Thoroughly Modern Millie made for a thoroughly memorable matinee.  I seldom go to musicals despite living five minutes walk from the Playhouse which presents a touring production of a different well known show practically every week.  I went to this one as a sort of by product of my interest in seeing Evita which I saw from a casually picked up copy of their brochure is on next week.  A liking for many of the songs from that show combined with a longheld fascination with Argentina should have ensured my seeing it years ago but for one reason or another I haven't.  Next week I will.

Anyway skimming through the Playhouse brochure I thought an empty Wednesday afternoon might be brightened by Millie, and so it was.  This was a slick, colourful and entertaining show.  Millie is a 1920s girl from Hicksville who arrives in New York determined not a be a star, which is the usual premise of such tales, but to marry well.  Being thoroughly modern it is betterment and self interest not love that will guide her choice. Of course we know from the outset that things will turn out differently.  Naturally there are a few bumps on the way to the inevitable happy ending but we get there accompanied by jazzy tunes and snappy dancing.

I bumped into Sarah (who runs our band) and her husband who were there primarily to see the girl who played Millie because of her appearances on Strictly Come Dancing.  Sorry to say that meant nothing to me and I can't even now tell you her name. I can tell you that she sang, danced and acted sickeningly well.  Jealous? Who? Me?

It was all good but there was one scene I admired above all else.  Her boss, who she is determined to marry but who has fallen madly for her chum is drunk because he thinks that aforesaid chum has dumped him.  Millie and the young man who eventually....well I don't want to give the plot away...are tending to him.  The boss is wonderfully, gloriously and athletically legless.  Millie tries to help him sit down.  The effort that must have gone into choreographing and rehearsing that brief scene is hard to quantify but believe me it would have been a lot, but my was the result worth it.  Side-splittingly funny and I'm not one who is easily pleased by slapstick.

There was a degree of slapstick or at least slapstick inspired acting in The Trial, an opera based on Kafka's satire with libretto by Christopher Hampton and music by Philip Glass.  Modern opera is not to everyone's taste and it can be unlistenable to but this was in my estimation brilliant stuff and a full house at the Kings gave it an enthusiastic reception.

It's played as perhaps more of an absurdist black comedy than is warranted by the novel's bleak and surreal fantasy.  More Chaplin and the Marx Brothers than Kafka would have wished?  Who can say.  Glass's music though has a threatening and oppressive edge that maintains an air of foreboding as a counterpoint to the comedy.  Full marks to this co-production by Scottish and Welsh Opera.