rain and regents

Today was particularly rainy. I don't know what's going on in London this year, except that it's London and it's supposed to be rainy. But it's more rainy than usual. El Nino? Today was drizzly and then it was really wet and then it was drizzly again. I don't mind it, and some of the students love it, but I can't handle it longer than a few days. I got stuff to see, yo.

We met up with Mark Oram at Nando's Chicken Factory on Gloucester road. It's a restaurant, not an actual chicken factory. Mark is a former student who is now studying at my alma mater, Exeter. He's in London working with his theatre company, Grassroots Shakespeare UK. I'm proud of how much he's done and I'm impressed with his vision and ambition. He's coming back to Utah this Fall and I think he's going to be a great asset to our local theatre community. We broke bread together, or, in this case, broke chicken together. And we had a good talk.


Next we all went to see Being Shakespeare at the Trafalgar Theatre. This is a one man show that takes the famous "seven ages of men" speech from As You Like It, and breaks down Shakespeare's life into these seven ages. It's very clever. It's also a little pedantic, and tough to stay awake through if you're well fed and at a matinee. Simon Callow is amazing. My chief memory of him is his skinny dip in A Room with a View, but turns out he's been in more than that. He's an incredibly talented actor. As he moved through Shakespeare's life he also morphed in and out of several characters from Shakespeare's plays. It was really an impressive performance.

I know it's probably inappropriate to put pictures of other people's kids on the internet, but I walked behind this baby for about a half mile on my way to the theatre. And I want to eat it! I want to eat this baby!

I said a few furtive prayers that the rain would let up in time for us to have dinner in Regent's Park, and the Heavens obeyed. The rain stopped and everything in Regent's Park was green and moist. That's right, I said moist. I was going to say "lush," but who uses that word? Anyway. We all ate our sack dinners around the Triton Fountain and played our traditional game of Silent Football. Greg was the captain, and he was fair and judicial. He also pulled no punches, and I appreciate that in a captain. I tried to sabotage Daniel, but it didn't work. And Zoe almost lost for just being Zoe. In the end, Josh lost and had to ask a stranger how to get to Regent's Park, even though we were standing in the middle of it. Josh took his punishments.

Also, a madman with a wandering eye attacked me while I was having a nice conversation with Robbie.


And later we stumbed across....A MURDER!

We realized, just before entering the theatre, that we had tickets for Friday's performance at Regent's Park instead of Thursday, a small detail that I hadn't bother to check on the tickets. Whoops. Never done that before. So suddenly our evening was wide open. Our solution was to rent bikes near our flat and pedal through Hyde Park at dusk. Which turned out to be so much fun, and such an adventure, that I don't know why we've never done that before. There we were, a group of thirteen on flashing beach cruisers, dominating the bike paths and circling the lakes. We took a break at the Serpentine and told funny stories, and then finished a loop around the park just as it was getting dark. Really a fun and memorable night. Robbie said it reminded him of this.

all's well that ends well

We started our day with a matinee of All's Well that Ends Well at the Globe. Actually, we started the day with class. But mostly class is me talking and balancing my laptop on a narrow television while the students eat cocoa puffs and pretend to listen. Hard as I try, there's not a lot of exciting things about class, except every once in a while someone confesses a deep and terrible secret, or Daniel tells us about ice skating disasters. But back to All's Well.

This is a really tough play. I saw it a few years back at the National, and I admired it then. It's hardly ever performed because it's basically about a really awesome girl who spends five acts chasing around this total tool she has a crush on. So it's tough for the audience, because you want her to move on to somebody a little more her equal. Someone who will actually love her back. But she doesn't. And then she tricks him into marrying her, and tricks him into sleeping with her, and tricks him into giving her a ring. Romeo and Juliet it ain't. But the National seemed to pull it off, and this year the Globe did as well. Somehow they made us care about this relationship between a charismatic, intelligent young woman and this frat bro she's stuck on. The play was funny, fresh, and surprising. And it's always wonderful to watch plays at the Globe, especially when you can lean up on the stage. Half the fun is the audience. There was a woman who kept flashing her underwear (don't ask - she was old) and a bunch of English schoolkids in uniforms that I accused of being from Hogwarts. Also there was a lady in the audience who looked like a ghost, except for her blood red eyes! I wish I had a picture so bad. You'd see what I mean. Spooky! And funny.

We had dinner afterwards at Leon. They make really great box meals for folks on the go. We weren't really on the go, but we had box meals anyway.

Our next destination was the National Theatre to watch a show called The Mill which was described as a "mind-boggling show performed entirely in a giant revolving wheel suspended above the ground." Sound exciting? I'm sure it would have been! It was rained out. But our sadness turned into sheer joy as we realized we were 25 feet away from the premiere of Horrible Bosses, the new film starring Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, and Jason Sudeikis. All of whom we saw in incredibly close proximity. I don't think I'm all that giddy about stars generally, but whoo boy. I sort of freaked out. Bateman sped by, all 98 lbs of him, but Sudeikis came over for a little chat and took a picture with Morgan. Aniston got by far the loudest cheers, and they whisked her by us pretty quickly, but she was kind and said hello while we jumped up and down like frantic monkeys. This is London. Something falls through, something else pops up. In this case, A-listers. (Look closely. In the crowd behind her are Jaron and Cherie!)
This was proved a second time tonight as seven of us headed to Holborn Station to catch the Richard III ghost tour. When we made it to the station it was raining out of control. Pelting rain. We waited for Richard under awnings and watched people slip and slide all over the streets. Kind of fun, actually. I also had a great chat with Jaron Hermanson, a student I've always liked but never known really well. We sat under a Costa Coffee overhang and talked about life. In the end, Richard III never turned up, though he claimed later that he did. But we were determined to do a ghost walk, so I led one of my own. More of a ghost pub crawl, but whatever works.

Here at the Two Chairmen pub outside Trafalgar we took our phones with ghost apps into the supposedly haunted bathrooms. I didn't get much, except sweet relief at the urinal. We felt that the ghosts may have been uncommunicative due to the Michael Jackson loop on the jukebox.

Darkness had settled in by the time we hit the Silver Cross in Whitehall. We gathered in a back corner table and avoided the waitstaff. We weren't really buying drinks and the kitchen was closed. So we were basically squatters. We huddled around a big oak table and told stories of dark shadows, cackling laughs, and spooky basements.

We ended the night at the Patisserie Pompidou just up from Embankment. I had a pizza. Everyone else had hamburgers or crepes or basic varieties of pompidou. That's code for "I can't remember what other people ate." We found the restrooms here to be spooky as well. Greg and I heard a mysterious beeping! But the scariest story at this stop came from Aubrie, who told us of a terrifying female coworker in sweatpants and frizzy hair who wrote love poems to her and loved slasher movies and bought her a teddy bear dressed like a soccer player. That story took about 45 minutes, but was worth it! And was clearly the scariest of the night.

theatre history

Today was a reunion of sorts with Richard III, who led us on our ghost tour three years ago. I didn't specifically book Richard for our theatreland walking tour today, but we were assigned him and I was thrilled by that. Richard is pretty amazing as tour guides go. He's funny and dramatic and knows how to tell a story. Nobody can punctuate a legend the way he does, and nobody else has the same talent with pause and effect. He's awesome. So funny. Richard walked us around the West End and gave us London Theatre History 101. We learned about fires, Shakespeare, ghosts, and Nell Gwynn, King Charles II's mistress who called herself the "Protestant whore." Richard, if pressed, will tell you what he thinks of current plays running (hint: he hates most of them) and will do impressions of the leading actors. He loves to go to the opera, but hates all the operas he goes to. He's in a perpetual state of curiosity and snark, and there's nobody quite like him if you want to walk around Covent Garden. We had a great time.

After this we were left to our own devices. Many of us headed back to Covent Garden, since Parliament was covered by a mass of international media for the grilling of Rupert Murdoch. It was exciting to be just blocks away from where Rupy was getting a pie in the face. London is never boring.

We stopped first at the Angel & Crown pub, one of my favorites. I had my traditional bangers & mash, though most of the students opted for a half plate of fish and chips. Greg ordered a "full man" plate, and proudly ate it. Zoe, as you can see, is suitably impressed.


After lunch we headed back to Covent Gardens and went our separate ways. Greg and I visited Benjamin Pollack's toyshop, a non-stop source of inspiration for me as a director. I love toy theatres, and I really love Punch and Judys. But today we were fascinated with these snow globes with naked babies in them. Naked babies standing up. I wondered if, when you shook the globe, the babies put some clothes on, but the salesman reassured me that they didn't. They just stand naked in the snow. He then took the globes out of the case and told us all about them, explained why they are such big sellers, and informed us that they carry white babies and black babies and (in a whisper) "we've got a couple of Chinese ones." We also had this conversation:

Me: But naked baby snow globes are so creepy!

Him: Yes. Creepy sells.

Me: It looks like the baby is about to walk.

Him: Yes! They are full of potential.

Tonight we saw The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre. This is the second time I've seen The Cherry Orchard over here, and my hat is off to anyone who attempts Chekhov. People always say that Shakespeare is the Olympics of acting, but I think it might actually be Russian realism. It's so talky, and there's no action, and everybody talks about going to Moscow but nobody ever goes to Moscow. That's a giant preface for me telling you that this was a fantastic Cherry Orchard. It was a new adaptation by Andrew Upton, Mr. Cate Blanchett himself, and it was so funny and thoughtful and sad. They hooked me from the beginning and held me - I didn't even notice the interminable discussions. I was really amazed that Chekhov could be this interesting, this fresh, and this beautiful. Kudos to Zoe Wanamaker, Claudie Blakley, and Conleth Hill for their fantastic performances.
To balance out our evening of high art, we all took the tube to the High Street Kensington McDonald's. And no one apologized for it! The best part of this meal was that the ice cream machine went on the fritz and soft serve kept coming and coming. They couldn't shut it off! It was exciting to watch. Also, we caught the "murder" tube home. But that's a story for another time.

woke up in london yesterday

Everyone showed up just fine today, so you can breathe easy. I certainly did. I always spend the first half of day one anxiously watching my phone and craning my ear to the window for any sound of luggage rolling and thumping down Manson Place. I check murder reports and kidnapping files. I eagerly rotate through airline websites for any news of disappearing planes. But there was no need for that. Everyone showed up at various levels of grogginess, and they settled into Flat 15 with relative ease. Once everyone had unpacked we trekked around the corner to the fancy new Waitrose grocery store, which now eliminates the need for that crappy old Tescos with their gross sandwiches and their outdated credit card machines. We've moved on, Old Brompton Road Tesco!!! We ate our lunch on the steps of Flat 15, and at one point Zoe confessed her feelings for Casey just as he emerged from the front door.

Today is twofold: get to know your hood, and stay awake. Both involve walking. It wasn't long into our walk that the drizzle hit. We ducked into many doorways and stoops, but eventually crawled our way through South Kensington. Past the museums, past the LDS church, through Hyde Park, on the #9 bus to the High Street, and onto the tube to Gloucester Road. With a less enthusiastic and peppy group a little drizzle might be a challenge, but this group seems determined to enjoy everything, including their umbrellas. And the drizzle comes and goes, so it's not too bad. At least Hyde Park is bright green this year and the flowers are incredible. This is why.

We broke for lunch and I had a traumatic dinner experience at Cafe Nero. I went in to get a quick panini, and I grabbed a ham and cheddar. It took a while to grill up, but i didn't mind because it's always worth it. Unless you accidentally grab a fish sandwich instead! Which is what I did. Which is what I basically choked down. I know it seems ungrateful when so many people are starving, etc. But seriously. Fish sandwiches? So gross. I got past it. It was my mistake.

We reconvened as a group and walked through downtown London, and everyone came with their second wind. The light rain had made the Millenium Bridge slippery, which the group took nice advantage of.

Sadly, we found a dead pigeon near St. Paul's.

But on a lighter note, Daniel rescued a dying pigeon near the Tate! It's the circle of life.

We took a little break at the Founder's Arms pub and had hot chocolate, and then we moved on down the river. The river walk was fairly quiet tonight, which made our walk even better. We could spread out a little, stop for pictures, and there was no competition for the giant green furniture at the National. Trafalgar Square was similarly empty, which is really a nice surprise. That place is usually a madhouse. So we had a really pleasant walkthrough. We stopped at the haunted spot in St. James park and you better believe I pulled out my Android ghost tracking app! We huddled under a tree and communicated with a ghost called "Fred" who didn't have much else to say. I bet you think I'm kidding about all this.

And then I realized I had done my job. I kept them awake. They were joking and having fun. But most importantly they were alive and in the most amazing city in the world. We came home and everybody crashed. I assume. I didn't see it. They are probably all still awake over there, chatting on facebook and eating gummi worms.

ships ahoy!

There's not a lot to report about the Gatwick Express, except that it seamlessly takes you from Gatwick to Victoria station, and everybody falls asleep on it. It's a smooth ride and you are only disturbed once by the ticket taker, who, in this particular case, was the skinniest, creepiest Filipino on record. I made it safely to Manson Place - my third year staying here - and set up my space in Flat 2. I've stayed in this flat before - it has a very Hobbit kitchen.

I was preceded in London by Daniel Whiting, Casey Price, Jaron Hermanson, Robbie Pierce, and Heather Murdock. They were eagerly awaiting me next door in Flat 15. And by eager I mean their eyes were closed and they were in bed. But eventually Daniel roused them for a day of adventure. My goal is always to fight jetlag by staying constantly busy. It's an uphill battle. We didn't have anything planned so I presented three options:

1. We could go see Pericles in the park.

2. We could go look at some shops I read about where you can buy stuffed zebras and grand pianos. In the same shop! Real zebras!

3. We could go to Greenwich.

Everybody picked Greenwich. I was fine with that, since it has been over five years since I've been there, and I've always wondered why it wasn't very exciting the first time. But first we stopped at the Kensington Creperie, since it's the best creperie of all time and I'm not exaggerating. And we had some amazing food and some awkward service, but you always do there. They do not split checks, fyi, unless you want to split it for them. And you have to use your cell phone because they do not have a calculator. But you don't care about the hassle of the bill, because man - those crepes are amazing. We headed next to Westminster and jumped on the riverboat. I suspected it might be one of those giant floating barges packed with tourists and a guy telling canned jokes with a portable microphone. I was correct! But what I didn't know was that it would also be a Poseidon Adventure! A major storm hit just as we embarked and we feared a) capsizing and b) brief hail. While the rest of the tourists stampeded down below for shelter, the six of crammed under four umbrellas and toughed it out. Possibly the hardest I have laughed in a long time. Something else we weathered was this belligerent Russian man who wore a yellow poncho and found his way into many of our pictures:

90 minutes later we hit Greenwich and disembarked with our sea legs. The weather had cleared and we hit the outdoor market. Mostly it just made us all hungry, but luckily we found the local Greggs - a shop that sells fresh baked goods until they sell out, at which time they just close up shop. We ate baguettes and some donuts called "Yum Yums" under nearby St. Alfege church. Then we headed up a tree-lined walkway to the Greenwich Royal Observatory, a place that Dan claimed was "where time was invented." There's a median line there where you can put one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one in the western hemisphere. It's great, except you have to pay to do that. But then we found ANOTHER secret line which you don't have to pay for. It's less fancy. So it's basically the meridian line for poor people. We then visited the Queen's House and the National Maritime Museum. Here's a photo of me enjoying myself there:When we returned to the boat it had mysteriously already set sail, even though we were right on time. We were not the only ones in that predicament. There were probably about one hundred other people, including a really grouchy lady named Roberta, but we were the only smart ones who ran to get refunds from the ticket booth before they ran out of cash to give back. Thus began an adventure wherein we took a bus. Here's Jaron and me really enjoying that bus ride:

But with the refunds we got from the HMS Titanic we had money to go to Wagamamas, which you better believe we did! And then we walked through town, snapping pictures at and above Trafalgar Square, and riding in a swanky elevator that felt like a nightclub.

there and back again

I always like to start another year of mind the gap, though it's difficult when you have nothing exciting to report. I actually have a lot to report, but most of it is fraught with anxiety and includes a lot of reports about meals and airport shuttles. Don't worry, I'm not sick. I'm just in Denver. Exciting Denver, one state over. By the way, anybody else get the creeps at the Denver airport? Here's why.

The day began at the Provo Airport, which I was more excited about than the actual flight to London. Lisa dropped me off just fifteen minutes away from my own doorstep. The check in line was ridiculously short, and the security was quick and breezy. I could get used to this! But sadly I don't think I'll ever getting used to de-planing because one of the jet's engines wouldn't start. And then waiting two hours so some fix-it man could drive down from Salt Lake. So I missed my connecting flight in Denver, and was forced to stay a reasonably comfortable night at the Country Inns & Suites near the airport. It was not too bad, really, though full of junior high school girls on some kind of soccer team. They were drawing Harry Potter tattoos all over themselves in the lobby. I tried to swim in the pool, but turns out swimming by yourself is super boring!

I escaped hotel ennui for a bit at a nearby Outback Steakhouse. Turns out, eating by yourself is super boring! But I kept myself amused by reading The Hunger Games on my kindle. I may be the last person to read these books. But I like them. I liked eating a big steak and thinking about Katniss & crew starving. I didn't find it ironic at all! Mostly tasty. On my walk back to the hotel an incredibly powerful lightning storm hit. I watched it out my hotel window and talked to my mom on the phone. A few hours after this phone call my grandfather and namesake, Layton Byron Jones, passed away in Washington State. He was 98 and pretty sick, so we saw it coming. But I can't help but think that the lightning storm was his way of telling me goodbye.