Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

To paraphrase Taylor Swift, home is where the heart is, but god I love New York.  After I visited in March this year, I told all of my friends that I was up for another trip if they wanted, and to my delight I got another opportunity much more quickly than I expected.  After my second visit in a year I  still don’t feel I am done with this place, and don’t know if I ever will be.  Below are some jottings about this trip just so I don’t forget.    Day 1 - Tuesday: Flights and Times Square  An uneventful flight where I just binged films - Go here if you want my notes on what I watched At the airport I picked up a cab and had the one of the suite of classic NYC cab experiences.  In this case the driver smelt of weed and was looking at his phone as often as the road.  There was one interesting moment when the only reason he avoided backending the car in front was because I shouted at him.  After hitting the brakes he just held his hand up towards me and grunted before carrying on.... It r

 I had been talking about another trip to New York, and so when this new production of Romeo and Juliet was announced, it was the perfect excuse.   With Broadway virgins Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler in the leads, Sam Gold, the love him or hate him director at the helm,  and Jack Antonoff, the show off/genius music producer in charge of original score, it could all go spectacularly wrong or be brilliant.  I booked the tickets before anything else, and then realised that meant I was going to have to go back to NYC for the second time in a year.  I usually prefer not to read reviews before seeing any play, but it previewed for a month, and given the amount of Tik-tok excitement it's not surprising that many of the more unusual features were heavily spoilered beforehand. The play is a fresh, young take on the well known story.  Walking in the theatre foyer, there is loud disco music and flashing lights to set the scene and that continues inside the intimate performance space, with a ti

An eight hour flight to NYC requires either an amazing book, or a lot of movies.  I chose the movies. Dune 2 This had less pretentious music than Dune 1, and the cgi and cinematography were fabulous.  I actually wanted to be in that desert despite the weird creatures that could kill me.  The downside is the bloated storytelling which meant it was far too long.   That's why I only can only see myself watching this movie series on planes, despite the tiny screen. I Saw the TV Glow -   I had heard loads about this but hadn't seen it available anywhere.  My best way to describe it is Stranger Things meets trans allegory.  It is both strange and wonderful, and looks great, a mix of schlocky horror imagery and an evocative colour palette flooding the screen with that blurry 80's video aesthetic.  The basic story is about a couple of teenagers who are obsessed with a tacky teenage horror/mystery show, but it's all about the subtext.  In fact, I am not sure it would make any se

The last time I saw this revenge tragedy must be more than 40 years ago and I remember it being a violent and bloody misery fest.  But this version has Jodie Whittaker so when I spotted a last minute discount ticket in the stalls I couldn’t resist. Whittaker is impressive from the start, commanding the stage and running rings around her childish, cartoonish, controlling brothers as she relishes her freedom after being widowed.  She continues to confidently hold the reins as she secretly marries her weak but sweet steward.  So far so good, but all falls to pieces pretty quickly from there.   The first half of this production is actually a bit of a mess, disjointed and with some strange decisions around direction, the text and which scenes to keep or cut.  With modern dress and setting, the original language is almost completely ditched by Zinnie Harris in this version, and the focus is resolutely on the misogyny and aggressive patriarchy which cannot let a woman have agency over her lif

Had a fab day of film overdose with three very different films First was Elton John: Never too late, the new documentary which takes a retrospective look at his career with the backdrop of his personal life.. Produced by David Furnish, this was never going to be a hatchet job and some parts of John’s biography are a bit glossed over but that didn’t detract from the overall film which spends a lot of time in the early years and with some great archive material and some moving snippets I had never seen before,  A great companion piece to Rocketman which was much more focused on his personal life  The biggest annoyance was a couple behind us, obviously fans but who thought they were in their living room, chatting their way through the interesting bits and occasionally singing along.  A Disney+ production,  I hope and assume it will be on streaming soon, but great to see it in such a big space. Next was The Wild Robot, an animation with some huge names doing the voice work. Lupita Nyong

I loved Alexander Zeldin’s earlier play The Confessions , so I was really keen to see what he had done with the tale of Antigone, reworked for a modern blended suburban family. The set is a house being renovated to ‘bring in the light’ with walls knocked down and swishing doors to the garden demonstrated to everyone, all very 'Grand Designs'.  But the house used to belong to Chris’s brother and it is being renovated to get rid of the past and move on.   As part of moving on, Chris (Tobias Menzies) has decided that it is time to scatter the ashes to get his brother finally out of the house, and is determined to do so.   One of his nieces Issy (Alison Oliver) is already living in the house with memories of before and they are joined by Annie (Emma D'Arcy), her sister, who hasn’t let go of an ounce of her grief and has decided that her Dad's ashes should stay in the house. The intransigence and battles between Chris and Annie takes some gasp inducing turns as they tussle w