Between Saturday and Tuesday, we saw 4 West End Shows and 1 Immersive show called Burnt City. That’s a lot of theatre in a short amount of time, but this is Margarite’s big birthday trip and it’s not every day she gets to see high end theater. London has a place called TKTS where you can get half price tickets on the day of the show, so this made it somewhat affordable. I think we may have lucked out because none of the tickets were particularly difficult to get. This may have been because of the timing of our trip as it was during the back end of a pandemic. Fewer people are traveling, and the locals aren’t going out as much I guess.
The first two shows (Come From Away and Life of Pi) are detailed in a previous post.
The next show we saw was Back to The Future the Musical, which is exactly what it sounds like…an adaptation of the 1985 movie.
This show was fun and nostalgic, and it had a lot of great effects. The guy who played Doc totally nailed it and it was just a great way to spend the evening.
The next night we got tickets to see “Six”. We kind of pulled this one out of a hat and had no idea what to expect, other than it had something to do with Henry VIII’s six wives.
Well, the only way to explain this one is to imagine if “Hamilton”(the musical) and The Spice Girls had a baby.
It was fun, energetic, and the costumes were great. We had a little trouble understanding some of the dialogue but got the gist. It definitely had a rock concert vibe.
The 5th show we saw was about an hour from where we were staying. We took the Uber boat up the Thames (which cost about £8.95) to the Woolwich Arsenal stop and walked to One Cartridge Place, Home of Punch Drunk Theatre and their immersive play called “Burnt City”.
Punch Drunk is the outfit that put on “Sleep No More” in New York City, which Margarite saw about 6 years ago. They specialize in this sort of non-linear, immersive theatre and you just have to experience it to understand it…although we both came away not understanding much of anything.
Burnt City is a show that combines a couple of Greek tragedies into one, somewhat esoteric story. The set is two buildings with 3 floors and the audience members are required to wear a creepy mask and are encouraged to follow the actors around from scene to scene. No one is allowed to talk, and the actors don’t talk much either. The scenes are performed in 3 loops and which part of the set you decide to observe is up to you. There is a big finale at the end that somehow everyone ends up at.
There are no photos allowed inside, and they put your phone in a sealed pouch that you can only open after the show.
The plot was hard to determine with this show because you sort of watch a lot of the scenes out of order, but it’s a talker for sure.
While we had trouble figuring out who was who and what was going on, the acting was brilliant, and the dancing was equally amazing.
The beauty of this show is that you could go 10 times and it will be different every time (we obviously did not have this luxury). Also, 2 people could go to the same show and have vastly different experiences. We stayed together the whole time, so our experience was the same.
It was an interesting experience and we’re still trying to figure out what exactly was going on.
We would recommend that if anyone ends up seeing this, to read up on the Fall of Troy and Euripides’s play called “Hecuba”. This was the only show we didn’t get half price tickets for, but they may be available through TKTS or the TodayTix app.
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