Theatre Adventures!

Guten Tag! It is the most gloriously beautiful Sunday afternoon and I am still in my jammies :D. The sun is out *flail* and it is a whole 14 degrees outside. TWO DIGITS! This is very warm, although I opened the window and promptly shut it because cold air started coming in :P BUT with the clear blue sky and lovely warm sun streaming in the window I can almost pretend that it's summer :)

So. EPIC THEATRE RECAP! It all started on Wednesday night when I went to the Opera with Elizabeth and Amberly. The Opera house is in Stuttgart city, so we met at the main station for cheap student dinnerfoodz.

Bratwurst in a baguette! Only two euros and it's pretty much the same as a hotdog at home :P Except the mustard was the spicy kind, which I really wasn't expecting.

Anyway, we were seeing Carmen in French with German subtitles. It turns out that it was some weird modern interpretation of Carmen, so even though we could mostly understand the German subtitles we really had no idea what the hell was going on onstage. There was this weird dude dressed as a pregnant frog with flippers, and he sort of stalked around looking weird through the whole show, and there was a tv with an eye on the screen just sitting in the middle of the stage.

This is the view you get for 8 euros :P Student tickets ftw! We could only see half the stage :P But it was still really fun and a good night out. When it had finished and we'd gotten out of the theatre Elizabeth realised she had eight minutes until her train went, or she'd have to wait another 45 minutes for the next one. So we raced to the train station and just made it. Once again, I missed my bus by two minutes and had to walk up the hill to get home. I got home at about 11pm, and went straight to bed because I had to go to school the next day.

Thursday was Tanz day! I yawned through my classes, then hung out in the computer lab until 4pm when Josie's class finished. Then we both caught a train to the theatre to get there by 4:30 in order to beg student tickets. We ended up with 29.90 tickets in the dress circle, and since we were there so early we bought tickets for the backstage tour. It was so awesome! They gave us each a clove of garlic before it started to protect ourselves from Vampires :P We got to see all the epic set pieces just sitting around in the wings, and the dressing rooms, and the girl talked a lot about makeup and the costumes and how much all the lights and stuff cost. Some of it I could understand because I had a point of reference, knowing the show pretty well and also knowing a bit about how theatres work. I think Josie had no idea what was going on. It was really funny when we were in the wings, because the lighting people started warming up the lights, so they were making all the wirry noises and stuff. Nearly the whole group started peering around trying to see what was going on, but of course there's nothing to see. Then later they all laughed at some dude that was warming up his voice in another room. I suppose there's a lot of stuff that seems normal to me that these people would have never seen before. BUT I never realised that the tracks for the set pieces were epic holes in the stage! There's a good inch gap between panels on the floor, which would make any sort of dancing, especially in heels, pretty damn dangerous. I just never made the connection that the stage tracks would actually be tracks cut into the stage :P

When the tour finished Josie and I went and got something to eat, then the doors opened so we went to spend all our monies on merchandise! I got a program and a mug AND a vampire rubber duckie! My first thought was "why...?" and then I remembered the whole bath theme :P Anyway, I just had to get it to go with my Jewish rubber duckie from the Jewish museum in Berlin.

Naaaw aren't they cute! I've decided to name the Jewish one Chagal, and the Vampire one Herbert. Herbert is going to bite Chagal so he becomes the Jewish vampire :P The theatre we were in is the Palladium, the same one Lana saw Wicked in, way back when she did her epic world tour. It's part of a big complex with a cinema and cafes and shops and stuff. Just outside the theatre was a bar with musical themed cocktails. I ordered the Vampirblut!

The cocktails weren't as potent as back home, there was only vodka in it, with lots of juice. Still yummy! In front of it is my Knoblauch!

LEMON PEN! I couldn't resist putting it with the lime and the orange from my drink :P When I'd finished it was time to go into the theatre. EXCITEMENT! The dress circle was almost empty, so we had no one sitting around us. I flailed a lot, I'm sure Josie got sick of me. Once again everyone was taking flash photos of the set and being told off by the ushers. I'm more practised at sneaky photography and got this one:

SQUEEEEEEE!!! *EPIC FLAIL* I was so excited. When the overture started I nearly wet my pants, but then I started missing Sophie so much and wishing she was there with me because Tanz der Vampire is one of her most favourite musicals :( Our Sarah was a bit weak in my opinion. She just wasn't very strong which is unusual because you can't say they hired her for her dancing because there's a double for all that. All Sarah does is sing. But ohmygoodness Graf von Krolock was sex on legs with sparkles. HE WAS SO AWESOME. He'd just stand at the front of the stage and sing all sexy and stuff being all ~scary and he'd just flick his fingers slightly and make his shadow on the curtain all vampirey and awesome :D At one point I could barely sit still because the ensemble came into the aisles of the dress circle all dressed up like the count with the awesome cape and they sang at us *dies* The whole show was so amazingly brilliant and awesome, but I really wished we could have gotten seats in the stalls, because I wanted to see them all running around, especially when Alfred runs away from Herbert. OMG HERBERT! I have so much love for Herbert :D

Anyway, once it finished I made my way home. Three trains that didn't connect very well, so I had to wait around in the cold, then once again I missed my bus by five minutes and had to walk up the hill. I think I made it home just before midnight, then had to be up for school again on Friday. I packed an overnight bag and took it with me, since we were going straight from school to the train station.

Here's bunny all squished in my bag :P We caught a 2pm train to Mannheim, then swapped onto another train for the rest of the way to Bochum. We arrived at about 6:30pm with an hour and a half to find our way to our hotel, check in and then get to the arena. After studying all the train and bus timetables posted on the wall, we decided to catch a taxi. We stopped at Maccas for foodthings, and I learned that "McMenu" means meal. Who would have ever guessed that? Stupid word for a meal. It's everywhere too, a meal is a menu. Whatever. Anyway, the taxo only cost 6 euros, which split three ways is cheaper that a bus ticket and a lot more convenient :P We stayed in a real hotel, not a student hostel. It was so different! We felt out of place in our fancy three star hotel :P

Finally it was time to go to the arena for Starlight Express!

Yay! We went in, picked up our tickets with no fuss, then straight to the merch stand! I got a program, a calendar and a mug, and was very proud of myself for asking for it all in German. Then the guy switched to English and told me he was putting some information in English into my program. Gah. Our seats were right on the side, just above the second race track. the main action happens at the front of the arena, and around three blocks of seats that are sunk into the floor. The ushers are all posted on the stairs, and every time there's a race an extra barrier goes up and the ushers have to put up the barrier in front of every set of stairs.

This was our view to the right, where the track was around the seats. To the left was the main action and epic moving set pieces, but it was in darkness and none of my photos came out :( There was a huge moving turntable bridge dealie and ramps and stuff that these two guys wearing inline skates did epic stunts on. They also did big jumps on the second track right in front of us :D The other characters all wore normal rollerksates and didn't do super epic stunts, just danced and stuff :P It was really awesome, but more like seeing a production of skaters on ice or something. It was more about the tricks with the skating that the story or the music. I was a little disappointed with that, but I suppose it's just the nature of the production. This particular production has the most skating and the most tricks just because they have a stage built for that exact purpose. Most productions of Starlight Express prefilm the race scenes and the skating is a secondary novelty thing. It is also very dated. The equipment and techniques and everything is very eighties :P I'm pretty sure they haven't updated any of their technical equipment. I'm wondering how much longer it has to run. It was a pretty empty audience for a Friday night, and there were a whole group of young people sitting around us that didn't want to be there. I have no idea why they were there. The guy sitting next to Josie had a lighter and kept flicking it on and off which was VERY ANNOYING and the girls behind me were chatting the whole way through. Honestly Germany, I am not impressed with your theatre etiquette.

So after the show we walked back to the hotel and went to bed. We had intended to sleep in, but that's actually really hard to do when you're not used to it and you're in an unfamiliar bed. I woke up at 7am and just dozed until 9am. We dawdled along and eventually checked out and got a taxi back to the hauptbahnhof. The fancy hotel breakfast was too expensive for us, so we found a little backery cafe in the centre of Bochum, which was deserted at 10:30am on a Saturday. After breakfast we wandered around a bit, then hung out at the hauptbahnhof until it was time to catch the train. The train was packed. I ended up standing on the steps between levels with people all around me and my bags to hang onto. Luckily, we only had to stand there for five minutes until the first stop when we transfered trains. We got to Oberhausen with two hours to spare. Catherine had the most amazing idea to rent a locker in the station for our bags. I'd realised that morning that there was no way my awesome Starlight Express bag of merch would fit into my overnight bag, so I'd have to carry it around with me to Wicked :P. But instead we found a huge locker for 4 euros and shoved all our stuff in there. This time there was a tourist information centre opposite the bus stop, so we went in there to ask them how to get to the theatre. They had rubber duckies there too! This time they were dressed as miners. I didn't get one because I had been spending too much money. I'm not sure if I wanna start a collection of rubber duckies anyway!

We got our instructions and got on a bus which took us to an epic indoor shopping centre. We found the food court which was huge, and had to stand up to eat our food. So many people! We wandered around the shops a bit before going across the road to the theatre.

Yay! We went in and picked up our tickets, then bought programs. We were all very good and didn't buy useless merchandise, but I already have a whole stack of Wicked merch from Melbourne anyway :P It's only been two and a half years since I saw Wicked in Melbourne, but it seems like so much longer. So much has happened since then, it's so crazy! I've barely thought about the show since, but watching it again brought back how important it was to us. It was pretty much my soundtrack to 2006, which started out the best year of my life, and ended up being the worst. But I still really enjoyed the show. It was good seeing it with just some actors playing characters. On Broadway and London and Melbourne it's all about the stars in the lead roles, Elphaba gets a huge round of applause when she enters, but it's because it's the actor's entrance. In this production she just ran on and it was part of the action. I really liked that. I think part of the reason Wicked became so Hollywood was because of the hype over the actors. People didn't come to see the story of the witches of Oz, they came to see the actors.

The theatre was really weird. It had no circle. Where we were was around the stalls, but just raised slightly and tiered, there was no balcony whatsoever, but there was space for one. The auditorium looked sort of flat. Also, one thing I must say. DO NOT BRING YOUR SMALL CHILD TO THE THEATRE. IT IS NOT A PLACE FOR CHILDREN. DO. NOT. DO. IT. There was a girl who was only about four or five years old sitting behind me kicking my seat and complaining to her mum the whole way through the show. That is just too young, she should be restricted to performances of The Wiggles or High Five and stuff like that. Wicked is not a children's show. I can understand Starlight Express, not Wicked. Even Starlight Express is pushing it. Children should never go to the theatre. They don't understand and they don't appreciate it.

I've just been going back over Lana's blog from when she was in Stuttgart, and I seem to have the opposite reaction to everything! She thought the production of Wicked wasn't as good as Australia except for the main roles, but I thought it was really good. I suppose a lot can change in two years. The cast is completely different for one thing, and I think a lot stronger. Lana thought the coffee was amazing in Germany, I think it's absolute crap, Lana thinks theatre tickets were so much more expensive, I think the top ones are priced about the same as Perth, but you can get way better cheap seats :P The exchange rate has gotten a lot better since 2009 :D

Anyway, after the show we had three hours until our train left, so we went back to the shopping centre which stays open until 8pm. We decided we wanted icecream for dinner, so we did :P Then we wandered through the shops and eventually got some real food. I had the most amazing chicken burger with some miscellanous sauce of awesome. Eventually the shops started closing so we headed back to the station. We were waiting on the platform when I decided that I wanted 70 cent vending machine lollies. I stuck a euro coin in and it ate my monies! I was so upset! It just took the money and didn't register that I'd put any in. I chucked a mini tantrum, because I wanted the lollies dammit! I pretty much pouted the whole way home, except when I fell alseep awkardly in my seat.

We arrived back in Stuttgart at 12:40am, and started heading towards the night buses when Josie's host father surprised her. He had come to pick us up! He dropped Catherine and I home as well, which was really nice of him. I was home by 1am, when I just fell into bed and slept in this morning. Today is a lazy day, probably my very last one because next weekend I'm off to Vienna, and the week after my course finished so I'm off to Wales and London and Paris and Amsterdam, then I fly home! Only three weeks left. It's gone so fast!