My 2012 theatre year may only be two weeks old, but it's already given me three mightily impressive productions: Midnight, The Ballad of Halo Jones (both part of LassFest at the Lass O'Gowrie) and The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor (at Unity Theatre in Liverpool).

OK, I have a week off next week and intend, in between catching up on OU stuff, to re-invigorate this site. What this probably means is me deciding to use a new theme, fiddling around with it a lot and not being happy with anything and so reverting to this (at least no-one will get lost). But a site (non-)makeover isn't enough. I need to actually blog some too.

Earlier this year I went to the Birmingham Royal Ballet's production of Cinderella which I adored. I've also been to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and thoroughly enjoyed that. So now Mixing the two, we have... Matthew Bourne's Cinderella.

Set In the London Blitz with an American pilot stepping into the place of the Prince and the Fairy Godmother becoming... an abomination.

The last of this weeks reviews to be written, but the first of the shows I went to see (I'm going to call WWRY "last week"), An Inspector Calls was on at The Altrincham Garrick. I only found out because I happened to see an advert in the paper over someone's shoulder - I really should try an keep a better eye out on the smaller local theatres.

To the cast of We Will Rock You: I'm sorry. This review isn't, for the most part, about you. You got stuck on a dud show and for that I'm truly sorry. One of the people I ranted at about this show suggested I review it, but I didn't want to break the ice with this.

They say that to deliver bad stuff you should wrap it in good stuff - Kiss-Kick-Kiss. So, let's try it... give me a second... errr... um... oh, yes:

The costumes were brilliant, fitting the themes they were representing well and showing off the abs on the GaGa boys beautifully.

Except.

So, March... no, wait, February. I forgot someone. One of the support acts for Ocean Colour Scene was The Moons. I actually picked up their CD I enjoyed them that much. And I forgot about them in my last entry. Consider this me fixing that mistake.

So, in 2009, according to my bookkeeping over at LibraryThing, I have read 60 books (let's face it, I'm not going to finish Black Man, Best Served Cold or Bolo before the New Year party tonight). Of those, 43 were fiction books, 5 were short story collections, 1 non-fiction, 1 play, 5 RPG Books (+one of the short story collections was technically an RPG source book), 2 graphic novel volumes, 1 Firefly reference book and 2 cookbooks.

One of the good things about Twitter Is that I can relegate immediate thoughts to it rather than a full blog post. It also means I can blog on the go via my mobile. It also means that I can use those on the go thoughts to structure a post such as this one about the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Hamlet. So, without further delay I wish to present TwitterExpanded...

yay - I'm going south and the rain's going south... wait... not yay!

Dear Noel and Julien,

I love The Mighty Boosh. I got into it in series one. I have since brought the DVDs and the CDs of the radio show. Lacking a time machine I am however unable to experience early Boosh at the Edinburgh Festival. I did get to see you on your last tour when you came to Warrington and did a fantastic show (now Leeds and sheepshagger are permanently linked in my mind). I was worried when you left the Zooniverse for series two, but it was a triumph. Series three equally good.

So, today was Mother's Day. My mum had her parents over for a trip to see The Reduced Shakespeare Company do The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) and I went along as well. Not sure it was as good as the last couple of times. There have been some changes which were very funny, but they seemed to lose some stuff just before the interval. Also, one of the actors didn't seem able to project his voice very well. Which was great when he was behind a small puppet stage 8-).