London, day 1

12 February 2009, 16:30

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, and I am sitting in Westminster Abbey, waiting for a ceremony in his honor. I think this is nine kinds of awesome. But it is bloody COLD.

My hostel in London is just down the block from Southwark Cathedral, home of the John Harvard Chapel and a particularly sparsely attended RCS tour concert in 2006. After arriving from the airport and checking in, I popped in to Southwark to see if there were any visiting choirs I could go support, but sadly, there are none. Unless their pubmen are slacking. I gave a hello to the Harvard chapel and got trapped in a noonday prayer. At least I didn't get trapped in the dressing room this time...

I walked along the bank of the Thames for the next few hours. I love listening to people talk as they walk past - there's so much variety in British accents! Even within the London accent. I can't place the accents, of course, though I'd like to pull a Higgins and write out speech patterns in IPA, but at least it is in my ear well enough now that I can hear the variance.

I spent a couple hours at the Tate Modern, which is my favorite modern art museum. Granted, I'm only comparing it to MOMA, but I can only enjoy MOMA ironically. Outside, a street musician was playing Bolero on a steel drum, and if you bear in mind that Bolero's sole reason for existence is as an exercise in orchestration, you'll gather the silliness of the arrangement for solo steel drum.

After a couple hours at the Tate (favorite piece: Roy Lichtenstein's vamp on Monet's haystacks), I continued down the embankment till I hit the London Eye, the big ferris wheel. Now, I'd meant to do my Doctor Who tourism all in one set, but hey, there I was. So I ran across the bridge to the Parliament side and stood by the Royal Air Force memorial and imagined that the blue-ish smudges on the pavement were from the TARDIS. ::shame::

13 Feb 2009, 15:00

Evensong was lovely, and afterwards we huddled around Darwin's grave for a wreath-laying and some words. From there, I was expecting a public forum on Darwin and (vs.) God, so I made my way through the cloister to the event.

At the door, a vicar was checking names on a list. Odd. My name wasn't on any list, but he let me in anyway. At the next door I was handed a glass of wine. Also odd. With a little investigation I determined that this was actually a book launch, invite only, and the debate I had in mind was actually in May. Ah well, might as well enjoy a book launch!

I had a lovely chat with an archivist of Darwin's letters. The whole evolution/creationism divide that stirs up so many emotions in the States is, apparently, quite unknown in the UK. The book being launched, "Darwin and God", was the first on the subject to be printed in the UK. She asked me why the fuss that's risen at home in the last few decades, and I could only guess at the causes. Reaction to increasing secularization of public life? Political rise of the Christian right? An exceedingly potent production of Inherit the Wind? Or perhaps Americans really are, on this as well as a host of other issues, rather a bit stupid.

A waiter came around intermittently, re-filling wine glasses, and I had to actually keep a close count this time, as I had the rare occasion to invoke my "# of drinks < # of hours slept out of previous 48" rule. A good rule, and a rule that should probably go without saying, but on such occasions it can be quite necessary.

However, the rule only works to prevent disaster - it is not an efficient safeguard against standard issue poor-decision-making. And, oh, did I make a poor decision.

You see, I accidentally went to a musical. How does one accidentally see a musical? Let me tell you how one accidentally sees a musical. One accidentally sees a musical by walking through the theater district. Alone. At 7:30. With nowhere else to be. Tipsy. That's how you accidentally see a musical.

It was Dirty Dancing: The Musical.

I have seen some pretty bad theater in my time. I don't mind bad theater - I mean, I DO, in that it is a frustrating loss of time and money, but often you can learn as much from seeing it done wrong as from seeing it done right. And Dirty Dancing really is a promising candidate for musicalization, whatever your feelings on the film itself. Cult following + strong clear emotions + intrinsincally theatrical subject matter + period setting = musical.

However. Dirty Dancing: The Musical was not a musical.

There were no original songs. But it wasn't a jukebox musical either. Convention would be to put contemporary popular tunes into the mouths of the characters, but Baby and Johnnie never sang. So they danced their emotions, right? Well, they did dance... to the songs in the movie soundtrack... but they never danced outside the "we're practicing for a performance" context. And yet, it had a musical book. This was a libretto that someone wrote before finding a composer and lyricist, and then decided that composers and lyricsists are totes overrated, and staged it without 'em. Dirty Dancing : The Musical is a musical. Just someone forgot to write the songs.

I left shortly after intermission.