Wonderous Stories

We first saw Rick Wakeman’s Christmas show back in 2018, when it was all piano music interspersed with a few showbiz anecdotes. We should have been going to his “Grumpy Christmas” show last year but rising covid cases (sound familiar?) caused it to be postponed until this year. Now titled the “Not as Grumpy as Last Christmas Tour” it was a wonderful evening of piano playing mixed with more complex sounds on the keyboards. All this punctuated by tall tales and corny jokes! As well as many excerpts from his own works - “Six Wives”, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, etc. - we enjoyed some of the other artist’s classics he had played on - “Life on Mars” and “Morning Has Broken” to name but two. And to cap it all off, various Christmas carols and songs popped up from time to time - who’d have thought you could bridge “Katherine of Aragon” and “Catherine Howard” (from “Six Wives”) with a jaunty rendition of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”!
A great evening and the perfect antidote to the doom laden stories and predictions we had heard whilst listening to the news on the way in. We had to show our NHS covid passes to get in to the venue and there were very few not wearing masks in the audience. And it wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d feared, keeping the mask on for the whole two hours.
We are going to Blackpool to see “Hairspray” tonight (another one postponed from last year!) and, again, this will require masks to be worn throughout the performance. I know of other people who are cancelling their theatre trips this week because they don’t want to risk catching covid and possibly then missing Christmas or passing it on to vulnerable relatives. I understand and respect this point of view, but I honestly feel more worried going to the supermarket than I do going to the theatre! At the end of the day, everyone must decide their own priorities and and levels of risk acceptance, and do what feels right for them.