Small Hands

You probably had to be there, but this had me chortling for hours. If you don't get it, count yourself lucky. It's an equation of hatefulnesses. (What an excellent word! How many hatefulnesses do you get for a pound?)

Anyway.

I'm on son-in-law duty this weekend. Tonight was the first of the family outings, with myself, Ian, his sister Bethan and their mother Ann. Ann is into dance and musical theatre, and Bethan and Ian apparently bonded in childhood over Julie Andrews (a blaring klaxon to any parent, I'd have thought), so Ian selected Thoroughly Modern Millie, currently in previews at the Shaftsbury Theatre. As we don't really keep up with the news from Broadway this was a bit of an unknown quantity, but it turned out to be the perfect choice, a real winner of a show. Silly, cheerful, exuberant nonsense of the most endearing kind, it brazenly and wittily reworks the original movie with all sorts of eclectic other source material and comes up trumps. The cast are jolly good too. Definitely one to take the old man to if it's still on next time he visits. And if it isn't, there's no justice -- I give you, for fuck's sake, Les Miserables!

Millie even managed to survive being seen in the same theatre that hosted the London run of Follies -- and my first view of Merrily We Roll Along -- a tough act to follow. Of course, it was also where I saw Rent, and next to that odious pile of prurient, titillating, let's go and pretend we're edgy and with it when really we're reactionary suburban wankers matinee shite, almost anything would seem a masterpiece. But I'd managed to forget that ever happened until a framed poster turned up in the interval bar to relight my ire.

Tomorrow night we're being marginally more highbrow, with the second of this week's pieces by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Rosas, who I've burbled on about before. The first, Small Hands (out of the lie of no), was on Wednesday at Sadler's Wells, a fairly big theatre drastically reconfigured for the occasion into a much smaller oval one. Two performers, one of them Anne Teresa herself, danced to Purcell and to silence in this oval, with some interesting lighting and costume changes along the way. It took a while to seduce me into its rhythm, but in the end I liked this piece a lot. My companions were less convinced. Ian thought it was boring, but also that it was too short -- an unusual combination. If it had gone on for another hour, he felt, it might have won him over as it did me.

The first Rosas piece I took Ian to resulted in a huge fight, and for maybe a year afterwards we grudgingly agreed to go our own ways on the theatrical front and not try to foist our choices on each other. Well, me on him, as it always was. There were, of course, other factors; the piece itself (Un Moto di Gioia, Mozart Concert Arias) was not really to blame. When Rosas returned to London with Fase, I was reluctant to go through all that again, but Ian wanted to come along -- and having done so was immediately converted. He's been a devotee ever since, dutifully trotting along to whatever Anne Teresa brings to town, liking pretty much all of it, sometimes (I Said I) to my surprise.

Tomorrow night (well, tonight, strictly speaking) is the first time with his mother, which is a bit daunting. Ann is no lightweight, but she's come all this way and I always feel a bit responsible for making her sit through things if they turn out to be tedious or whatever. Several times we've taken her to things by people we love who, on that occasion, came up with a dud. And Anne Teresa is unpredictable and uncompromising; while I've never seen a piece of hers that I didn't like, I've seen plenty I would be a bit dubious about subjecting others to.

But everyone has to start somewhere. Time will tell.

And so, no doubt -- blogwhore that I am -- will I.
Posted by matt at October 18, 2003 02:41 AM