Bath and Stratford-Upon-Avon

My trip to Bath was wonderful! I went with my friends Isa, Meghan, Ashley, and Katie. We went to the Jane Austen Centre for tea and scones, which were deliciously delectable as was the jam and butter. We saw the Pulteney Bridge, the Fashion Museum, the Roman Baths, and the Bath Abbey. The highlight for me was the Fashion Museum: we saw authentic gloves, shoes, and clothes, and got to try on corsets and hoop skirts. The Roman Baths were interesting, but got a little bit repetitive. It also didn't seem like they were preserved very well. It was more of a tourist attraction, but it was still informative. We saw a lot of the infrastructure of the houses, and how the drainage worked. We also learned that the audio tour was narrated by one of our professors at BADA, Christopher Cook, who teaches Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism! We missed out on it, but still it is so cool to know that he did the narration!

On Monday we saw Judgment Day at the Almeida Theatre, which was in this quaint, beautiful neighborhood. The show was fantastic and thrilling. I got chills, which is always a good sign that the show is good. This I think is one of my favorite plays because it deals with justice and redemption...two of my favorite topics. It was about a train station master who "has always done his duty" who misses a train signal because of a woman, and the train crashes because of his mistake, killing 18 people. He and the woman lie about his mistake, and the entire town treats him like an innocent victim, but eventually the guilt of lying catches up to him, and he slowly decays and goes mad as he deals with his mistakes. The execution of the show was brilliant: there were smoke, lighting, and sound effects to simulate that a train was going by, which worked quite effectively. The actors were very seasoned, and enjoyable to watch even when there was silence on the stage.

Classes this week were also good. I performed my emotionally charged Romeo & Juliet scene with Cori on Friday, which went really well.

I learned that my High Comedy teacher, Annabel, is friends with Tim Curry and Hugh Laurie! That's pretty crazy. She was in the Rocky Horror Picture Show movie too! She is such an amazing woman, and has really high expectations for her actors.

We also had an amazing home-cooked meal on Friday from Laura, the BADA canteen chef. She made us heaps and heaps of Columbian food, which was so delicious. She is the sweetest lady, and we all call her our "BADA mom."

On Friday, we went to see "Vanya" at the Gate Theatre, which was this really small, intimate theatre. The show had only 4 actors, each very talented. This show was a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." This was another psychological show, which I am discovering to be my favorite! Afterwards, I got a copy of the script, since it is a brand new play, so I am seeing a future directing project for myself perhaps!

On Saturday, we went to Stratford-Upon-Avon (about 2-2 1/2 hours North of London), where William Shakespeare was born. We saw the house that he was born in. We even saw the room where he was born! We also saw his tomb, which is inside of the beautiful Holy Trinity Church. The entire city of Stratford is very commercialized, but it is still a beautiful, quaint city of shops and memorials. We saw a print of the new painting of William Shakespeare that was recently discovered and donated to the museum.

That evening, we went to The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon to see The Winter's Tale. The show was SO FREAKIN' AWESOME! This is the play with the famous stage directions of "exit pursued by a bear," so everyone was wondering how they were going to pull that off, but they did it splendidly! The bear was this gigantic puppet engineered by two or three men, and the puppet was made out of pages of a book. The show was put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, so they were some of the finest actors that I have ever seen. It was interesting because the production that we saw was the closing performance in a span that lasted months and months. All of the actors still had amazing energy, and gave it their all for the last time! What an amazing show! Greg Hicks who played the lead male Leontes, and Kelly Hunter, who played the lead female Hermione are coming to do a master class at BADA in a few weeks!! I am so excited!

That's all for now, folks! :-)