PeterRS

You really have to wonder why it has taken years and years and years for anyone to think about this! A unified communication strategy is an utterly vital part of all disaster planning - indeed of all planning. Yet every government department and NGO in Thailand seems to think it has a divine right to communicate its own thinking on any issue. Why, of why, oh why will Thailand continue always to go it alone without bringing in overseas experts for desperately needed advice on policy and planning? It's not rocket science!

I did see Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman a couple of months after "Phantom" opened. Crawford in particular was perfect for the role but I have never really liked Sarah Brightman's voice much. I don't know why but I also never really liked the show! The end of Act 1 with the chandelier is a great coup de theatre, and Maria Bjornson's sets were superb. But I found much of the show quite boring, including the first 20 minutes! Interestingly Crawford had also been a boy soprano and appeared in a Britten opera. He was considered for Miles in "The Turn of The Screw" but it went to David Hemmings instead. Yes, I also loved the Robert Wise film of "West Side Story". I bought the soundtrack album and sang the songs for weeks after! Interesting that Bernstein 'borrowed' some small parts of the score from major classical works. He even uses Wagner's redemption motif from his massively long "Gotterdammerung", the last of the four operas in the Ring cycle, for Maria's song "I have a love . . ." I quite like this version from Barbra Streisand's 2nd Broadway album which starts with Johnny Mathis singing the theme. I had been so looking forward to the Spielberg movie. I assumed there would be some updating but had forgotten that the musical is very much of its time with major redevelopments of much of New York's Upper West Side and the Puerto Rican gangs. The music was great but I left the cinema feeling that something had been missing. It always amazes me that "Cats" has been such a worldwide sensation. Neither Mackintosh nor Lloyd Webber thought it would be more than a modest success. Then their usual big investors failed to come up with cash as they believed the show would never get them back even their initial investment. It was only financed by small investors and Lloyd Webber taking out a second mortgage on his home to complete the initial financing of £450,000. Anyone investing in the original production would have made a profit of well over 3,500% by now - and the cheques keep coming!

With all respect, I do think you must be confusing the bar and/or the owner. He was the most pleasant of guys. After dinner at Dick's, a friend and I used to go almost every Sunday for around 18 months until the bar closed. We got to know him well and we never saw him stop anyone from visiting that bar - or even raise his voice at anyone. There was never a show - apart from the semi-pro dancers - so there was no nudity and the bar rarely had more than ten or so customers, some occasionally with cute young boyfriends. We also never once saw him asking for ID cards to prove age. The German owner certainly owned/managed two or three bars. I think I only visited the upstairs one. This was usually packed at the weekends with lots of chairs being added. and certainly had lots of gogo dancers. We all assumed at the time that he was making a mint of money with those bars. Does anyone recall Classic Boys near the end of Soi Twilight? More of a twink bar with a large water tank behind the stage filled with pretty murky water. I felt sorry for the two or three boys who had to swim in it. It was rumoured this was owned by a cop. For a few weeks it had to be closed after a fire in the apartment above. The owner then farmed the boys out to other bars for those weeks, one of whom we met in Solid bar - a lovely young man, beautiful face and body and extremely good English. We assumed he was around 25. Later I learned that he was about 34, married with two kids. Yet he was a fantastic off - as I can attest!

Inspired by @Olddaddy's thread under Gay Pattaya, I wonder if those who have visited Bangkok or lived here have memories of people and places in the city. I have written in other threads about bars in the 1980s and 90s. One character I recall was the Englishman who ran X-Treme Bar in Soi Twilight for a couple of years or so in the early 2000s, a man with a full head of white hair. There was a rumour that he had been associated in some way with the Church of England! His bar never had many customers, but at least he tried something different. In addtion to a small number of actual gogo boys, he hired about 8 dance students to present a proper show with sort-of semi professional-level dance numbers. The problem was that show desperately needed a producer. The pauses between eaeh dance number were far too boringly long. I can no longer recall his name. What I do remember is that his student boyfriend would occasionally come to sit in the bar and he was drop dead gorgeous! When X-Treme closed, the dancers moved across the soi for a while to the German's (can't recall his name either) downstairs bar. I last saw the Englishman in Roxy in Soi 4. I wonder if anyone remembers Khun An who was one of the original lovely bar tenders in Telephone. I met up with him when he went to London for a few years to help a friend with a Thai restaurant. Then he came back and some will recall he became a partner and Head Waiter in the lovely little French restaurant off Soi Saladaeng, La Table de Tee. Sadly this became a victim of covid. Lost track of him now.

I knew he had worked with Britten and performed with him in several of his works at Britten's Festival in Aldeburgh. Britten had, shall we say, a 'reputation' with boys but Hemmings always stated that nothing had ever occurred between them other than as composer and singer. With all your experience of musicals, I wonder which one/s you liked best? Stephen Sondheim's "Company" is almost certainly at the top of my list. I saw it in London with the late, great Elaine Stritch and Larry Kert. A revival of Sondeim's "Follies" in New York is near the top. I loved a National Theatre production of "Guys and Dolls". Unfortunately, we had tickets for the evening after Princess Diana had died. That somewhat tempered our enjoyment. But an earlier NT production of "Carousel" was quite superb, one where an actual carousel is built on stage during the overture. Patricia Routlege singing 'You'll Never Walk Alone" had quite a few in the audience with tears in their eyes. My list would also include "A Chorus Line", "West Side Story", "Hair" and the Broadway production of "Sweeney Todd" with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. Perhaps surprisingly, I aso loved "La Cage aux Folles" with Gene Barry and the incomparable George Hearn - and saw it twice! I had seen the earlier French film and doubted it would work as a musical. I found it gloriously camp, lovingly directed and it has the most amazingly tuneful music by Jerry Herman.

17 years ago I took the wonderful Rocky Mountaineer train from Vancouver to Banff. There was an overnight stop in Kamloops in the mountains, a place I had never heard of. The train stopped around 6:00pm and we were bused to a hotel. A few days earlier I had been checking Kamloops on the apps when I noticed one cute Chinese guy. We got in touch. End result. We spent a lovely quite unexpected evening together at the hotel. Another encounter was in Cusco in Peru. I was there for 3 nights, with a train to Macchu Pichu on my last day. Having flown from Lima at sea level to an elevation of around 3,500 meters, all the guide books tell you to rest for the first five hours on arrival to help avoid altitude sickness. I was suprised to see oxygen bottles at the airport! I read on my bed for a couple of hours and then decided to hit the apps even though I had no intention of meeting up with anyone. I was merely curious. Chatted to one lovely guy who was a student doing part time work in a bar. We hooked up the following day and it was another wonderfully unexpected encounter. Another 'surprise' was to discover that Chengdu is one of the gayest cities in China - at least in respect of the number of hits I was getting on apps. Impossible to keep up with the demand!!

This discussion started with an article - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/31/trump-administration-hiv-research-grant-cuts That you decide to misinterpret it, go ahead! We know your methods.

Seems to be only for American tax payers. Did I miss something? I assuned from the thread title it meant the Thai taxes due to be paid by expats living in Thailand.

The article was nothing about Jakarta. It was specifically about HIV cuts affecting only Trump's own people in the USA.

Of course getting a country's finances in order is one of the prime duties of an eected government, one too many leaders do not take seriously e.g. Britain under the last lot of incompetent leaders. But how does cutting the minuscule budget for HIV research have any effect whatever, other than to make life more miserable for more Americans in the long run? This is more true when you consider that Trump will undoubtedly, as he did in his first administration, cut taxes for the mega rich? So with one hand he saves a bunch of tiny peanuts and with the other he doles out massive amounts of government money which he fails to tax. Wasn't it Warren Buffett who said that his secretary paid more in taxes than he did??? Similarly the cutting off of aid to Myanmar, a country so desperate by decades of a brutal civil war the likes of which the world has rarely seen since WWII, is surely self defeating. Not providing aid for earthquake relief is bad enough when other smaller countries have tried to help as best they can, albeit with no assistance whatever from the Myanmar military government. In the longer term, strategically and historically both Democrats and Republicans have done virtually nothing whatever for Myanmar other than ensure that it is likely to end up in China's camp eventually. Given that it is the fourth largest country in East Asia, that seems exceedingly foolish. A plague on both their houses!

As I have previously written somewhere, this is the height of stupidity! Expats who live here already have to complete an online form not later than 36 hours after each arrival back in Thailand. This requires exactly the same information as the TDAC but has our address automatically included. So in future we'll have to lie about our residence prior to departure for Thailand and then be honest with a different address after arrival. Ridiculous!

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If Trump 2 is anything like Trump 1, Musk will probably be out the door sooner rather than later! 🤣

Why does anyone actually take the time to watch @bucknaway's silly vdos filled with hate speech. it just encourages him. His childishness becomes obvious with the volume of these posts. Just ignore him and ignore them! Children like attention. Don't give it to them and they go away and sulk!

I used to love just wandering along the little paths through the rice paddies hearing in the distance the faint sounds of gamelan orchestras practicing, first on one side, then on another. It was all so calm and peaceful. In the evenings, we'd join villagers for shadow puppet plays or the dancers who put on displays of various dances, including the young boys who danced the warrior Baris Dance. I read somewhere that Walter Spies had choreographed along with a Balinese the wild Kecak Dance. During my first visits, these would involve up to around 100 men. When I returned in 2005, there were perhaps only 30 or 40. I wonder if you remember the artist Antonio Blanco. He lived in a house just across the bridge on the left side amost opposite the Tjampuhan Hotel. I paid a visit to his studio one day and was slighty surprised to see that all his female helpers were naked to the waist. But they were all very beautiful. Directly across that little river was Murni's Warung where I would go to eat quite frequently. Fresh fruit with honey and her homemade yoghurt was wonderful!

I was very surprised that, for whatever reasons, he did not take part in the film docudrama based on Randy Shilts masterful account of the AIDS crisis, "And The Band Played On". Given his star popularity I am sure he must have been asked. Many gay and non-gay actors willingly participated in the filming and helped to bring the AIDS crisis to more and more people around the world. Alan Alda, Richard Gere, Mathew Modine, Ian McKellen, Lily Tomlin, Phil Colllins, Steve Martin and Anjelica Huston were just some of the 'names' who took part. But no Rchard Chamberlain!

I was hooked as a 17-year old on my first visit to London. The hit show of the day was Lionel Bart's "Oliver" but it was sold out. So I got a ticket for his second show "Blitz". I recall little about the production apart from the enormous stage sets and two huge banks of spotlights all round the front of the Proscenium Arch. Until then, lighting units were basically unseen by audiences. The visual effects were amazing. ALW also came something of a cropper when he was casting the show which followed "Phantom", "Aspects of Love". It's a much smaller musical and I consider it one of his best. Unlike others which followed "Phantom", it had a moderately successful first run. But without a producer as savvy and experienced as Cameron Macintosh, he had started his own production company within his oddly named Really Useful Company (frequently renamed The Really Useless Company!) As with "Sunset", for the opening London production he made a weird decision by putting Roger Moore, the former James Bond, into the cast. Like Dunaway, till then I think his singing had been confined to the shower. After "Aspects" had been in rehearsal for six weeks in the Prince of Wales Theatre, Moore himself realised that he just could not sing! "I was having nightmares of the worst possible kind over this show . . . Once we were in the theatre with an orchestra I knew it would be impossible for me to continue. The only polite way out was to leave while there is still time for them to find someone else". At least he did not have to be paid off! His understudy Kevin Coulson came out of "Chess" to take over.

Since not all are on Facebook, can you kindly provide either a screenshot or simply copy and paste into another post.

I managed to see that production of "Anything Goes" at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in New York before Elaine Page saw it and decided with Tim Rice to take it to London. Patti Lupone was the lead at a time when she really reigned supreme over Broadway. I had dear friends living in New York and often they would arrange Broadway tickets for us all when they knew I would be visiting. That afternoon prior to seeing "Anything Goes", they had taken me to see David Henry Hwang's excellent play "M. Butterfly" with B.D. Wong and John Lithgow. Such a pity that John Lone was badly cast in the movie version. But for me, that was an epic day on Broadway! Re Ms. Lupone, you may recall Lloyd Webber's troubles after casting her as Norma Desmond when Sunset Boulevard opened in London. This was to be his new blockbuster show which backfired quite spectacularly. Given its history as an iconic movie, the show's American premiere was actually in Los Angeles instead of Broadway with Glen Close as Norma. Patti Lupone had already opened in the original London production and her contract stated she also open as Norma once the show got to Broadway. However, the producers did not like Lupone's characterisation (frankly, nor did I!) and fired her from Broadway. This resulted in a legal batle in which Lupone allegedly walked away with $1 million. It was then decided that Glen Close move from LA and open the Broadway season. To replace Close, Lloyd Webber staggered everyone by casting Faye Dunaway, an actor who had never sung anything, anwhere! We can teach her how to sing, was Lloyd Webber's refrain. Even as production rehearsals had started, the ALW team were still saying Dunaway would be great. A day or so later they fired her and closed the LA production. Another legal battle ensued with Dunaway walking away with rather nice compensation! Even though "Sunset" ran on Broadway for two years, the total losses on the US productions was estimated by the New York Times to be $20 million. I did not see Glen Close but heard she was excellent. I believe the best Norma was the American Betty Buckley.

It's getting harder for reasonable people outside the USA to have any other than aggressive feelings against the recently elected President. Near Thailand, the cutting the USAID budget has affected hundreds of Myanmar reporters camped out on the border with Thailand on whom the world has depended for months if not years for news of what has been happening re the ghastly civil war in that country. USAID paid their salaries. This started weeks before the present earthquake. Now no more. Worse, The Guardian today has informed us that Trump and his cohorts have made "Sweeping HIV Research and Grant Cuts." This will "decimate" progress on elimiating the pandemic. Let's not forget that in his State of the Union address in 2019, Trump said his actions would eliminate HIV in 10 years -. “Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” said Trump in his address. “Together we will defeat Aids in America.” We all know the man is a liar, a cheat, a misogynist, a narcissist wth a foul mouth and a pussy grabber. Now he adds the dubious distinction of being the man who is likely to increase the prevalence of HIV, at the least in his own country. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/31/trump-administration-hiv-research-grant-cuts

Senior care, as opposed to medical tourism, requires long term visas. Nothing so far leads me to believe that the Thai government is doing anything that would make this any Baht less than the present retirement visas. I have an Australian friend with whom I used to work for several years who has been suffering from Alzheimers since early 2019. It's desperately sad that he no longer has any memory at all but he and his partner live in Chiang Mai. Their combined income is under the Bt. 65,000 per month each. I do not want to intrude on their privacy by asking how they get round the retirement visa regulations. Certainly they could not take the 800K route nor the Thailand Elite/Privilege. Given that senior care for most involves two people, it is wholly unrealistic to expect all to tall under the present financial guidelines. That's certainly true for most in the older generation from the UK and some parts of Europe. Rather than first announce an intention to go after the senior care market, it would have helped if the government had announced how they would make this financially possible visa-wise. But then expecting the Thai government to be logical is a perfect example of the illogic.

I had the pleasure of working with him when he, along with Elaine Page and Colm Wilkinson, stepped in at last minute in Hong Kong for a gala which was aupposed to be with Danny Kaye. Kaye had just had open heart surgery (during which some believe he was treated with HIV infected blood) and had to cancel. Tim Rice manfully took over and presented one of the funniest shows I have heard interspersed with songs by two of the West End's great singers. It was thanks to him that I was given seats for "Chess" for myself and my young nephew and niece. He is a lovely man with virtually none of the ego displayed by many in the musicals business.

Plenty of countries have changed either their names or names of cities since the end of colonialism. Does Fox News still refer to Bombay as Bombay rather than Mumbai - or the tech hub as Madras instead of Chennai? Do they still call Ghana. the Gold Coast? Or Zimbabwe. Rhodesia? Of course they don't. And I'll bet the US government was none too happy with the last two changes either, but they use the modern names! When Barack Obama visited Burma in 2012, he used both Burma and Myanmar in public speeches. In one to students at the Uiversity of Yangon, he claimed, "“one of the things that we can do as an international community is make sure that the people of Burma know we’re paying attention to them, we’re listening to them, we care about them.” He added that the USA was committed to continue to work “very hard to strengthen bilateral relationships so that we can promote progress." Those words certainly came back to haunt him! Given that all of the bar boys will have been born after their country's name change, to call their country Burma could be regarded as wrong! But since the two names sound amost similar in one or other form of the Burmese language, it is unlikely offence would be taken if you use Burma. personally I aways use Myanmar with my partner and his famiy and friends. It is nothing like what happened during British colonisation. The British refused to call Burma by its name of Burma. They called Burma a Province of India and Rangoon a "suburb of Madras". Only as their Empire was about to come to an end did the British use Burma from 1937.

Yes, I know! What has one of the most popular disco numbers of the 1980s to do with Gay Icons? I wonder how many are aware that this song comes from a Broadway musical? "Chess", with lyrics by the chess-loving Tim Rice who in the 1970s had made himself a nice fortune as the lyricist for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Evita" and then later for Disney with lyrics for Elton John’s “The Lion King” and other shows, was one of Tim Rice’s pet projects and very dear to his heart. I saw the musical in its first month in London in 1986. To write the music, Rice commuted to Sweden to discuss it with the ABBA boys, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. They liked the idea. In the view of many, including me, their music for “Chess” remains one of the greatest Broadway scores of all time. 18 months prior to opening, the producers issued a concept CD with the full cast and the London Symphony Orchestra. This raised expectations for “Chess” to a very high level. Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” became a massive worldwide hit in terms of record sales and radio plays, as did the lovely duet sung by Elaine Page and Barbara Dickson, “I Know Him So Well.” Head was well-known to cinema audiences as having been part of the first mouth-to-mouth gay kiss in the John Schlesinger 1971 movie “Sunday Bloody Sunday” when his other party was none other than the almost aggressively heterosexual actor Peter Finch. Sadly for “Chess”, though, internal Broadway feuding and international rapprochement as Gorbachev's star was rising and the Soviet Union soon to collapse, rendered Tim Rice's book and lyrics about a Cold War love affair set alongside a chess match between a Russian and an American all but redundant. It struggled along in London for three years but then flopped spectacularly on Broadway with a loss of over US$6 million. Some years later Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Aspects of Love", his first post-"Phantom" musical, lost $8 million after it too died on Broadway, thus becoming Broadway's most expensive flop up to that time. This was massively eclipsed by the $60 million loss after “Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark” also collapsed in 2017. That sure-fire hit had become a legendary debacle. Broadway can be an unforgiving beast. “Chess” also faced a major problem when a much bigger disaster hit the world. Apart from groups of doctors in New York and Los Angeles, no one thought much about HIV and AIDS when it first started on its train of devastation. As more and more information came into the public domain, suddenly gay men in particular started to fear this new illness for which there was no cure. One who contracted it was Michael Bennett, the hugely successful producer/director who had pioneered a revival of the dance musical with “A Chorus Line”. Audiences on Broadway and in London adored "A Chorus Line". Unfortunately when the movie version was on the drawing board Michael Bennett turned down the role of director when the producers would not accept the changes he wanted from the stage version. So iconic was the stage musical that many established directors also turned it down. It was only when the producers reached Richard Attenborough whose “Gandhi” had recently won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, that he accepted. Many felt this was an unwise choice. A very British director for a quintessentially American musical. The sceptics were proved right. The film version was neither a critical nor audience hit. Tim Rice had loved “A Chorus Line” and was certain that Bennett was the right director to get “Chess” on to the stage. Bennett agreed and started working on casting the show and having very expensive large and unusually tech-heavy scenery constructed. Bennett’s vision was essentially a multi-media show. Some found this odd given that Rice’s book is set in a small Swiss village in the Alps. Then disaster struck. Bennett’s illness had progressed and he was forced suddenly to resign from the production. To take over, Rice was able at short notice to sign the director of “Cats” and "Les Misérables", Trevor Nunn. It quickly became known that Nunn hated the high-tech design, but he had no choice. He had to work within it. The show’s first night had the critics divided. Some loved it; others panned it, mostly because they felt the book was a mess. The undoubted star of the show was the then relatively unknown Swedish singer Tommy Körberg who played the part of the Russian in the chess contest. Audiences seemed to like the show but there was no rush for tickets. Allegedly it was the large weekly advertising budget that kept the show running for three years. For its later Broadway run Nunn was retained, but he had the book and some songs rewritten, the show was recast and it had little in common with London. While the history of “Chess” illustrates the complexity and risk involved in getting a musical from original idea on to the stage, it also illustrates how much the world of entertainment needs musicals. For if Broadway IS New York, now it also belongs to the world. Musicals had always toured internationally, mostly in locally produced versions often quite far from the Broadway originals. When Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up with the struggling gay London producer Cameron Macintosh, though, a new idea was born: cloning musicals. Macintosh realised that audiences in Sydney, Berlin and Tokyo not only wanted to see a hit show, they wanted to see exactly the same show as audiences in London and New York. Thus the musicals' franchise was born. The result: everyone involved in their shows - "CATS" and "Phantom of the Opera" (and let's not forget that Cameron had also produced on his own two other blockbusters, "Les Misérables" and "Miss Saigon") - started achieving profits earlier producers could not even dream about. Some years ago Forbes Magazine estimated Macintosh’s wealth at over US$1 billion – and this was a man who had started his career as a stage hand in one of London’s large theatres with just a dream to become a producer! Years earlier Lloyd Webber had hit the billion mark. Mackintosh was a visionary in more way than one. When he wanted to take “Cats” to Japan, no theatre owner would give him more than four weeks. This was the custom in Japan for Broadway shows and no owner considered a western show like “Cats” might play for longer. Mackintosh and his Japanese partner in the show decided to mount it in a large marquee on a vacant plot of land in Shinjuku. The first "Cats" tent in Tokyo: Photo by Masanobu Yamanoue So successful was it, it ran there for two years. When the landowner decided to develop it, Mackintosh just took the show to Osaka, brought it back to Tokyo and then to various other cities. Now it has not only been seen by well over ten million people in Japan, there is a specially built CATS theatre where it continues to run more than 40 years after its first performance. How those theatre owners must be kicking themselves! Worldwide, “Cats” has generated US$3.5 billion in ticket sales – and that number is still rising. As the relatively recent book "Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway" by Michael Riedel illustrates, the relationships between theatre owners, producers, directors, PR teams, performers and critics have usually contained far more drama offstage than on. Perhaps less so in its beginnings during the Great Depression when all audiences wanted were bright lights, glitz, glamour, chorus girls - and more chorus girls! Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II changed all that. When the curtain went up on their first collaboration "Oklahoma" in 1943, the audience literally gasped, for this show and four others that followed from the same team transformed the musicals' genre from musical comedy to serious musical theatre, with real story lines and real people living all but real lives. A string of great musicals followed, starting with "West Side Story" by the gay quartet of Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), the book by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein's gorgeous music and stunning choreography by Jerome Robbins. Others included "My Fair Lady" and "Fiddler on the Roof". Soon thereafter the Dance Musical came to the fore with the brilliant - and gay - Michael Bennett conceiving and directing "A Chorus Line" and David Merrick producing "42nd Street". But as if in a flash Broadway itself was threatened by one of the world’s mega-disasters. The sexuality of those on Broadway has always been the stuff of gossip. The distinguished British actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft once said, "Of course I knew Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye were having a long-term affair. So did all of London. So did their wives. Why is America always the last to know?" Perhaps it's the Puritan streak in America that encourages people to look the other way. Those who faced up to reality knew full well that Broadway and the Broadway musical had always relied on gay men and women for its success, and the toll of those who died in the early years of AIDS was horrifically high. It was not just the male dancers and the dozens of boys in the chorus who were dying by the week. Directors like Michael Bennett, actor Tony Richardson, Joe Layton ("Barnum"), song writer Peter Allen, Larry Kert who played Tony in the original "West Side Story" and the lead in Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”, lyricist Howard Ashman, choreographer Michael Shawn, publicist Frank Nathan, set and costume designers - the obituaries just went on and on. As my little memorial to all those who died, here is the Anthem with its stunningly beautiful melody from the “Chess” concept album, fabulously sung by the Swedish singer Tommy Körberg whom I saw in the original London production. It was written specifically for his voice and Benny’s smile in the control room at the end says it all! Although this is not a typical Broadway song I believe the melody is a fitting tribute. After all the crying and all the funerals, the Broadway musical picked itself up. To this day it continues to present some of the finest entertainment in the world. More recent shows are the talk of the town – “The Lion King”, “Wicked”, “Hamilton” and others along with revivals like “Cabaret” at Studio 54 which I saw around 25 years ago with the androgynous Alan Cumming superb as the Master of Ceremonies. Before the pandemic, 70% of all New York visitors attended a Broadway show. That equates to more than forty million seats sold - many to tourists! So I salute Broadway and its musicals as my final Gay Icon. Of course there are dozens more. But I wanted to keep the list relatively small. I could have added icons like Bette Midler, Judy Garland, Elton John and even Dame Julie Andrews. As discussed in an earlier post the ‘Divine’ Ms. Midler owes much of her fame to gay audiences. But others can now take over this short series if they wish. Finally, since much of this post has been about “Chess”, rumours of yet another revision of the show and a return to Broadway have been around for years. Now, Sir Tim Rice has confirmed that it will open this autumn but no further details have yet been provided. Will it open? Once the curtain has risen, will it succeed? No one ever knows. When the curtain rose of the opening night of “Phantom of the Opera” in London, neither composer Andrew Lloyd Webber nor producer Cameron Mackintosh could bear to watch. They were terrified. They spent the evening walking the streets of London. When they returned for the final curtain, they knew they had not just a hit, but one of the greatest the world of musicals was ever to see. But the unforgiving beast that is Broadway did not escape Lloyd Webber. As he stated in an interview in London’s Daily Telegraph, after “Phantom” he wrote six more shows, including “Sunset Boulevard”. All flopped financially!

There are several tall bulldings under construction in Bangkok and many recently completed - Bangkok One being a prime example. One wonders why this particular building under construction seemed to pancake down from the top rather like the buildings in the Twin Towers in New York, and yet no other building seemed to suffer damage. With no knowledge of construction, I would have thought ground shaking would have started in demolition from the bottom up, or would it have been progressively strengthened as the building got higher?