Living the Disney Dream

There is no reason to visit the Caribbean, except the guaranteed sunshine, the jewel blue water, and beaches with pure white sand the consistency of caster sugar. Ok, so there are three really good reasons to visit the Caribbean! However, if you are looking for culture and interesting destinations this is not the place for you.

I’m aboard the Disney Dream - the third, and largest, of the Disney Cruise Line fleet. This is a trip to visit Jeff - the payoff of being apart for so long is the perk of a free cruise. The ship is only in its seventh week of operation so everything has that wonderful new yacht-varnish smell. To be fair to Disney’s unparalleled standards of maintenance it will still have that smell in ten years time.

Disney manages to strike everything right on the nose - the perfect experience for kids, whilst having excellent values, but also a great experience for the adults. The overall quality of everything on offer, and of everything you see around you onboard, mean you feel pampered but without the pretensions that sometimes accompany this type of experience.

I’m on two short back-to-back cruises, visiting only Nassau and Disney’s own island Castaway Cay, both in the Bahamas.

Nassau is, on first look, much like any other Caribbean cruise destination - an excuse for more shopping identical to the last destination. There is a taste still of the old colonial town there with the Government buildings still in use, and the uniforms of the police and army having a familiar look, but there is not a great deal else to see.

By exploring off the main drag a little I managed to find some beautiful, if run down, old buildings. It is predominantly shabby. It could be a quaint place if it didn’t have 10,000 cruise passengers flooding the streets every day, but then without those visitors there is no saying how much more shabby things would be.

There is the upmarket resort of Atlantis  on Paradise Island which I will be visiting on my second stop in Nassau later in the week. I’ll report on the other side of life in the Bahamian Capitol.

Kommilitonen Review

Great review in the Guardian! Click here.

Kommilitonen!

Kommilitonen opened on Friday night. A great night. The Academy Theatre was packed with the great and the good who responded enthusiastically to a fine performance from the students. This is a good piece and I hope it continues to have a life long after the RAM production is finished.

I spent most of Friday in meetings with gratifyingly enthusiastic colleagues from the Juilliard School in New York, who will revive this production in November. We are all looking forward to working with a new set of students on the piece, and also looking forward to a month in one of my favourite cities!

In between meetings I managed to grab an hour watching some of the RAM Bass players in a masterclass with Matthew McDonald, the young Australian Principal Double Bass of the Berlin Philharmonic. It put a big smile on my face! Great stuff.

Birth of an Opera

Today is a special and rare day. I'm sitting in the auditorium at the Royal Academy of Music listening to the Sitzprobe of the new opera 'Kommilitonen'  by Peter Maxwell Davies and David Pountney on which I have been working for the last month.

A Sitzprobe (literally 'sitting rehearsal') is the first time the orchestra and the singers get together to put together the piece musically. It's always an exciting rehearsal because everyone sings their best and you begin to get a real sense of the what the performance will be like after the hard work of stage rehearsals.

In this case it is doubly exciting as no-one has ever heard this piece put together with orchestra. Max's score is complex, layered and very theatrical so the 'birth' we are witnessing this morning is a wonderful event. I can't wait to put singers, orchestra and production together tomorrow.

I've been lucky enough as a performer and director to work on a number of world premieres and it is a great experience. You feel like you are carving stone - creating something which will live on. Of course as a director your physical production will not live on - it will at some point end up in the bin and live only in people's memories. But the music will still be there to be taken on by a new team of artists and performers.

I quite like the fact that our physical production, out theatrical experience, is only for the here and now. We are creating something which has a fleeting life in the ear and on the eye and gone in an instant, but which can influence the brains and hearts of our audience forever. I mentioned a couple of blogs ago that the Director for this piece, David Pountney, ran English National Opera when I worked there as an usher and was responsible for most of my early operatic experiences. My brain and heart were definitely changed by those experiences. It's great to be present as he and Max create a piece which I am sure will have a strong influence on the audience and an indelible impact upon the young performers involved.

For more info about this production read David's article in the Guardian here.