PeterRS2

Really? No doubt you noticed the police wear brown uniforms.

It always somewhat surprised me that the colour for His late Majesty the much revered King Bhumiphol was pink as he was born on a Tuesday. Photo: AFP

Your nephew's daughter can take heart from the fact that a number of top stars have begun careers hoofing the boards in theatres before making it big on Broadway or in movies. Julie Andews is one obvius example, and she was turned down by no less than studio boss Jack Warner for the movie My Fair Lady after she had been a big success in the stage version. But even success on stage is not vital. Sarah Jessica Parker, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton and Viola Davis all started in small roles on Broadway.

New name 🤪

This thread is partly boiing down to semantics. In which case, I cannot agree with the above statement. What precisely does "cannot reasonably live in his country" mean, I wonder? "Reasonably" is an infinitely variable term. I could band together with others and say without acommodation equivalent to a two-star hotel room, a cooked breakfast and a jobs that paid enough for me and my family to get by and put something aside for retirement, in Switzerland we are being persecuted. But that is definitely not persecution. If I have no work and no matter how hard I try I cannot find work, I could say I am being persecuted. But even that is not persecution. In China youth unemployment is at record levels. Are they as a group being discriminated against and are they therefore being persecuted because they have no income on which to live? That would be hard to justify IMHO. We can say that homosexuals are persecuted in certain countries just as we can say vast groups of Christians are persucuted in Nigeria and the Sudan. But how are other countries going to react to that persecution? Are other coutries responsible for all of it?

If I have a greater depth of knowledge it is only because I have had a great love of musicals since I was a teenager and in my working life have been privileged to be in New York and London (and even Sydney) dozens of times when getting to see a musical has been relatively easy. I certainly doubt that I have higher standards! Whereas the musical genre really took off just before WWII and continued both during and after the war, going back to the topic of the thread I think Lloyd Webber has made one pertinent point. I'm not talking about the investment he says is becoming much more difficult - well, when you have designers design monster sets and don't get them reduced to more manageable and financially moderate sizes, what does he expect? The fact is that he and producer Cameron Mackintosh gave the designer Maria Bjornson £950,000 to design both the scenery and the costumes for the entire Phantom of the Opera when it opened in London in 1986. After 40 years inflation that equates to approx. £3.6 million. Since the Broadway production was identical, the physical production costs would have been virtually the same. Even after adding costs for writer, director, choreographer, cast, theatre hire, orchestra, backstage staff (of which Phantom requied about 40) etc. the cost of mounting Phantom today would have been perfectly possible even with Lloyd Webber's present thoughts on financing. In my view, what the musical needs is a visionary or a group of visionaries. I think after Rodgers and Hammerstein the acceptance that a new musical would be worth seeing rather bit the dust. Just as that duo was completing The Sound of Music, four great creators in Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents had started work on what became one of the great 20th century musicals, West Side Story. For almost the first time serious drama (through what is termed "the book") found its way as a major element in musicals, and this element was to continue. The list becomes long with Gypsy, My Fair Lady, Chicago, Fiddler on the Roof, Hair etc. Perhaps only Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line (far better on stage than Richard Attenborough's pretty dreadful movie - the fact was that no other director would touch it!) looked back to the glory years of the 1930s. Until then Broadway had had its own way. Most shows with directors like Hal Prince and Michael Bennett turned to gold. Then in the 1970s along came two English ingenues, musical mad graduates determined to put a show together. The rest of the story behind the Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice partnership is pretty much known. They were visionaries in their own right. And soon another appeared in the person of Cameron Macintosh. Now almost 80, when he was eight an aunt took him to see the old-style musical Salad Days. From then on he was hooked. By 1990 the New York Times described him as being "the most successful, influential and powerful theatrical producer in the world." Mackintosh began his career as a stagehand at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. In the 1970s he was producing small scale inexpensive musicals. In 1981 he was asked to produce Lloyd Webber's CATS, a show no-one in the business believed had any long run potential. It was eventually to run for more than two decades in both London and Broadway. Before the two teamed up for Phantom in 1986, which like CATS broke records for massively long runs in both cities, a couple of cassettes had landed on Mackintosh's desk. Ths was a show which had run in Paris - a city which generally loathes musicals - and which the writer and composer hoped might interest Mackintosh for a run in London. Those cassettes of the concept album for Les Miserables excited a degree of curiosity in Mackintosh. He had it adapted into English and asked for views of a writer and director. Both agreed it had potential, but only for a short run. SInce it would be very expensive to stage, Mackintosh approached the the Royal Shakespeare Company to see if they would share in the production costs. As a result, Les Mis as it is known opened for a 12-week season in 1985. Newspaper reviewers generally did not like it. Some panned it. The investors assumed their investment had gone down the drain. But Mackintosh had spent his evenings not looking at the stage but at the audience. He saw how much they were enjoying the show. He decided to add some extra performance weeks. And of course we now know that Les Mis has become the longest running musical in West End history history and the second longest in the world! Now a new batch of long-running musicals and their producers have appeared. Rent, Hamilton, The Book of Mormon and Wicked have appeared, to add to older shows like The Lion King. No visionary successor has yet appeared to take over from Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh, but unquestionably one or two will - eventually!

The balcony is ready but I regret no bed. It is the rainy season and you'd end up with a very soggy mattress. And my coffee is the strongest Ristretto black, but great for waking up in the morning. You, as you may recall from one of my earlier posts, are bringing two bottles of Bass Phillip Estate 2021 Pinot Noir which will go down very nicely, thank you

I love the scene in the movie Cabaret where Sally and Brian (played by the very English Michael York) are having an argument about her relationship with Maximilian. Brian says to Sally - "Oh, screw Maximilian!" to which she brazenly replies - "I do!" and he adds somewhat sheepishly - "So do I!"

In olden times, Saphan Kwai was a smallish nightlife district with several go-go bars but these were mostly girlie bars with Thais as their market. Eventually a small number of gay go-go bars opened and westerners discovered it. From what I recall, it was never particularly popular - no doubt being so far from the Silom/Suriwong axis. Now the gay go-go bars all seem to have disappeared and it clearly has morphed into a spa hub.

Thanks @stevenkesslar. I,too, loved 42nd Street. I managed to get two last minute tickets for the opening in London at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Of the others you saw, the only one I'd seen was The Producers at the same Theatre but sitting in one of the upper tiers. I loved parts of it, but having seen the movie a couple of times took some of the enjoyment away. I forgot to mention another of the older musicals Guys and Dolls which I saw at London's National Theatre. It was a fabulous production but neither of us enjoyed it as much as we should for our tickets were for the day after the death of Princess Diana. Few in the theatre really wanted to enjoy themselves that evening. Oh, and more keep popping into my mind. Cabaret is one of the great musicals. Even though I had seen the movie several times, the production at Studio 54 in New York with Alan Cumming as the EmCee was marvellous, perhaps because it was in more of a nightclub than a theatre. Years earlier, friends took me to see Patti Lupone in Anything Goes in the Lincoln Center, the wonderful foot-tapping Cole Porter musical. And I can't end without what I consider Rodgers and Hammerstein's best work Carousel. Another National Theatre production where an actual circus carousel was assembled on stage during the overture. Dame Patrica Routledge was magnificent as Nellie Fowler who sings the show's show-stopper "You'll never walk alone".

Abhorrent though the laws in these countries are, we have to recognise that there is virtually nothing any of us can do to change them. At least in Russia, after more than a century of claiming the coutry's best-known composer Tchaikovsky was not gay, Putin admitted on television a few years ago that he was indeed gay, but added that it was "his music that matters". He went on to say as quoted by Reuters, "Russia's pride in composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, even though he was gay, is proof that the country does not discriminate against homosexuals!" He could have added that Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, that the great impresario Diaghilev was very openly gay, that Sergei Eisenstein was gay, that Nureyev was aggressively gay, that Nijinksy and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich were gay - and a vast number of others. But they do not fit his agenda. Yet we definitely can start and continue movements for change in our own countries. As recently as the 1980s and 1990s there was a large number of gay men murdered by being thrown on to the rocks on the outskirts of Sydney. The number is assumed to be 88 and were originally classified as suicides. It was not until 2005 that some of these deaths were changed to homicides. Even though same sex relationships had been decriminalised in 1984, gangs of youths, many of school age, were on the lookout for young gay men with the intent to kill them. A subsequent Inquiry found that there was a "persistent culture" of homophoia and transphobia in the New South Wales Police force and many of the crimes were never properly investigated. A Judicial Inquiry estabished in 2021 claimed that the police had lost or destroyed records requested by the inquiry. In June 2016 there was the Pulse gay nightclub shooting in Orlando which murdered 49 gay men. In 2014 there were the Port murders in London. Stephen Port became one of Britain's deadliest serial killers. It is believed he murdered as many as 62 gay men whom he met on Grindr, drugged them to make it appear they had overdosed and dumped their bodies. We still have a lot to do to bring sanity to our own countries. https://www.advocate.com/crime/2017/5/08/18-historys-worst-mass-killings-lgbt-people#rebelltitem17 https://www.advocate.com/crime/2017/5/08/18-historys-worst-mass-killings-lgbt-people#rebelltitem7

I am certain some might be, although like most people I cannot be sure. We should, however recognise that 33 out of 54 African countries have laws outlawing homosexual behaviour. 13 of these countries still have anti-homosexual behaviour on their statute books thanks to the British 19th century colonial law. Punishment in most cases is a term in prison (which in some countries is not enforced) ranging up to the death penalty (again rarely enforced), the latter in southern Somalia, Somaliland, Mauretania, Northern Nigeria and Uganda. In the West we have become used to freedoms we never had 65-75 years ago. We assume, but do we have a right to do so? that our present freedoms should also apply to the 33 African countries which have very different histories, societies and customs. Many western gay men managed 65-75 years ago, albeit with difficulty as, as in Africa today, it was in those years against the law in most US states and in the UK until exactly 69 years ago. In England and Wales around 1,000 men were jailed annually for homosexual offences in the 1950s.

DId you not write this in your first post?

I used to go with a friend virtually every Sunday for a couple of hours. The dancers were great guys and very friendly - although that is as far as most of them were prepared to go! We did throw a party for them at Dick's when one had a birthday. The problem as we saw it was too often there was an eternity between the numbers. When you have a good dancing show, it has to go with a degree of pizzazz. Instead of all eight dancers in each element of the show, each then having to retire to change into a different costume, we thought the owner would have been better served with some numbers being just for 3 or 4 dancers. Sometimes there were gaps of 5 minutes which was way too long and that could have been one reason for the lack of attendance. Full marks to the manager for trying something different, but he really did need someone professional or semi-pro to choreograph the shows.

Good thought, but he was more of an administrator type I understand. Maybe he did the auditions for the Choir 😵

@macaroni21's post is too true. @Olddaddy's suggestion that the people fleeing from Morocco are refugees is inaccurate. The United Nations clearly defines what the word 'refugee' means' - Refugees are people forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder. Economic migrants are not refugees.

Having professional dancers (or at least dance students) give shows in go-go bars may be new in Pattaya but not in Thailand. Back in 2001 X-Treme bar in Soi Twilight had a group of around 8 young dancers who did 'proper' dance numbers in the middle of the evenings. The owner of X-treme had been involved in the Church of England in some capacity. I recall he had a very handsome student boyfriend who would sometimes come and do his homework (the university type 🤪) in the bar. X-treme did not last long. When it closed, the dance troupe moved over to the German's ground floor bar across the soi. Even that was not a success and he hived them off to Roxy in Soi 4, the successor to Rome Club. No idea what happened thereafter. The dancing boys were basically not offable. But a couple of regular farang customers did a lot of chatting up with two of them and for a short time they became partners with no cash fees involved.

The only specific date is that it will take place some time following the one year mourning period which will end on 24 October. But it also depends on the very elaborate cremation complex being completed as well as other Royal obligations. The exact date should be announced relatively soon. For those who have never witnessed the cremation ceremony for a senior member of the Thai Royal Family, it is a unique occasion which you may wish to view, at least on television.

You seem to assume that throughout my rather long life I have not made any contributions to refugees. Sorry @Olddaddy that is not true. I have made several contributions. Like many posters here, I have also contributed to other charities - as for example the Thai Red Cross for the massive 2004 tsunami, the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake when 69,000 lost their lives, and the disastrous earthquakes in Nepal in April and May 2015. @unicorn is absolutely correct. When it comes to disasters of any kind, do not go to Go Fund Me pages where you have little idea idea where your contribution goes. Do research and stick to official charities. For years my chosen charity has been Medicins Sans Frontiers who work with people in many needy parts of the world.

I am sure we have all been affected by family or friends struck down with dementia. It's such a ghastly disease. One friend I have known for almost 40 years is now in the final stages of Alzheimer's in Chiang Mai. But dementia has struck people earlier than 45. Some years ago The Guardian reported a case of BvFTD dementia in a young lady of 36 when she started exhibiting signs. The report of her struggle does not make for pleasant reading. It took six years before she died. The second link below is to the dementiaUK website. It has a lot of information and a vdo about Young Onset Dementia. It estimates that there are 70,800 Young Onset patients in the UK and slow loss of memory may not always necessarily be the first indication of this type of dementia. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/14/daughter-died-young-onset-dementia-42-angry-doctors-long-diagnose https://www.dementiauk.org/information-and-support/young-onset-dementia/

Your indication could not be further from the truth! 🤪 You know perfectly well that in common with some other posters I write long replies!

Such a horrible shame for one so young!

What are you talking about? That anyone unhappy with their lot has the right to illegally skip over to another country so they can have a better life there? If that is as you seem to think a "right", then let's be honest half the world's population would immediately be on the move. And what of the thousands and thousands of people who have gone through official application channels to repatriate? Illegal immigrants slow down and sometimes stop their official entries. Bear in mind that 57 Moroccans have already lost their lives in the attempt with more having been crushed to death in the panic. Bear in mind that many dozens died when trying to flee from African countries to get across the Engish channel to Britain in recent years. Bear in mind that over a thousand each year lose their lives trying to get from Libya to Italy - again in recent years. That is a horrible price to pay for their families and friends. I have no idea of the total who managed to cross into Cueta compared to the number who died trying or were after arrival sent back. The irony here, I believe, is that Cueta is actually part of the African land mass that is geographically part of Morocco but belongs to Spain, a relic of European wars of the past. In their desperation, I wonder what these illegal immigrants thought they would find after crossing that border. In Spain these poor people, allegedly some 60,00 or so thousand of them so far, have no food, no housing, little clothing, no nothing! Hardly surprising that the 83,000 inhabitants of Cueta do not want them and 48,300 have already voluntarily returned to their home countries. Mind you Spain has partly itself to blame after changing its law without considering all the consequences. But I congratulate you for contributing to the go fund me efforts for those who have now arrived in Spain.

At least this commercial venture with Trump is now dead. What's the betting that another will soon appear until Infantino is kicked out of FIFA

That's one of your silliest inane remarks. You include in that comment one of the most respected posters on this Board @macaroni21 whose posts are virtually as long as many of mine. You also include @unicorn, @bkkmfj2648, @ichigo,@pylonguy71 whose long reports you recently wrote that you looked forward to, @Jimmy who has made a great many marvellous reports about his adventures with Cam, and the host of all the many other posters who make trip reports. OK! We've known for a long time that you do not like my posting and you've made that plain. Fine. Do you think that concerns me? Not in the slightest. Does anyone make you read my posts? Yes. Your brain! Because you have a sneaking suspicion that you might actually find something interesting and so you do not block me. Other posters like @Keithambrose generally prefer for their own reasons to write short one or two posts. These clearly cover your attention span while longer ones don't. These readers might do well to take note.