Oh, what a relief to be online again! I had so much to catch up on this evening - my mother's internet has been down since Thursday. Turns out they're repairing / upgrading the mast. The lady down the road, who's never off the internet, is in bed with depression.. When I finally psyched myself up to call 3, today - their customer service is the worst I've ever come across and always gives me homicidal urges - they were actually quite well behaved for once, apologised profusely, and said they'd credit my mother's account, and text me when it was up again. We live in hope!
Meantime, I was in despair of getting to The Festival Tent yesterday - the Ennis Gospel Choir concert. Storms are periodically lashing the western seaboard, and yesterday saw a nasty one. (It's every second day this week.) Which was good timing for my flight today, but not so much for the concert. Anyway, it was to clear in the evening, but my mother was dubious. But she needed to go out on an errand, and when she saw how much the weather had improved, she said we'd eat out as well. And after that, when the weather was still calm, she agreed to risk the concert.
Mind you, by the time we parked at Glór Arts Centre, it was raining fairly heavily again, and with a cold breeze was quite unpleasant. We parked quite close, and made our way in. They weren't letting into the auditorium yet, so we sat and had something to drink in the lobby, where there's a bar. Which was fine, until the drummers started. Dunno whether they were officially part of the choir - they all wore "Ennis Street Festival" t-shirts. As my mother remarked later, they had probably been supposed to play outside, except the weather was so awful. Unfortunately, there were about half a dozen of them, with full-size drums, and in that space, it was deafening! Thankfully, there was a room off the side - with a door - to which one of the ushers led us, so that we were somewhat isolated from the racket..
When the auditorium opened, we went in. Now, we generally like Row F, and had booked that - but it turned out that this was so popular that they had added rows, extended some.. so Row F, on this occasion, was not where it normally was! Never mind, we were ok. The crowd arrived late - probably, as my mother later remarked, because they had difficulty in finding parking - and the place was packed. And in due course, and slightly late, the show started.
The choir was very good. However, the material was very unexpected - pop rather than gospel, and not to my mother's taste - although well performed, and with unexpected touches, such as an acrobat for one song. The show title gives a hint of what they were about - the idea was to recreate a music festival. So they had a decoration at the edge of the stage that was meant to represent grass, and was later exchanged for cut-out hands, as if being waved in the air at a rock concert. And there were dancers, who at various stages bounced around the edge of the audience, or made their way onstage. Sometimes they passed out cans of Coke, sometimes glo-sticks.
The quality of the singers was variable, but some were excellent, and it was nice to see lots of different people, of varying ability, given their own solos. But some of the songs involved rotating lights, and even I had to close my eyes sometimes, as I was blinded. What with that, and the choice of material, my mother decided she'd had enough and left a couple of songs before the interval. I joined her at the interval - she'd had another cup of tea, despite describing it as "rotten", and we decided to leave. Sadly, we didn't manage to leave quickly enough, and the drummers had started up again, deafening us as we made our way back out into the weather.
Verdict: enthusiastic, not quite polished, and some things could definitely be improved. Like the lighting, and please, ban those drummers from performing indoors!
Tomorrow should be calmer - I'm heading to the Beckett trilogy, at the Duchess Theatre. Good timing, just before the Tube strike kicks off! It'll make planning the rest of the week more interesting.
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