Feast of Fools

Weekendage avec les scums in Oxf! Lunchage, Underworld: Evolution, drinks, Edamame, Yukikaze, the Pacifier. In that order. :-D And lo, Underworld 2 is so mind-numbingly cheesetacular that it's awful close to coming out the other side of so-bad-it's-good to become bad again... Did like the CG transformation sequences though (until the budget clearly ran out halfway through and they were reduced to men in furry werewolf suits going 'rarrr'). Also contains a sex scene which rates a seven on the Matrix: Reloaded scale of gratuitous awfulness O.o

And we went back to Ivan's and successfully got Helen hooked on Yukikaze *squee* I'd forgotten how much I love it! It's so beautiful and all the jargon is correct and and and... yes. *cough* Love makes planes shiny. That is all.

Also the Pacifier, which I rather enjoyed even if nobody else did :-p I like Vin Diesel, I can't help it.

And then hoooooooooome again on Sunday and straight back out the door again for Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall. We ate at the Cafe Consort beforehand, which was surprisingly nice by the pretentious standards of such places, although the service speed left something to be desired for a pre-show restaurant in a concert hall.

And yay, Alegria! This is the show I always wanted to see, but only CdS' relatively new stuff has been touring the UK for a while - Quidam and Dralion in the last couple of years. And it was loverly. The look was rococo birds, for want of a better description. Birdsong playing in the background, gigantic ornate cage and bird swings above the stage, and everyone was in a sort of feathery rococo music-hall getup with masks and velvet tailcoats and inside-out crinolines (you know, with the basket outside the skirt?) and such. There was a one-legged angel in a ragged trenchcoat who must've come directly from whichever Neil Gaiman story he was starring in.

Highlight for me was the Power Track dance/tumble troupe, where they built camouflaged trampolines into the stage so you could never tell when it was going to be a standard somersault or when they were going to boing fifteen feet into the air and do a triple :-D

The sync trapeze were also great, and the Russian bars were just wonderful - they didn't miss a step for the whole act, which may have been unusual considering the wideness of their grins at the end. Possibly the best bit, however, was the snowstorm, where they suddenly turned a huge fan on the audience and created a gigantic storm of tickertape 'snow' and dry ice which filled the entire Royal Albert Hall. I'm going to be picking tickertape out of my clothes for a week. ^__________^