I did it!

I’m not sure I ever thought this day would come! It is now exactly 350 years since Pepys finished writing his famous journal - and nine and a half years since I started writing mine. Pepys wasn’t a hugely happy man on the 31st May, 1669. He stopped writing because he genuinely thought he was going blind. As it turns out, diligently writing his diary by candlelight had caused terrible eye-strain, so the less he wrote in the coming months, the more his sight improved.

I actually had the opportunity to hold his journals in the Pepys Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. It was incredibly sad to note that, when he started, his writing was small and very neat, but by the end, when his eyesight was failing, it was scruffy and about three times the size.

He wrote his diary for 9 1/2 years, during a hugely exciting time in British history. He personally witnessed the restoration of the British monarchy (and was actually on the very boat which brought Charles II from his exile in Holland back to the UK). He watched countless friends and colleagues die of the Great Plague, then gave us the most vivid accounts of the great fire of London, before documenting the Dutch invasion of the UK in 1667.

I remember hearing an historian talking about Pepys and saying that his diary gave us more colour than any other document of the time and that later decades just seemed that little bit less exciting without his accounts.

Pepys didn’t want his diaries to be read by others. He wrote in a form of shorthand, and used words in Italian, French and Latin to further obfuscate passages which offered lurid details about extra marital affairs.

If you read his official documents and letters, the language is considerably more florid, and, as a result, far more difficult to understand. His diary, by contrast, is plainly worded - adding grist to the notion that real people didn’t speak in Shakespearean tongue. If we travelled back in time to 17th Century London, we’d probably have a far greater understanding of what ordinary people were saying.

The last entry in Pepys’ Diary talks about preparing for a trip overseas. We know that he went to France during the summer of 1669, and sadly, that, whilst away, his wife contracted an illness and died. We don’t know how her death affected him, because, well, there’s no diary. She is buried in Saint Olave’s Church, London, where my Pepys Motet was first performed in November 2010. Pepys commissioned a bust of his wife which looks down on the church from high in the ceiling. It’s a hugely animated image, almost as though the long-suffering Elizabeth were nagging Pepys as much in death as she did in life.

The Pepys Motet was written in Leeds, London, New York and Miami from January to September 2010. It is a 6-movement work, originally scored for forty voices, which were made up of eight individual choirs of five singers, representing vocal traditions as diverse as gospel, folk, opera, musical theatre and early music. One of the choirs came from Trinity College, Cambridge (where Pepys studied) and another was formed of five Royal Navy officers, to represent Pepys’ day job as a Navy clerk. Each individual part is unique, so at times all forty voices are singing separate lines. We recorded five of the movements and performed three live at St Olaves. The last movement was performed in a circle around the audience, which was something of a coup de theatre.

The project genuinely nearly killed me. It’s the most ambitious and complicated work I’ve written in a career which has been somewhat defined by ambitious and complicated projects. We rehearsed during the autumn and I rehearsed each choir, many times, separately - travelling all over London, up to Cambridge and down to Devon often in terrible gales. I’m ashamed to say that I lost my rag on countless occasions! The stress of it all really got to me. The complete insanity of the period is documented in this blog, if you read back.

Three years later, I was able to re-write the piece as a twenty-part Motet which was released as a CD. It’s still one of my proudest achievements. It’s a highly quirky album, which is unlike anything you’re likely to have heard. And if you don’t have a copy, you can download one at all the usual places, or buy a physical copy on my website.

The final movement of the Pepys Motet includes the last, somewhat wistful, words which Pepys wrote - exactly 350 years ago - which I will quote almost in full because this date feels like such a milestone for me.

“And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know...

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me! May 31st, 1669. S.P.”

I would love to take this opportunity to thank all the singers who loyally came with me on the Pepys Motet journey, some of whom like Abbie and Michelle, have become friends for life. Out of the Pepys 40 came the Rebel Chorus who recorded the London Requiem and the Four Colours EP. This composition genuinely changed my life.

You can hear the last movement here (definitely one to listen to on headphones to hear all the sonic detail. Read the text, close your eyes and listen to the words whizzing around... )

This is me with the actual diary in 2010... seems like such a long time ago

Quizzical

I ran a quiz in the city tonight. I am trying to be a lot more careful with the jokes I crack, as the modern day culture of political correctness has made it very difficult to generate humour about, well almost anything. Broadly speaking, if you so much as mention a minority group in the present climate, someone will misinterpret what you say as some sort of dig and leap to offence (on someone else’s part.) My favourite ever response to one of my quizzes was when the client accused me of homophobia and antisemitism. The former has happened on more than one occasion. I think I’ve written about it before. The only thing worse than genuine homophobia is accusing a gay man of homophobia. Particularly when you’re straight. And a woman. So be careful you have all the facts before pulling those sorts of words out of your lexicon.

Comedy, and genuinely not taking life too seriously, were some of the only tools LGBT people had in the bad old days. We didn’t have rights. We didn’t have the law on our side. We didn’t get to complain. So we cracked jokes - the more politically incorrect the better. You see the last vestiges of this approach to life on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I was talking to my mate Matt the other day who thinks that we’re going to look back on that particular show in twenty years with our hands over our mouths in deep shock - just like we do with some of those misogynistic comedy shows from the 1970s. I hope he’s not right, but the world is so humourless at the moment that I think it could be the way we’re heading.

I’m pretty sure that gender specific pronouns will be dead in twenty years. Even tonight I found myself choking back the phrase “good evening ladies and gentlemen.” My worry is that there’s nothing polite to replace the phrase with. “Hello, good people,” perhaps? It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I am certainly beginning to know how my Granny felt when I tried to explain to her that Dana International, winner of Eurovision, had been born into the body of another gender. She just nodded a lot, smiled and obviously decided that she hadn’t heard me properly!

I’m with her on the escalating cost of things as well. Just as Grannie used to thrust a few coppers into my palm and say “buy yourself something nice,” because she genuinely didn’t know how much things she didn’t regularly buy cost, I have started to be shocked at the price of almost everything. Train travel is particularly ludicrous as is, as we discovered to our chagrin in the last few months, the cost of rent.

We move out of our beautiful flat in Highgate after fourteen years in June. In order to find a flat of comparable size, our rent has gone up by a quarter and we are two stops further up the Northern Line. It feels a little ludicrous and we’re genuinely not sure we can afford it, but needs must and money has a habit of coming when it’s most needed.

Nathan and I are looking forward to a new home, however. After the continuous flooding, the building work, the thick layer of dust, and our landlord being somewhat cavalier about our suffering, the house has been quite the toxic home of late. We had a gas leak recently, which came as a result of a non-gas-safe registered odd-job man being sent round to fix our hob. The emergency man from British Gas said the leak was 100 times larger than any he’d expect to find in a domestic property and that we were in immediate risk of catastrophic explosion. He also told us if we decided to tell the authorities about the odd-job man, he would immediately go to jail with no questions asked.

It was a chilling and sobering moment!

Let’s start learning from the past

I am very worried about the world at the moment. During the night, whilst suffering from jet lag, I found myself watching the BBC rolling news. Every story delivered another little piece in the overall catastrophic picture. The piles and piles of plastic rubbish being shipped mindlessly around the world. Intrusive data collection by multi-nationals. The fact that Nigel Farage’s followers call him “The Master.” The fact that people I love and respect voted for his ludicrous Brexit Party. The fact that politicians are no longer held to account for lying. The fact that Jeremy Corbyn can suspend someone from the Labour Party for not agreeing with him. It’s all hideous.

The world at the moment is starting to resemble the political climate of the 1930s. In this country alone, we have a Hitler and a Stalin and no one seems to be looking at the bigger picture. It suits those on the right to call Corbyn Stalin and those on the left to call Farage Hitler but everyone seems to be blithely ignoring the absolute danger of the person they support. I maintain that Farage is the more dangerous of the two because he’s a single-issue politician with no manifesto, no sense of what he’d do once the Brexit problem has gone away, no checks and balances within his own party and the seeming inability of any of his followers to be at all perturbed when he lies. He’s an unstable, power-crazy, one-man-band and if you voted for him just because you want us out of Europe, then shame on you. Think of the bigger picture. Think what might happen when his thugs realise they’ve got rid of the immigrants and this country STILL hasn’t got its act together. Who will they turn on next? The people who need expensive medication? Trans people who require hormones? HIV people who require combination therapy?

Having come back from America where there’s a definite underclass, where only something like 27% of people with HIV are undetectable, where gun crime is out of control, where trans and gay people fear for their lives unless they’re wrapped up in the safety of a larger city, where middle class people who have paid taxes all their life realise they haven’t paid enough medical insurance to have life-saving surgery. I can see the future away from Europe, and I don’t like it.

We have to start learning from the past, or someone you know and love very dearly will be being marched off to a concentration camp and you’ll be too scared to speak out. Think, people. Before it’s too late.

Invisible minorities

Jet lag is a funny old thing, isn’t it? Here I am at 3.40am, wide awake, wondering whether to try to sleep or just acknowledge that sleep isn’t meant to happen tonight. I’ve just taken a melatonin. Do they work? 

I notice that Felix Klein, Germany’s antisemitism chief, is now advising Jewish people in the country not to wear their kippot in public. The remark reflects the sad fact that antisemitism is, yet again, on the rise, right across the world. 

I suspect that Klein, through his comments, was actually trying to make it clear that there’s a very large problem in Germany which hasn’t yet been resolved. The sad fact is that, in certain communities, Jewish people are not safe. The sadder fact is that all of this is happening in Germany. 

Here’s the rub: Jewish people, like members of the LGBT people, are a largely invisible minority. Unless a Jewish person “presents” as Jewish, by wearing a kippah, a sheital or a mogen David, or emerging from a synagogue on an early Saturday afternoon, he or she has the ability to blend into society, or to use a term which irritates me beyond anything, “pass.” An LGBT person, similarly, is only largely recognisable to others if he rubs society’s nose in his particular affliction by holding hands with another man in public, or dressing and speaking in a stereotypical manner. 

It is, thankfully, becoming more and more unacceptable to tell a gay man that if he presents as gay then he only has himself to blame if he gets beaten up. I used to be told this all the time, to the level that I was sickened by my own innate campiness and even changed the pitch I spoke at to hide my sexuality. I think back to childhood teachers telling me to “try not to lisp” or hauling me up in front of an older group of students and telling me I ran like a fairy. I was banned several times from playing with girls at school and, on one occasion, my mum was told that if I didn’t stop playing with girls I’d end up gay. I have always been proud of my Mum’s response to this little nugget of hideousness. At the time she was a CND activist and said, “I’d rather he were gay than a nuclear scientist!” My favourite part of that particular story, in retrospect, is the fact that, I’m her eyes, the opposite of gay was a nuclear scientist! 

Anyway, the roundabout statement I’m making here is that, time and time again, statistics have proved that people are more likely to show prejudice about minority groups if they don’t actually know anyone from the community that they fear. The people who complain most vociferously about immigration are often those who don’t actually know immigrants. People who routinely post online bile about women wearing the hijab, are less likely to know a Muslim woman. And so it goes on... 

In the fight against prejudice, visibility is crucial, and that becomes a great deal more important if the minority group is essentially invisible. If we don’t demonstrate the breadth of a community, the belief in stereotypes will continue to prosper. People only started to accept gay men when they saw us as more than mini-John Inmans and realised there were as many different types of gay men as there are human beings. 

In my view, the same is true of Jewish people. It became a personal policy, some time ago, to put my kippa proudlyon my head every time I left the house to sing in synagogue. I opt not take it off again until I get back home - or Shabbat comes down (whichever happens first.) As a result of this rule, I’ve been to my god daughter’s birthday party wearing a kippah, I’ve started quizzes, I’ve even walked into a church in Northampton to rehearse Rutter’s Gloria. I do this, not just because if someone’s in the market for having a pop at a Jewish person, I’d much rather they tried it on with me than a young lad who might be frightened, but because it means that people will see me in the kippah, going about my ordinary business, not looking overly religious, and realise that there are all sorts of different types of Jewish people. Religious ones. Atheists. Zionists. Anti-Zionists. Women who like to sit up in the balcony. Others that would rather be rabbis. Left wing Jews. Right wing Jews. LGBT Jewish people. Black, Chinese and Indian Jewish people. Rich ones. Poor ones. Frum ones. Disabled ones. I could go on and on... 

So, in summing up, yes, it may be sensible advice to protect yourself from the ghastly people in society by not wearing the kippah, or the hijab or an AIDS ribbon, but unless people are brave enough to be visible, then society will never change.

So, when you’re wondering why comedian Tom Allen cracks so many jokes about his sexuality, wondering why my husband talks so much about his HIV status, or are tempted to think that Jewish people are rubbing our noses in it by wearing kippot, remember this blog. And remember that open-mindedness can only come if people are brave enough to step out of the shadows. 

London ahoy

LThere really is a ludicrous lack of signage on the New York Subway system. You pull into most stations and immediately panic because all you can see is a dark void and a load of pillars propping up the grimy tunnels. There’s usually very little to tell you where you are. In London, you can immediately see which station you’re passing through. The station names are clearly printed on the eye-catching red, white and blue iconic roundels. In New York, the wording might be on a grubby mosaic or on a little sign attached to a post. There is no consistency, so you don’t know what to look for.

It gets worse, however. Take Franklin Street down in the West Village, where the powers-that-be have made identification considerably more difficult by turning the station into a tribute to the late, great Aretha Franklin. The actual station’s name is written on ornate and very beautiful mosaics, but they’re made from muddy brown and sepia tiles which are barely visible in the darkened tunnels. By comparison, the Aretha Franklin tribute has led to a large number of very official-looking sign-like plaques being placed on the walls which say the word “Respect.”

On my way down to Wall Street I got in a complete tizzy because I was trying to find Respect Station on the somewhat confusing Subway maps! 

We had breakfast in the West Village, at a lovely little cafe called Dante, where I had crispy croissants and Michael had what he described as one of the best-ever avocado on toast experiences. I didn’t like to tell him that Jem had already provided me with that whilst I was staying with him on Wednesday night!

It was boiling hot again, and we decided to walk back to Wall Street via the Hudson. There was a children’s play park down there filled with fountains and all sorts of cool streams and water pumps. I envied those kids so much. I was desperate to dive into some sort of swimming pool.

The hot weather sent us rushing away from the Hudson and back into Manhattan, looking for a shady street to walk down. We ended up in TriBeCa, which, it turns out, is a really beautiful and very quiet part of Manhattan. It’s filled with old warehouse buildings which have been turned into flats and little pocket parks where the New Yorkers walk their tiny dogs - usually dachshunds! The tops of all the buildings, which are normally six storeys high, are covered in the most intriguing-looking roof gardens: little oases of green, which must be wonderful to sit in with a glass of lemonade at the end of a hectic day.

We sat outside a little cafe. Michael drank macchiato and I had a nice cup of tea. The Americans are getting slightly better at serving English breakfast tea, although I did come across some up-himself barista yesterday who told me that my incredibly weak tea had been “steeped to perfection.” I told him to steep it again “‘cus this Midlander doesn’t like dishwater.” He got a bit shirty and started calling me “mate” in a cod Dick Van Dyke “fuck you” kind of way!!

Our destination this afternoon was the Museum of Jewish heritage, which, as one might expect, was a pretty painful journey into the world of the holocaust. There was a wall of photographs of children, mostly from France, who had been killed in the camps. One particular image of a pair of tiny little girls, probably sisters, wearing pyjamas, really affected me. It’s hard to say what it was which drew me so deeply into the picture. It was probably the level of absolute innocence in the children’s faces and the complete incomprehension that anyone could have looked at those two little dots and felt anything other than a deep desire to protect them.

...And then it was time to collect our bags, jump on the E train, and head for the airport. My T-shirt stinks. I’ve only had hand luggage during this trip, so haven’t had enough clothes, and had to hand wash a few things in the hotel. The (tiny) sink didn’t have a plug, so I was doing it all in the shower, and then I couldn’t dry things properly, so now I’m that person that people don’t want to sit next to on an aeroplane. I’m considering buying myself a new T-shirt at the airport because I feel so ashamed!

It’s been a wonderful, exciting, enriching trip, which really feels like it’s lasted an eternity. When I think back to arriving at JFK just a week and a day ago, and eating a pizza slice on 42nd Street whilst heading to Frank’s house in that strange gale, it feels like another world away.

I’m a very lucky man, and I owe everything to the Robinson’s Award, who spotted 100 Faces and gave me this wonderful opportunity. London, I’m coming home.

Dumbo

We went to Crown Heights today to meet one of Michael’s old school pals who’d left England in the 1990s to become a Lubavitch rabbi out here.

Crown Heights is a very low-rise area compared to Manhattan where nothing is less than six storeys high, and most of the buildings are considerably taller. The Main Street, Utica Avenue, is incredibly wide and totally tree-lined. It actually reminded me of some of the roads out in Mile End.

The temperatures were pushing 90 degrees today, and that’s the type of heat that can make me feel a bit panicky. I suddenly noticed how slowly we were walking. Nothing is important enough to hurry in that sort of heat!

We ate in a kosher deli and I had a delicious - if a little stodgy - plate of spaghetti. Michael’s friend, Haim, was very lovely. He arrived with two of his children who were as good as gold.

After eating, Haim took us to the main shopping street for the Brooklyn Lubavitch community, which is called Kingston Avenue. It’s got a lot of charm to it. It feels quite run down and tatty - this is not a wealthy community by any means - but I loved the fact that shops were blaring Klezmer music out onto the streets and all the posters and shop signs were in Hebrew. It reminded me of Washington Heights (if you swapped the Latino community with Jewish people.)

It’s the sort of highly orthodox area where you hear a lot of Yiddish being spoken and the men are almost exclusively dressed in black and white, with homburg hats and big bushy beards. The women all wear sheitals (wigs.) They take great pride in them, and I’m told some can cost up to £2000. 

This area is known as quite a hot spot for tension between the African American and Jewish communities. There were actually quite devastating riots here in 1991. The police were apparently so overwhelmed that they actually decided to withdraw from the area and let the two sides continue to fight. They have subsequently apologised for this decision.

We ate doughnuts on a step and watched the world going by. 

We took the subway down to the East River, at the point where Brooklyn looks across at the bottom most tip of Manhattan. We ended up walking along the most wonderful and quiet little road called Joralemon Street which is lined with mid-Victorian, brick-built, characterful houses. There are trees everywhere, and all the houses have little front gardens which the residents have filled with fragrant flowers. There are cafes with massive windows selling vegetarian food and speciality coffees and, nearer the river, the houses are covered in clapper board.

The Brooklyn pace is more relaxed and much slower than Manhattan’s. People sit by the river on benches and wooden deckchairs, quietly contemplating the view, and many of the piers have been converted into nature reserves and sculpture parks.

The wonderfully-named DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is the brick-built, gentrified-industrial, triangular area of Brooklyn underneath the roads and train tracks leading away from Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge. No film about immigrants in New York would be complete without a sequence shot in DUMBO. If it weren’t for the throngs of tourists, ice cream vans and flea markets, it would be a magical and highly atmospheric location. As it stands it’s rather similar to Camden Market: lots of warehouse spaces selling artisan shite at vastly-inflated prices.

We went back into Manhattan en route to Queens for dinner with Ian and Jem. As soon as we pulled into the first subway station on the island, everything became frenetic again. An announcer on the tannoy system was blowing a veritable gasket, trying to get us to listen to what he had to say. You’d think we were being round up to be shot! It’s clear I’m getting older because I find the high-octane pace of Manhattan less exciting and increasingly irritating!

As we pulled into Jackson Heights, a storm started. Just a few drops of rain turned the air into thick soup. We exited the subway and walked out into a world of exotic Latino fruit and food stands, all nestling underneath the shabby subway arches. The most amazing smells of barbecuing meats, curious spices and caramelised peanuts blended with the evocative aroma of the first drops of rain on a hot summer’s day.

By the time we’d reached Jem and Ian’s the rain was falling heavily, and by the time we’d sat down in their living room, it was absolutely tipping it down outside.




Dinner was with a lovely crowd of Brits, Aussies and Yanks, and food was, as usual for Jem, delicious. Top marks have to go to the coffee and chocolate cake which was coupled with cream into which Jem had folded mixed berries doused in rum.




Heading home in the sticky, muggy air was a bit of a trial but we changed trains at 42nd Street which is on the 1 line, and therefore air conditioned, so everything improved enormously!

Choral services and corsages

We went into the village for a meal with Cindy last night. She chose a lovely little vegetarian restaurant on Thompson. She was a little late, so Michael and I ordered starters. I opted for a vegetable soup which was placed on the table almost as soon as I’d asked for it, in the style of the old Stock Pot restaurant on Old Compton Street where they used to want to get you in and out as quickly as possible. High turnaround meant larger profits.

My problem is that I’m not a huge fan of eating alone if I know the person I’m with is waiting for their food. I feel self conscious and then get food envy whilst they finish. I waited some ten minutes for Michael’s food to arrive and then stopped the waiter and asked if he could take the soup away, keep it warm and then bring it back when Michael’s starter was ready. The man looked confused, “I’m sorry!” he said, “I didn’t realise you’d want to eat together!” It was unquestionably the oddest thing which has been said to me since coming to the States this time. You walk into a restaurant with someone. You sit down with them. And the waiter assumes you don’t want to eat at the same time as them?! Bizarre!

Cindy joined us, and we chewed the metaphorical fat and caught up on at least a year’s worth of gossip, before taking a pleasant stroll around the village to a bar called Pieces where we’d hoped to see a drag show. Sadly the bar was very crowded and very loud. We were all shattered and the queens took rather a long time to get onto the stage. More to the point, they weren’t the finest drag queens I’ve ever seen and because I felt we were in for a night of crude lip-syncing and lame jokes, we ducked out. 

As we left, I was reminded of the time I went to Pieces with Philip Sallon about ten years ago. I had a ball but he was fairly unimpressed. I still remember him going up to the door man as we left and saying “you know what the best thing about this club is? ...LEAVING it!”

This morning we decided to go to an American synagogue to see whether their standard of choral singing could hold a torch to ours, so we ventured to the Upper East side.

The thing which I’ve noticed time and time again since being in NYC is African American people, obviously in deep distress, delivering endless, angry monologues to pretty much anyone who’ll listen. Sometimes the rambling is almost poetic and sounds like freestyle rapping. Sometimes it can be quite frightening. The great sadness is that the behaviour tells you what enormous gulfs there are in society over here. Plainly these folks could do with some help. Plainly they’re not getting it.

The synagogue was very large and rather beautiful. It’s obviously at the centre of a very thriving Jewish community. It was bustling and fairly crowded and no one came over to the two Brits standing at the back of the kiddish because no one noticed we were there!

Sadly there wasn’t a choir - and the chazan wasn’t fabulous - so I didn’t get my dose of spectacular. New West End, in my head at least, can continue to be the greatest orthodox choral service in the world!

We sat under a tree in Central Park, and actually dozed off listening to the susserating leaves and the park-like sounds which don’t change wherever you are in the world. Children laughing. Dogs barking. Mothers reprimanding...

We went down to Battery Park in the afternoon. That’s the bit at the southern most tip of Manhattan where the ferries leave for Staten Island and you can see the Statue of Liberty watching over the bay. Boats full of tourists left every few minutes, helicopters chugged overhead and there were quite a few people on jet skis. None of any of this was appealing, although there is something genuinely iconic about the Statue of Liberty.

We walked along the Hudson, back up to the World Trade Centre and ended up getting horribly lost in the network of subway stations all of which are in slightly different places, serving different lines, but seem to call themselves World Trade Centre. It’s a genuine nightmare. The signage in the stations is terrible. At one point we were in a crowd of horribly frustrated people looking for the E line, literally going round in circles...

We finally boarded an entirely random subway train where everyone was so irritable that a woman who managed to trip herself over on the heel of my shoe stood for some time giving me daggers expecting me to somehow apologise for her clumsiness.




...And then, of course, you get off the subway train in Midtown, and are instantly surrounded by even more fuck sticks, all stopping for selfies in the middle of the street and generally seeming to have no concept of what’s going on.




It was a relief, therefore, to duck into a deli for tea with Christopher Sieber before he performed in The Prom this evening. It’s Tony season, so he’s knackered. He’s not allowed to miss any shows, and every spare moment is spent rehearsing special material for the award ceremony.




On the way to the theatre I heard a woman, rather appropriately, singing Uptown Girl and suddenly started wondering whether the Pet Shop Boys’ dark, sardonic West End Girls was a typically English response to that somewhat perky American song. Seconds later, we walked into a cafe and, just as we sat down, Uptown Girl started playing, loudly, on the radio.




Chris was absolutely wonderful in The Prom. It’s a light, fluffy piece with a shed load of heart about a young girl who wants to take her girlfriend to a school prom, and, as such, it has shades of Everyone’s Talking About Jamie about it. The Americans certainly know how to put a musical together and those old timer actors in the cast certainly knew how to sell a joke and a number. It was a hugely entertaining and diverting evening and the crowd, particularly the younger ones, went mental for it. I noticed afterwards that some of them were dressing like the lead characters and wearing corsages on their arms.




We went backstage afterwards for a quick hug and a congratulations before wending our way back to the financial district, feet aching from all the walking we’ve been doing today.