Oh, What A Circus

Do you know, I’ve only ever been to one Andrew Lloyd Webber musical? And that’s because someone gave me a ticket. I went to see Starlight Express at the Apollo Victoria theatre. It was rubbish.

This week, however, Evita is in town, and I thought I’d give him (Lloyd Webber, that is) another chance. We scored some tickets for the Saturday matinee performance. We went for a quick lunch at Egmont St Eatery, a new-ish café on (you guessed it) Egmont St. This café had recently taken the award for “best burger” at this year’s Burger Wellington competition – I’d even eaten the burger in question during Wellington On A Plate – so I was looking forward to trying it again. I asked the waitress if this was the same award-winning burger, and she told us it was its “little brother”. It was, to coin a phrase, a tasty burger. It had everything you want in a burger, and nothing you didn’t. In the spirit of Burger Wellington, I washed it down with a Hapi Daze from Garage Project. Mmm, tasty. Nicola had a cheese and ham toasted sandwich.

We were just across the road from the Opera House, so a short walk took us there, where we met up with some of Nicola’s fellow chorussers, who had got the tickets for us. And we settled back to watch and listen.

You probably know a couple of the tunes – Don’t Cry For Me Argentina and Oh What A Circus. The rest were fairly standard musical fare in a variety of musical styles from classical to latin. The story follows the rise of Eva, her marriage to an up and coming army colonel, Juan Peron, and her subsequent career as the first lady of Argentina. At the end she dies. The musical ends very abruptly at this point…I was expecting a big finale (no matter how inappropriate that might sound), but there isn’t one.

We emerged blinking into the sunlight…ha! Afternoon performances will do that to you!