pipsytip’s blog

I can't really think of any other that should be in my top 5 books right now...

Musically I have been listening to wicked, to Sunday in the park with george, tah dah by the scissor sisters, little shop of horrors and jekyll and hyde.

Immersed in musical theatre me?

I went to see Wicked at the Appollo Victoria on Friday night.  It made a really good impression on me at least.  We had some luck ingetting the tickets as a poor guy was trying to sell his as he had a family emergency and had to go back to canada so Phil and I took two of them off his hands.


So the set.  It's a big budget production, lots of flying things in about the stage.  A dragon and impressive backdrops.  The lighting is most effective too.  The Costumes were surreal and fantastic.  I was impressed.

We were pleased to find that Indina Menzel was performing that night and we got to see her and Helen Dallimore in the roles of Elphaba and Galinda.  Miriam Margolyes and Nigel Planer were fab.  It it always exciting to see the orginal casting for a musical and I know that seeing Laura Michelle Kelly as Mary Poppins was all to me.  Indina played Elphaba on Broadway so it was really special seeing her in the West End.

The Choreography was excellent and more dancey than I was expecting the show was also extremely funny much much much better than the book which I thought I would like and in fact totally hated.

Go see this show its well worth it.

I like something that slags off greco-roman gods :)

Labyrinth is a beefy novel of some 600 plus pages.  It is one of those modern novels where there are two narratives and it flits back and fourth between them.  I like that kind of thing which is good.  It starts in the present and we find Alice at and archeological dig and she stumbles across an old temple with a labyrinth on the wall.  We then are exposed to some time slipping and we meet Alais (the i should have a double dot but I can't do it so imagine it ok?).

The novel is rich and complex there are many similarities between ALice and ALais that the reader is left without a doubt that they are linked if not the same.

What follows is two thrilling stories. I enjoy the historical aspects of Alais' life in 13th Century southern france I actually learnt some stuff about Occitain and the inquisition. 

The one thing I'm not too sure about is the interpretation of the grail.  She uses the same pun as Brown with the san graal and sang real pun. But ultimately in a different context.

Its not a book to change the world but it was gripping and I got all page turnery on it.  Well worth the effort to get through it.