I love London. My dad grew up there and my family spent so much time there during summer vacations — not to mention my semester at London’s Royal College of Art — that I feel it’s my second home. So, growing up we did most of the MAIN tourist things… so when I go there I tend not to aim towards those sorts of things any more than I would in home Chicago. For me, London is and always has been about theater! (My mom loved theater so much that she often took us to two shows a day, and occasionally crammed in three).

One of the shows I saw this trip was Education, Education, Education

So… I’ve said this before, but in case you’ve not read that post… first rule of London theater, as taught to me by my parents…  is, unless there’s a specific show for which you’re willing to pay full price, you’ll want to start out by going to the Tkts Booth in Leicester Square…. London has a very competitive theater scene, just like New York, so anything showing in a major theater is most likely very good. On the way there you’ll pass any number of store front ticket booths advertising them as THE half price ticket booth… keep walking. None of them are. Their What’s on Sale screen, behind me in the picture above, will tell you what tickets they have that is on deep discounts (usually 30 to 50% off). You can also buy tickets for two days out… so tonight, tomorrow and the next day… but not farther out than that. You can check their website to see what’s available, but you can only buy the tickets at their booth. Half price tickets for the top shows are ONLY available either at the box office doors of each individual theater, where you stand in line on the day of up to time of seating, but with no assurance of actually getting a seat … or here at the TXTS booth. (How do you want to spend your vacation time?) Personally I haven’t got that much time. This way is easier, and profits from the ticket sales at this venue rather (than ending up in corporate or private pockets) go towards the Society Of London Theatre, which supports the theater community in a myriad of ways. (So you can feel good about your purchase).

The Trafalgar Studios, while while being listed as a Grade II English Heritage building, is still a relative modern space by comparison to the Gielgud where I saw Sweat, a theater that like a lot of London is NOT handicapped accessible. The Trafalgar was built in the 1930’s and (as such) has an actual elevator for people with mobility issues. The space is split into two smaller venues that used to house television productions (hence the name studios), but currently tends to house new productions, which if they become major hits are then then moved into larger venues. If you look the picture above you’re seeing all the seating front to back. You can see how the seating was designed to host audiences viewing live TV productions, with a few more rows of seats now added at the very bottom where the cameras and staff used to be located. And it’s a very small space, so viewing is good for pretty much all seats

The show, which only had the suspiciously short run of only a month, was described as a “whip-smart love letter to education in the 90s” that was “jam-packed” with the musical hits of the day … but that said, the show bored me — a MUSICAL bored me (the mind boggles). As a former educator I hoped it would appeal to me, and the girl who sold me the tickets promised it was a very good show… but I had a feeling in retrospect that its the sort of thing that you really have to be British in order to fully enjoy. I wasn’t and found myself getting irritated by the heavy handed cynical tone. I assumed that had been full of inside jokes (but didn’t hear a lot of other people laughing when I wasn’t) that you had to be very familiar with the state of education during the Tony Blair administration to understand well enough to “get the joke,” (he was the UK’s left leaning Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, around the same time as Clinton and Bush Jr.,) as the show kept making references to expected increases in school funding. Upon writing this post I learned that even the title was an inside joke, as “Education, Education, Education” was how Blair had described his priorities when he took office, according to this BBC article, and in fact if you read their article pretty much all the points the show made there. Who knows, maybe everyone else in the theater was also a tourist and as such none of us were getting it, so to speak.