"Oh, Lady Esmerelda patronises everything!"

As promised, today we are blogging only about nice, happy, pleasant, non-murderous thoughts, feelings and events.


The above image demonstrates a number of things, for example, it demonstrates why I have no money. It also demonstrates my oddly slightly pink stained fingernails which are the result of wearing nothing but bright purple nailpolish for a month or more, but I digress, for what I'm actually attempting to to demonstrate here is that I have lots of theatre tickets and quite frankly if I keep going at this rate the Queensland Performing Arts Centre is going to have to erect a rather large plaque in my honour at some point in the near future since I'm probably matching the government dollar for dollar in funding their operations... or at any rate I've probably funded at least a week's supply of toilet paper. So here's the quick run-down on what we're seeing, with, of course, the promise to update on exactly how good they all were at some point after the event.
Keating!, presented by Company B - a political musical which according to the glossy promotional leaflet QPAC sent me about a month after I bought the tickets is 'the musical we had to have' which will apparently 'tear through the reign and tragic fall of the 'Placido Domingo of Australian politics' while 'transporting you back to a time less politically grey'. For those not in the know, Paul Keating is a former Australian Prime Minister who won what was considered an 'unwinnable' election in 1993, before being most fantastically defeated by John Howard in the 1996 election. He also has the irrefutably brilliant achievement of having had referred to John Howard as a 'desiccated coconut'.
Next up presented by Opera Queensland we have Rossini's The Barber of Seville, a "real" opera, by the standards of the kinds of people who care enough to get upset by people who think that by having had been to see Phantom of the Opera that they have in fact been to the opera. It fits my criteria for a "real" opera as well - extremely long with probably quite a ridiculous plot and in a language I don't understand. I'd love to try and explain what it's about from the synopses I've read, but I'm not really sure that I understand it myself... in any case, I expect that there shall be a barber of some description in there somewhere.
Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands is up next. For those not in the know, Matthew Bourne is most probably best known for casting male dancers in the role of the swans in Swan Lake, which has been praised, criticised and probably not cared greatly about most likely in equal amounts. Edward Scissorhands, is, of course, based on the film by Tim Burton, about the inventor's unfinished creation, Edward, who has only sharp shears of metal for hands who is one day visited by the Avon lady who takes him home to suburbia where he finds a wild and wonderful world of gardening and dog grooming awaits.
Finally, (well, at least until I flip out and buy another couple of hundred dollars worth of tickets) we have Queensland Theatre Company's production of the The Importance of Being Earnest, which we are going to basically on the principle of (a) since I'm under 25 the tickets were really cheap, and (b) Queensland Theatre Company aren't putting on any Shakespeare this year, so we may as well go and see this since it is of a general classic nature.

Right, and if you read all of the way through that, I applaud you! (As the extremely lame one man comedy act on a horse at the exhibition one year said as people left the stadium following the conclusion of the interesting entertainment, 'could you all please clap on the way out so I can say I received a standing ovation?') For further information, including summaries which may in fact somewhat actually reflect what will be carried out upon the stage, I direct you to the qtix website.


By the way, the title quote is an in-joke for Discworld readers... Maskerade being the book you should be referring to if you absolutely have to know.