it to succeed is to really kind of make it the most tight product, family entertainment it can be. Because ultimately, Paddington the Musical is not trying to be company. It's not trying to be Sunday in the park with George. It is trying to be an entertainment with heart and intelligence for families, for people of all ages, which is what entertainment used to be, right? You look at movies from the Disney Renaissance era, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, or you look at the golden age, like Snow White, and you look at who Framed Roger Rabbit. You even look at the first two Paddington movies, and children delight in them. But adults also enjoy them because they are well structured, well crafted, well written. They're funny and they're intelligent. And there are jokes that work for adults. There work jokes that work for children. There's enough physical comedy. There's real emotional stakes to it, so you don't feel cheap for liking it. And there were honestly more adults in the audience when we saw it than children that night. Granted, it was a Wednesday night, but still a lot. A lot of adults. And I think what the musical gets so right is it does not cheapen Paddington to go for the lowest common denominator of saying, well, we're only trying to appeal to seven year olds and parents. Just, you know, be happy that your kids are happy. No, they want both parent and child to like it. And that is where it succeeds so brilliantly. And so with that in mind, as I said, we're playing with house money here. There's nothing that needs to be rewritten, there's nothing that needs to be exchanged or rethought. But I would tell them if they are looking to bring this to Broadway, to come back to it maybe over the summer and go, okay, we have to be ruthless here and we have to do our best to shave off five to 10 minutes from this entire show. And I think they can. I think there are little pieces in scenes that they can just sort of cut a couple of lines to get to the punchline faster, get to the end of the scene just a little bit faster. I think that there are numbers that maybe you can take out a verse. There are a couple of musical interludes and reprises that have buttons for applause that don't need the buttons. We can just take the button out and go right into the next scene. And these things will just all add up. These little things add up to make it a more well oiled machine without feeling mechanical or cold. Just in order for something this light hearted and optimistic and joyful to succeed in such a cynical world, you have to set it up for as much success as possible. And in America, we do not have an overwhelming love for Paddington that can override and pride for Paddington that can override any hiccups or flaws that might keep an American adult from enjoying this show. So you want to kind of, of think ahead and knock those problems out before we can, you know, have anyone come to them. I don't have much else to say other than this was such a joyful piece for me. I would say this was my number one of the, of the trip. I know into the woods is number one for my mother, but Paddington for me was such a delightful, heartwarming and confirming show. I wanted it to be good and it was good. I want to see it again, partly because I want to feel that love again. But also now that I know, now that I've seen it, I don't have to conflate it in my head as this all time epic work of art. And now that I know what to expect a bit more, I can sit and enjoy it rather than try to just absorb every crumb that this show has. Because when you want to love something, when something is a really epic moment for you. And you know, with theater, it's fleeting. You're trying to remember everything, you're trying to absorb everything. And it's hard to always enjoy yourself. But I did think that I enjoyed myself with this. But I want to see it again and relax even more now that I know, because there is so much to love about this. And I think that if you are in London, if you have the opportunity to absolutely see it, and if you can't see it, wait for the cast album and then watch the first movie and play the songs alongside it, because that's a very similar experience. It's just such a. It's such a delightful evening. And once again, directed by Luke Shepard. That's the way his name was brought up again since Starlight Express. And I really appreciate the time and craft and energy that went into this because as I said before, so many shows on Broadway have gone with, well, we're just trying to be a good time. We're not trying to break any ground. Can you cut us a break? And that is always an excuse for sloppy writing, bad writing under thought designs and basic staging and poor performances. And this is a show that really is trying to go for the highest caliber of full family entertainment. And that is why it is succeeding as well as it is in England, because they really took the time to think it through and make it the best it could be. And I want more people to think of that, that as they go forward. Creating works, especially if you're creating works with children in mind, you don't want to feed them slop, you want to feed them curated material. Because ultimately this is the stuff that's going to help shape their brains as they get older. That's it for now. If you have more questions about any of these shows, you can ask me either on Instagram, Matt Copley, Usual spelling, or you can join the Discord Channel and ask me there. You can join our substack and ask me there. We've been a little lax for with releasing articles on there in conjunction with the episodes here. I've had people join the substack because they liked my writing, but they aren't really podcast people and we would have articles tied to the episode so they could read those and sort of get the gist of what we were talking about here. But we will. I will pick those back up again shortly, I promise you. Once again, we have a link for tickets for the March 6th Sondheim Weber A Birthday Threesome Live show at Greenroom 42 in the description box. And we are going to close out this episode with Ms. Victoria Hamilton Barrett. All right, that is it. I'll see you guys next week with another deep dive. Take it away, Victoria. Bye. All the pretty little d things that you'll ever need lost no one makes a pretty little dust Ain't quite like me.