There's something about the smell in a theatre that makes the onstage magic come alive. I've always loved live performance - there's an intimacy of being able to make eye contact with a performer as the belt out a song, or the possibility that something tonight might go differently from every other night. There's something so special about the gamble that performers and the audience jointly enter into.
After being theatre-less for months now, by a strange fluke it appears that I'm going to be at 3 different theatres watching 3 very different shows over the next few weeks. The first was an amateur production of the comedy musical The Witches of Eastwick. It's quite a dark musical for a comedy, that plays on themes of lust and power... and just what is too much.
This weekend I'm heading to The Globe for Hubby's belated birthday to see Macbeth. We spent the weekend in Stratford upon Avon for our last Anniversary and we missed out on a trip to The Swan due to the floods, so I figured I'd gamble on the weather for an open air production.
And then finally, the following weekend I'm going to toddle along with a group of friends to The Southwark Playhouse to come face-to-face with Titanic: The Musical, it's a show I'm quite familiar with having been in an amateur production last year, but I'm really looking forward to seeing to show done by a professional troupe.
I feel so lucky that I have to opportunity to see these shows. I grew up in Somerset, which was lovely, but it did mean that a trip to a big theatre was a lot more challenging... and fairly limited.
I look back on these times when my theatre options could essentially be boiled down to whatever happened to be on at either Bristol or Bath, and I realise how much things have changed for me by moving East...
