Fingers on buzzers for today’s culture quiz: name the great American comic writers of the late twentieth century. Woody Allen? Nora Ephron? The teams behind Friends or Seinfeld? Narrow it down to playwrights and suddenly it’s a much tougher question. But like her predilection for spilling her guts to complete strangers, her singing similarly lacks subtlety. The only detectable nuances between numbers is that each seems more schmaltzy than the one before.Looking at the crowd, it is as if all 70,000 of us are engaged in some sort of group hug. Indeed, if credibility was measured in terms of volume and the ability to hold a note, she has no competition. But lest we are offended by her desire to be elsewhere Dion collectively embraces the crowd, referring to us as her “second family”.There is no denying the force of Dion’s lungs.
She laboriously expresses the pain of being parted from her husband Renee, who is at home recovering from cancer surgery but thanks to a satellite link-up is “here with us”. Later on, she rounds off their special song with a sidelong wink at the camera. When she gently pats the heads of her band, positioned like expectant pets at her feet, it might be seen as a display of arrogance except that she seems genuinely grateful for their contributions, and they seem equally appreciative of her praise.
In Dion’s eyes, music is about tugging the heartstrings of her devotees, creating a romantic ambience so that punters will return home with a warm glow in their stomachs, their marital difficulties rendered a distant memory.But it is also about sharing her own feelings. When the Bee Gees appear on the screen and ask how the show is going, you get the feeling that she really believes that they are there, despite the fact that she has been acting out the same charade for the past five nights. The scariest thing about all this is that to Celine, it is quite real. But let’s not complain, at least the weather stayed warm and sunny.Further performances July 17 & 18 at noon and 3.30pm (tickets: 0870 900 0355)..
A MARKED transformation occurs in Celine Dion when she sings. Her eyebrows become earnestly upturned, her face crinkles up and her eyes mist over as though she is overwhelmed by her own sensitivity. Just in case we haven’t got the full force of her feeling, a matrix of giant video screens depict the diva with her head quite literally in the clouds. At the end of each song there is a brief pause as Celine takes a deep breath and visibly floats back down to earth Earth in her case being a huge, heart-shaped stage. There was also quite a lot of marching about and climbing up or down, spread over the best part of four hours, and I did overhear a comment about the shortage of recognisable dance routines.
This proved the afternoon’s most cogent offering: a sort of mimed play about a large black woman dying, agitatedly but I think gladly, among the luggage of her memories, including her younger self and an RAF sergeant who might have been her son.Wallace’s direction made ingenious use of the roof space and its structures for entrances and exits. A pity we had to sit with our backs to the river; but then it occurs to me that on this river adventure we saw the Thames only between items. And so off in our boat further upstream to the South Bank, where the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall provided the site of Noel Wallace’s Inside Out. The choreographer here was Wendy Houston, described in her programme CV as “a unique and original voice” in contemporary dance. That is accurate enough, I suppose, since she is progressively becoming almost all talk and hardly any action.However, she had four acolytes for Feted, who did a few little jumps, pretended to run egg-and-spoon or three-legged races, rolled in amorous couplings, and looked remarkably cheerful even when (perhaps because she recognised how wet the show was proving) Houston had the sprinklers turned on to saturate them.No gifts of feathers here, but a medal for one lucky spectator and flowers for some others. We assembled at Greenwich, where the Painted Hall of the Old Naval College made a grand if gloomy setting for Rosemary Lee’s Banquet Dances with their cast of sixty, from eight-year-old schoolchildren through college students and an “open group” (presumably the PC term for adults) to a couple of sprightly, 70-plus ladies.
Lee set them walking, running, pointing, sitting and sliding on tables, all dressed in white feathers, white or near-white clothes, and for some of the women hoops but no skirts (designed by Pippa Roberts and Sue Davis).At the end tiny feathers were distributed and the performers waved us goodbye as we left for our next adventure.This was a boat trip to Canary Wharf where we were met by someone who led us to a circular garden while describing the delights of the great tower behind it. This series of performances at Greenwich, Canary Wharf and the South Bank is connected by boat.
TAKE ME To The River is subtitled”a dance adventure” – more adventure than dance, I would say. Still, there was a pretty impressive team participating on Sunday afternoon: all ages from babes in arms to pensioners, attractively dressed and rather pleasant And that was just the audience. On rarer occasions, when the house was open, many will recall their hosts’ dignified bemusement as a dozen people stood in his bedroom discussing the ingenuity of Lutyens’s cupboards, or when a visitor announced that Folly Farm was his birthplace, in its guise as a maternity home during the Second World War.Hugh Astor’s stewardship of Folly Farm, for almost half a century, came naturally to him, but his graciousness in sharing his family’s home – which just happened to be an architectural icon – leaves thousands of individuals, and the cause of architectural heritage in general, deeply in his debt.Hugh Waldorf Astor, publisher: born 20 November 1920; married 1950 Emily Lucy Kinloch (two sons, three daughters); died 7 June 1999.. Folly Farm’s glorious garden, tended by his head gardener, Dennis Honour, for over 30 years, was regularly opened for charities and a request to see the garden was almost never refused.Perhaps on some crowded afternoons he was reminded of the “Hever Days” of his childhood, when his father entertained the entire staff of The Times. But during the 1970s Lutyens’s reputation spiralled skywards, and architects, photographers and garden historians from far and wide began beating their path to Folly Farm’s gate.Despite his innate reserve, Astor gave his support to the Lutyens Exhibition in London of 1981-82 and he became a patron of the Lutyens Trust when it was founded in 1985. He bought Folly Farm, in the Kennet valley south-west of Reading, shortly after his marriage in 1950, appreciating it as one of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s most idiosyncratic and enchanting houses, with a marvellous garden designed in partnership with Gertrude Jekyll.For perhaps 25 years Folly Farm was enjoyed by his family and friends, and in the wider context of his role as a JP and as High Sheriff of the Royal County in 1963.
