On the Jukebox this (long) weekend at Dolores Delargo Towers

Jaeger-meisters no more

And so, farewell to yet another British institution, with the announcement that the 133-year-old Jaeger Clothing has gone into administration - hot on the heels of such venerable rivals as British Home Stores, Austin Reed (although its brand was rescued by Edinburgh Woollen Mills, its stores were not) and Aquascutum (bought out by the Chinese).

The Jaeger company was formerly known as Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System, yet over the years developed stylish clothing lines that were the occasional favourites of such disparate fashionistas as Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe and the Duchess of Cambridge; it was certainly always renowned for its sturdy woollens, stylish overcoats, tailored suits and... sexy underwear!



...and bathing costumes.



It was the absolute epitome of post-War style...







...and embraced the oh-so-trendy 1960s...



...with lesbians, apparently.

And now, with a whisper not a scream, the most famous purveyors of the classic camel coat are no more.



RIP, Jaeger (1884 - 2017)

Penises or Penii?

...regardless, there were many of various sizes at Japan's notorious Penis Festival.

Now, that's what I call a good way to start a weekend!

Miss Davis expects...

It is our Patron Saint Miss Bette Davis' birthday today! Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect...



To celebrate, here are a couple of choice extracts from The Devil in Miss Davis, a rather marvellous anecdotal article by veteran director William Frye that was published in Vanity Fair in 2010:

...when Bette Davis decided she wanted to go somewhere, you went. Naturally, we didn’t have a reservation, and [the club] Mocambo was jammed. There was a line of people standing behind a red rope waiting to get in. Bette was no more going to join that queue than fly to the moon. She marched up to the maître d’ and said, “We want a table for two.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Davis, there’s not an empty table in the room. Would you like to go to the bar and wait until one becomes available?”

“No,” she said haughtily. “Put one up.”

Moments later, we were escorted into the main room. Right next to the stage, where everyone could see us, they had put up a table about the size of a silver dollar. As Bette was being seated, she spotted two people at the door who were also having trouble getting in - Esther Williams and her husband, Ben Gage. “Esther! Ben!” she called across the room. “Come join us! There’s lots of room!”

They, too, jumped the line, and two more chairs were brought to our table. We danced and drank until the club closed.

And this [on the aftermath of Miss Davis being upstaged by Miss Crawford at The Oscars]:

Olivia de Havilland became very upset. She said it was terrible that Bette had lost, terrible that Joan Crawford had stolen the night, terrible, too, that the world would wake up the next morning to pictures of Crawford clutching an Oscar and assume she’d won it for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ...

At that moment I made the most inappropriate comment I’ve ever made in my life - the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the wrong person. I still cringe to recall it. I suddenly said, “Well, you have to admit, when Crawford came out on that stage, with that dress and that array of diamonds, she did look like the movie star of all time.”

There was dead silence. Olivia stopped commiserating. Bette stopped slicing bread. I stopped rocking.

“What did you say?” Bette asked, looking up. When I didn’t reply, she came at me with the knife. Pressing it to my chest, she repeated, “What did you say?”

I sat frozen in the rocker, imagining blood dripping down my pleated evening shirt, and repeated the monumentally stupid - but accurate - thing I’d said a few seconds earlier. After another interminable silence, she took the knife away. “You make me sick” was all she said.

Then she went back to slicing bread, and the party resumed. After more drinks, everybody had scrambled eggs and toast. I got home at five a.m. The “evening” had started 12 hours earlier. Neither of us ever mentioned the knife incident again.

There was only one Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (5th April 1908 – 6th October 1989)

"Brek-kek-kek-kek"

Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans - Invocation and Instructions to the Audience (BBC Proms 2010)

From the very opening number, whereby we were instructed: "Please don't fart. There is very little air and this is art", we just knew we were in for a good evening. And so it was, indeed - as a little gang of us huddled into the teensy-tiny confines of the fabulous Jermyn Street Theatre in Mayfair last Friday for not just any old show, but the première of a Stephen Sondheim musical!

The Frogs is not the best-known of the modern-day Master's work, of course. It began as a short art-house-piece way back in 1974, for which Mr Sondheim had merely been asked by its "creator" Burt Shevelove (who "freely adapted" it from Aristophanes, of all obscure sources) to contribute a few songs. It was not a huge success even in those experimental times, despite its semi-aquatic staging (in a swimming baths!), and despite the presence in the chorus of a couple of young gals who were definitely destined for greater things - Miss Sigourney Weaver and Miss Meryl Streep! However, that other theatrical maestro Mr Nathan Lane had other ideas, when he "even more freely" re-worked it (with the collaboration of Mr S, who wrote more songs for it) back in 2004...

We had no water in our theatre of course, but we did have a fabulous cast with fabulous voices, energetic choreography, a (very) quirky storyline and even quirkier score (typically Sondheim: hints of Brecht & Weill, hints of Gershwin and even of Lerner & Loewe in places; lots of staccato and overlapping harmonies) to entertain us. That doyenne of all things arty, Miss Libby Purves [recently treated like shit by the BBC as they axed her Midweek Radio 4 programme after 33 years] (writing in her Theatre Cat blog) has the lowdown:

Here’s the god Dionysus, deprived of his Noël Coward smoking jacket and unconvincingly disguised as Herakles in a lion skin. He’s having a panic attack on a ferry across the Styx while a chorus of marauding frogs sings a menacing staccato and Charon the ferryman sleeps off a spliff. The frogs represent apathetic conformity – “Brek-kek-kek-kek! Brek-kek-kek-kek! Whaddya care the world’s a wreck? Leave ’em alone, send ’em a check, sit in the sun and what the heck?”.

The Frogs

But as the God of theatre, our hero is on a quest to bring back a great playwright – George Bernard Shaw of all people – to improve the world with questioning.

There are many fingers in this mad frog pie. Aristophanes, the Ancient Greek playwright who wrote, for the feast of Lenaia, about a journey into Hades to bring back the dead Euripides. Then Burt Shevelove who updated it to include Shaw and Shakespeare in debate, and Stephen Sondheim who wrote the music and lyrics, and had it performed in the unfriendly acoustic of the Yale swimming pool. Now add Nathan Lane, who fell for it as if for “a little homely rescue dog”, messed about and wrote new bits. And here it is at the ever-adventurous Jermyn.

Rarely have I been in a more Marmite show. A couple left furiously at the interval, not getting it at all: another woman rhapsodised in the interval expressing surprise that they didn’t adore it like her, then unaccountably picked up her many bags and left ten minutes in making the rest of the row stand up for her. Me, entrancedly amused mainly by the Sondheim lyrics, I stayed and enjoyed the character of Pluto the underworld king as a leather queen with a whip, the assorted choruses, and the very funny advent of Martin Dickinson as George Bernard Shaw himself, pompous, emitting his famous epigrams and excoriating the frivolity of Shakespeare and his "Purple patches on borrowed rags".

Dionysius holds it together, the affable Michael Matus alternately alarmed, determined, and nicely gushy as the top Shaw fanboy, praising his “gravity of subject and levity of manner”, which actually describes this whole show quite nicely. The duel of quotations between Shaw and Shakespeare is wonderful, with quite the right winner.

So I enjoyed it, crazy as it is, and the music – piano, woodwind, trumpet and cello, is beautifully Sondheim, and Grace Wessels directs with cheerful speed. It feels more like a clever college romp than anything else, but it is a romp composed by a genius, an eloquent wise clown. For Sondheimites, it has the buzz. Or croak.

For the record, nobody left halfway through the show when we went. Nobody farted to my knowledge, either. In fact the audience was generally, as we were, enraptured.



Like Miss Purves, we loved the interplay between the somewhat effete Dionysus (god of drama and of wine) and his slightly-nerdy slave Xanthias (George Rae) that holds the story together (with some funny throwaway lines such as “Viagra - the god of perseverance”), the humour of the dominatrix Pluto (Emma Ralston) complete with Cage Aux Folles-style fan-dancers, the hilarious Beetlejuice-esque Charon (Jonathan Wadey), and the sheer camp effect of the ensemble cast playing not only the central Greek Chorus roles but also myriad other characters (Chris McGuigan plays both the macho Herakles and a handmaiden to Persephone(!), Martin Dickinson plays Shaw, Nigel Pilkington Shakespeare, Li-Tong Hsu plays "Virilla" the highly-sexed Amazon, and Bernadette Bangura is Dionysus' love Ariadne).

There is a lot to take in in this show, and it certainly is unlike anything else in Sondheim's repertoire (aside from the fact that some of the "hooks" herein sound somewhat familiar to anyone who may have seen his much later Into The Woods). It is definitely not like anything else currently showing in the West End. And for that, we are somewhat thankful.

The Frogs at the Jermyn Street Theatre is now completely sold out, and closes on Saturday 8th April. However, it is definitely worthy of a run at a bigger (not too big, hopefully) West End Theatre, fingers crossed.

Der Mutter Schwur!

It's Mothering Sunday again.

Oh dear! It would appear she's not happy - maybe the card and flowers never arrived..?

Diana Damrau - Queen of the Night aria (Mozart: Die Zauberflöte)

German:	English:
Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her! Fühlt nicht durch dich Sarastro Todesschmerzen, so bist du meine Tochter nimmermehr. Verstoßen sei auf ewig, verlassen sei auf ewig, zertrümmert sei'n auf ewig alle Bande der Natur. wenn nicht durch dich Sarastro wird erblassen! Hört, hört, hört, Rachegötter, hört, der Mutter Schwur!	The vengeance of hell boils in my heart; Death and despair blaze around me! If not by thee Sarastro feels the pains of death Then you will be my daughter nevermore. Outcast be forever, Forsaken be forever, Shattered be forever All the bonds of nature If not by thee Sarastro turns pale! Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, gods of vengeance, hear the mother's oath!

Scary.

Queen of the Night Aria on Wikipedia.

Joan's having a buffet

It's Miss Crawford's birthday, bitches!



...she thanks everyone for her two thoughtful gifts.

Joan Crawford (born Lucille Fay LeSueur, 23rd March 1905)