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Fancy sipping a cocktail with a couple of opera singers acting out arias just for you?
In the heart of London’s museum district and a stone’s throw from the Royal Albert Hall, Bar 190 at the Gore Hotel hosts opera evenings where you can do just that.
After viewing the fineries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, it’s the perfect place to sink into a stylish leather sofa with drinks and delicious tapas, and enjoy operatic favourites performed at your table by professional singers, James and Fiona. If you have a soft spot for a particular piece of operatic splendour, why not make a special request?
Weaving around the oak-paneled interior of the darkly atmospheric Bar 190 (the location for a Manolo Blahnik photoshoot, no less) the delightful duo set the scene for an evening with a difference.
And if you find yourself truly transported by the likes of Mozart or Verdi, there’s always the possibility of retreating to the VIP Cinderella’s Carriage, and closing the curtains - or indeed of booking into this unique hotel to extend your romantic tryst.
The Gore is a sumptuously decorated hotel, which, as well as providing a backdrop to fashion shoots and glam after-parties, has been a home from home to countless regular star guests.
The bedrooms range from beautifully appointed doubles, to specially themed suites that would wow the most well-travelled of clients, from the decadent Dame Nellie Melba’s boudoir with its bed in a tented recess lined with pleated silk and a mirrored bathroom with bronzes of Venus and David, to the Judy Garland room, where you can sleep in the very gilt wood bed the iconic singer reserved for visits to London.
The next Opera Night is on January 28. Go to gorehotel.com or call 020 7584 6601
Cate Langmuir
DICK WHITTINGTON: ANOTHER DICK IN CITY HALL
The joke that often makes you laugh the hardest is the one you have heard a thousand times before. The very British Christmas tradition of Pantomime proves this point perfectly.
Combine this with the very gay tradition of filthy double entendre that would make Sid James blush and you have Dick Whittington: Another Dick in City Hall.
Our Dick is a naïve young gay man who flees the country to find fame and fortune in London but finds himself shacked up above a dingy Docklands gay bar and embroiled in the murky world of mayoral politics.
The villain of the piece Alderman Rat does his best to scupper Dick’s ambitions from spiking his drink with GHB to kidnap.
Dick, however, has the Good Fairy with her amazing powers of disguise watching over him.
Joining forces with sluttish landlady Holly Oaks, her son the gyrating bouncy Idle Jack and the brilliantly played panto dame of snooty housewife Wilma Whittington we embark on an hilarious two hours of more male genitalia jokes than you could well shake a stick at!
Once the cast had eased into the performance Dick Whittington is a perfectly timed comedic rip-roarer that had the audience in fits and, in true panto tradition, joining in the action.
This Christmas have a real gay old time and head down to Above the Stag for the perfect antidote to all the doom and gloom of the credit crunch.
Stefan Robinson
Dick Whittington is playing at Above The Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5DD until 22 December
Tickets: £12 Bookings: 020 8932 4747
PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT
Priscilla Queen of the Desert is sheer spectacle.
Although the opening scenes are superficial enough - a troop of Sydney drag queens moaning about their boring lives - a masterful two hours of showmanship underlies a poignant and insightful biopic of our struggle for gay rights.
Unless you are one of the few who missed the movie, the storyline will be etched into your gaydar. A tired and irascible trio of queens embark on a bus trip to just another gig in Aussie hicksville, Alice Springs, an outback town which God plopped right in the middle of Australia and then forgot about.
Unbeknown to our heroines they are about to undertake a voyage of self-discovery and witness the emergence in each of them of the humanity hidden deep beneath the superficially of their humdrum bitchy lives.
Their home for several weeks, a Technicolor dream coach with a will of its own called Priscilla, trundles them through the homophobic horrors of the Aussie outback and adventures which will change their lives forever.
This musical fantasy is true spectacle in all its rainbow glory. Simon Philips’s brilliant production throws every theatrical trick in the book at an astounded audience with oodles of rip-roaring gay abandon and all set to a soundtrack of anthems we came out to: “Hot Stuff”, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, “Don’t Leave Me This Way”, “I Say A Little Prayer” and enough Kylie to satisfy diehard fans. Oh, and Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner’s creative costumes are so outrageous and over the top they would make Busby Berkley turn in his grave with envy. This is drag with a vengeance!
Jason Donavan as Mitzi finally lets his feminine side out to passable effect, and the anguished trannie Bernadette is gloriously played by Tony Sheldon. But for my money the big star of Priscilla is Oliver Thornton as Felicia. She minces, she bitches and she throws herself into desperate danger with the ignorant redneck outback folk but in the end emerges as the caring person she never knew she could be.
Shake out your feathers and book now this show is going to sell out for months to come.
Jason Pollock
Priscilla, Queen of The Desert is at The Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London
08447550016
