Five Shows in Four Days

 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. 

Nerding out at the British Museum

 One of the things Margarite was really looking forward to on this trip was visiting the British Museum. 

On our way there we came across some kind of television shoot right next to the museum. We couldn’t see any actors, but we think they might have been shooting “Ted Lasso.”

Not so fun fact: The British Museum houses more stolen artifacts than any other place in the world. 

Despite it’s lousy reputation for refusing to repatriate anything back to its rightful owner, The British Museum is one of the largest in the world and far be it for us to judge. We went to see history, and its vast collection did not disappoint.

The museum is known for such artifacts as The Elgin Marbles, the Sutton Hoo Mask, and The Rosetta Stone

 but nothing could prepare us for its outstanding collection of mummies and sarcophagi in the Egyptian section. These were absolutely jaw dropping!

Margarite fancies herself a history buff so when we came upon the Standard of Ur and some of the El-Amarna letters, she just about fainted. 

 To be able to gaze at the actual correspondence between Kings and ancient Pharoahs was just awesome. In this case it was a letter complaining that the Pharoah had sent along an unsatisfactory dower for the King’s daughter.

We spent hours there, and came to the conclusion the there’s no way we were going to be able to see the whole thing in one day. We would just have to come back. We’ve got no problem with that!

Getting around and Fitzrovia…a great area to stay in London

When we first booked our trip, we wanted to stay in an area that was walking distance to the British Museum and the West End theatre district as those were two of the things we knew for sure we were planning to do. 

We settled on a cute little AirBnb in Fitzrovia, just north of Soho. 

This has turned out to be a fantastic choice. The area is safe, near the Goodge St Tube station, and there is a grocery store just around the corner.

Fitzrovia at 6 in the morning (we were still jetlagged)

 We picked a place that had a washer and a kitchen to save money on eating out. A £25 trip to the grocery store is easily saving us £125 on breakfasts, and probably more if you consider that we feed ourselves so well in the morning that we often don’t  need to eat lunch. 

We are probably 2 tube stops away from Leicester Square, and two tube stops away from Euston station- the main rail station where you can catch a train to other parts of the UK. 

The Tube took a little getting used to at first, but we quickly got the hang of it. As long as you know how to pay, you’re all good.

When we first arrived, we bought an Oyster card at the airport and put £20 on it. 

We ended up putting another £25 on it later which was just about perfect for our 7 day stay. The Oyster card has a daily cap on how much you can spend depending on which zones you go through. We mostly travel in Zones 1 & 2 so the cap is about £7.70 per day.

 The only day we didn’t use our Oyster Card was the day we went to the Tower of London. That day, we used a single day Travel Card because the National Rail has a deal called 2for1 Days Out. If you buy certain passes at a national rail station and show a voucher, you can get 2 for 1 tickets for some attractions for that day. Seeing as how the Tower of London was about £30 each, it made sense to do a little bit of planning to make this work for us. 

We were able to save about £20 total (the travel pass was slightly more than what the Oyster Card daily cap was). 

Information on these discounts can be found at daysoutguide.co.uk . 

Make sure you read ALL the directions and know what the rules are if you want to do this. Not all passes will work, and in some cases, you have to print out a voucher, which may be difficult to do while on the road.

For our entire stay in London so far, the weather has been perfect. May is evidently a really good time to travel here. There were times we could have walked to the places we were going, but it was nice to be able to just pop onto the tube to rest our feet. We’ve been walking an average of 5 miles a day! Good thing…we have to walk off all that heavy British food somehow!