After the ASTA convention in Strasbourg, some colleagues and I took
the rail route to London for the World Travel Market. That meant a
pleasant four-hour train ride from Strasbourg to Paris and the
Eurostar from central Paris to central London.
It was my first ride on the vaunted Eurostar. If I hadn't known
I was traveling across the channel, I might have thought I was
taking the train from New York to Washington. The trip takes about
the same time and offers the same advantages. You avoid the crowded
airports and planes and arrive a short taxi ride from your
hotel.
The first-class meal on the Eurostar was the equivalent of a
better-than-average airline coach meal but substantially better
than the Metroliner's Club Car cuisine, probably because it was
prepared in Paris.
From Friday evening until Sunday, when my first commitments were
scheduled, I was free to do what I enjoy most in London, going to
the West End and seeing as many plays as possible.
Within minutes of my arrival, I was in the tube heading toward
Theatreland to see Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Whistle Down the Wind," a
musical that the composer has been grappling with for years. After
several abortive starts, it got onto the boards earlier in the
year.
I'm a sucker for Lloyd Webber's saccharine melodies, and there
are two in this show that made it worth my while, the title song
and the first-act closer called "No Matter What."
The story, about a bunch of kids in the American South who
mistake a fleeing convict for Jesus, is sappy, but being a
sentimental slob, I loved almost every minute of it.
The next afternoon, I joined the line at the Leicester Square
half-price ticket booth just before noon and got a ticket to
"Quartet," a play about four elderly former opera singers living in
a nursing home. It stars four grand British actors, Alec McCowen,
Donald Sinden, Stephanie Cole and Angela Thorne.
"Quartet" has its fun with various forms of senility and at
times is in questionable taste, but the acting is splendid,
particularly Sinden's and Cole's. Sinden, an old favorite of mine
from films and theater, plays geriatric lechery for all it's worth,
and Cole makes Edith Bunker look like a rocket scientist.
The finale, in which the actors struggle into their old costumes
and recapture their past glory by lip-synching the Quartet from
"Rigoletto," is terrific.
For my last theater visit, I went to see an all-British
production of "The Pajama Game." The singers and dancers were
valiant, but I'm afraid the old musical comedy has lost its punch
and is too middle-America for this game British cast.