Theatre Bliss

As you can probably tell from the title, the Lion King was absolutely amazing!! And guess where my seat was??? FRONT ROW!! I didn't know that until I got to the theatre...it was so very cool!! I could almost touch the amazing costumes, especially when they leaned out over the audience. It was very much the coolest performance I've ever seen. They had lots of moments when the cast (who play the animals) were amongst the audience, parading past, flying birds over our heads, it was so very cool!! And the woman who played Rafiki (the baboon for all of you who have only seen the Disney and aren't big enough fans to know all their names) was phenomenal!!! OMG!! I loved it, loved every moment of it. The music was great, it has more songs than the disney movie, Timon and Pumba are fantastic, the song and scene for "can you feel the love tonight" is sort of abstract and cool in order to work around the fact that they are playing animals and their headdresses are too big to mimic our traditional stage impressions of love. It was just - wow - I may have to come back and stay in London for a few days after my tour to see the Lion King and Wicked one more time each, and just spend three days in Scotland instead of 6. Those two performances have been some of the highlights of my whole trip. And for the record, the Lyceum theatre where the Lion King was staged has to be one of the most beautiful interiors I have ever seen. It's really every cherished idea of an old school theatre or opera house. There's nothing plain about the interior - it's all murals and crown mouldings and pillars and rich curtains and reds and golds and balconys and the ceiling is so elaborate, it was just...sigh...you get the idea I hope. It was such a good show I didn't even notice the time passing. Usually in full theatres in which the seats are close together (which is every show I've been to so far) at some point you feel the pain in the ass of sitting still so long, or the people next to you distract you somehow, but I was completely oblivious to all that during the whole thing. I was grinning almost the entire time, except of course when Scar was being evil or the stampede scene. Oh!! The stampede!! Let me just tell you about that cuz it was one of the things I was curious as to how they would stage it. So they have the large pieces of scenery on runners and stuff, and they had the red cliff walls pulled out in successions so that closest to the audience was the largest, and it went back and had smaller and smaller parts until at the back, there was a projection scren between the cliffs faces that showed the wildabeasts grazing on the field at the top of the cliff. When Simba roared and they started the stampeded, the screen changed and you could see the tiny wildabeasts running down the cliff face like in the movie, then in each part starting from the back there were mechanized rows of wildabeast that looked like they were running towards you. Each row had several wildabeast and they worked on a circular system so it looked like they were bounding towards you. Each layer closer, the mechanized beasts were larger in size, so it looked like they were getting closer and closer. At the level Simba was on, he began running in place and other actors in costume as wildabeasts ran up beside him and then another group with the largest costumes of all filled in the front so that it looked like they were overtaking Simba!!! IT WAS SO COOL!!! I really hope you can get some sort of mental picture from that, it was just amazing. Anyways, I got two items from the show, a program outlining who was in it and the scenes and numbers and stuff, and another one with lots of pics from the cast performances and stuff, so you can get a better look later.

The last few days at the hostel have been pretty nice. I really like the roommates I have now. Mostly Auzzies, three at the moment actually. The girl from Alabama left this morning, as did our guy roommate from Brazil named (spelled phonetically for how you pronounce his name) hen-hee-kay. The Spanish equivalent would be Enrique, but the Portuguese pronounciation is apparently different. Anyways, the Auzzie's are great. Belinda's been here for a few days already and is very friendly, has been travelling the world, been to Tailand, is a personal trainer and just very interesting to talk to. The guy who just arrived yesterday is named Lee. He's lived most of his life on the ocean, is a boom operator in comercials (as only Jeff will be likely to know what that means, I shall explain. He's the guy that holds the pole with the fluffy black mic on the end of it), and is travelling the globe. He's been all over and has a month left before he goes home. Very nice guy, in head over heals in love with a girl who organizes travel excursions in Egypt, but hasn't seen her since he left home 7 months ago. Between Belinda, Enrique, Lee and I, we've spent the better part of the last two days in conversation about almost every topic imaginable. Surfing, of course, the world politics, what it's like in our countries having both previously been British Colonies, relationships, quantum physics, tourist stuff (where we've been, where we're going), tattoos (have had a handful of people wanting to know about mine, which is cool), everything. It's been pretty cool. One of those true, touring around, meeting new people and sharing different experiences kind of times. We seem to be all leaving London around the same time, we'll all be gone by this weekend. So it's cool to have good roommates until I'm done here. I still have nice time to myself though, cuz they all like to go out and party, so it gives me a chance to read Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens :D

Okay, that's been a ridiculously long post, so I think I'll leave it for now. Today I shall be looking up my options for my last week after my tour, checking on costs and stuff, so it shall be a long computer day. Ah well, got nothing but time this afternoon anyways. My only venturing out shall be to dinner later, in an effort to under spend in my last few days.

Love and miss you all!! Thanks so much for all the comments, no joke, they make my day!!
xox Mel