The not so amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat

This past Wednesday I went to see my friend Craig in the touring version of Joseph & The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Anyone who needs the background on my friendship with Craig can find it here.

Let me start by saying the show itself is just horrible. I saw this in its original West End run, when it was big, expensive and fabulous. I also remember dialogue making for a coherent plot. The touring version is staggeringly, obviously cheap, all the dialogue has been removed and the songs stitched together into a lumpy, uneven and incoherent whole. The show is aimed squarely at 5 year olds and it even has a pantomime style sing along audience participation finale. Vile. I became convinced about half way through that the permagrinning female ensemble went home of a night and self harmed, the show really is that awful.

Luckily for Craig, he was fantastic. He has a gorgeous gorgeous voice and when he performed Close Every Door, every hair on my body stood up in a most spectacular set of goose pimples. Not least because the bad forced rhyming of "if my life were important, I/would ask "will I live or die?"" was one he decided to ignore and break the line at "important" instead. Much better. I realised as he was singing up a storm that this was only the second time in our friendship I had heard him sing. It won't be the last, as he is now off for a year on the international tour of Mamma Mia! as Sky. It's starting in the UK so depending on where I am at the time, I am hoping to see him in it before they head out to China.

On a baser level, I enjoyed the show because Craig's thighs, which I so readily once wanted to wear as earmuffs, were on display for pretty much half the show. He spends a while in a loin cloth so I got to ogle his chest and his thighs for like an hour. As he pointed out after the show, 10 months performing 10 shows a week dressed like that will make you go to the gym. Delicious. And of course, at one point during his meeting with the Pharoah, he is pushed to the ground and fell in such a way that I got to see right up his loin cloth. Sigh.

Contrary to how the previous paragraph makes it seem, I am over him and love him purely as a friend. Craig has a boyfriend who isn't me and who he loves very much and who, when he returns from a year of singing ABBA to bemused Asians, he will be moving in with. So even if I weren't over him, there would be no point in not being.

In other news, my iPod, an obselete 40Gb, died 3 months ago. I managed to damage the hard drive on it purely by pulling it out of the dock when it was refusing to connect to my iTunes. The other day I found a way to fix it myself though it's a patch job at best. However, to get it fixed properly by a professional will cost £155 and remove all my music. Factor in that the battery is on its last legs and the headphone socket is acting temperemental and I figured what the hell, and bought myself a brand new 60Gb video iPod. In black. Thanks to Senuti, I can retrieve all the music from my 40Gb and load it up to new one, so it all works out. Oh and I got it engraved too. The back will read "But I Always Liked A Good Storm". I really am a Tori Amos geek.