This map of San Francisco is in the foyer of the W Hotel – not a place for the budget traveller, but then again, very little in that city is! When I was there last year, my backpacker accommodation cost me more than I’d pay for a mid-range (or better) hotel in most cities. In…
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Mar
If you saw my show The Sound of a Social Climbing Nun, you might suspect that I am a little obsessed with musicals. I’ve asked some unbelievably important questions about them. If you click on a question, you’ll get the unbelievably important answer. Why should Eliza Doolittle have married Mrs Higgins? (And why did Mrs…
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Mar
Fun Home was the first of three Broadway musicals I saw in 27 hours last August. The ‘Fun’ stood for ‘Funeral’ and the plot centred around a closeted gay man who commits suicide. (No spoiler there. It was mentioned early on.) It’s since finished its New York run, but is on tour in the United…
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Mar
In 2007, my friend JJ and I went to the Victoria area of London to see Billy Elliot. nearby, Wicked was playing at the Apollo Victoria Theatre. We didn’t see it there because we went to the Broadway production a few weeks later. Last September, I was passing the theatre, and it was still on….
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Mar
It didn’t take long to work out what show to see last night at the Adelaide Fringe with my old friend Justin. ‘Livvy & Pete: The Songs of Olivia Newton-John and Peter Allen’ at the Garden of Unearthly Delights leaped out of the program. I expected Michael Griffiths and Amelia Ryan to sing beautifully, and they…
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Mar
My friend Rebecca (plus her friend Linda, who’s now become a friend of mine as well) and I have kind of started a tradition of going to Original Joe’s restaurant after baseball games in San Francisco. I say ‘kind of’ because we’ve done it twice in less than a year. The second time, it was…
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Mar
The Australian newspaper has described La La Land being wrongly named as the Best Picture winner as the ‘worst blooper’ in the history of the Oscars. But was it? The Academy Awards have caused some wonderful things to happen. Jacki Weaver never looked like making it in Hollywood until out of nowhere, her chilling performance…
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Feb
The Falklands (known in Argentina as Islas Malvinas or Las Malvinas) are an archipelago, roughly the size of Wales, largely sheep farms, about 550 kilometres east of the South American mainland. They never had an indigenous human population, though there were, and still are, plenty of penguins. In 1982, the United Kingdom and Argentina fought a…
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Feb
