Woke up kind of late, but still managed to get some coffee and do some reading before cleaning up for breakfast. Learning how to work the buffet system – turns out you can ask them to make you eggs to order.

Off to the church. Turns out the little hill up to the church from the pedestrian mall is actually quite a huffer-puffer nowadays, although I made it just fine. Since the heartblock/pacemaker, stairs and hills, man. (My cardiologist doesn’t seem to be worried about it, she thinks I’m just out of shape. Ha!) Oh, also, I found out from one of my fellow choristers that he has exactly the same heart problem I do and also has a pacemaker. Wow! I also had a nice chat with Simon, who’s playing Pooh-Bah – he’s one of the several Australians that the two directors brought over with them, and he’d been in the chorus of my Patience in 2018 – sweet guy.

The men’s chorus started working with music. It is funny having been the MD last year and this year just being a little chorus bee. I like our MD, but of course he doesn’t do things the way I do. One thing that both our directors do is when you ask them, “this or that”, they’ll say what they want and then go on a riff to defend it. No, sweeties, we don’t care why, we just want to know which one you want.

We ended up by the end of the day going through all of the music (I think) and blocking the opening of Act 1 and the Act 1 Finale, moving quite quickly. The chorus movement is not particularly difficult – Mikado lends itself to ‘stand and sing’ quite nicely, not like Ruddigore which had a lot of dancing.

We got let go pretty early. I went back to the tearooms to have a coffee, then to the room to chill until time for dinner. I was seeing the show at 7:30, so went to the Old Clubhouse around 6:00, thinking that was plenty of time to order food. No, they were saying already that it was at least a 45 minute wait. As per tradition, the Old Clubhouse is almost belligerent about not catering to the theatergoers and getting them out the door in time. So Kelsey and Kathryn E and I went to Pizza Express (later joined by Marisa and Ashley), where I had a ‘leggera’, which is essentially a ring of pizza with a green salad in the hole in the middle. A perfect amount of food for someone with a medically-suppressed appetite.

The show was Peak Opera’s Iolanthe, directed by and involving many friends. It was very entertaining. I love Iolanthe and this was well-cast and quite funny. There were bits that I didn’t appreciate (I thought the frog didn’t bring a lot to the table) and other bits I liked a lot.

I was determined this year to go to the festival club more, even though I am old and tired and like my chill-down time. I had a cider (and bought the Halls drinks), and ended up in the back sitting with and chatting to the Flints. I saw several cabaret numbers, including my buddy Marie’s french number, and then a Glitter and Be Gay that I described on FB as “approximate”. It turned out later that my buddy Rachel was accompanying, and she said no one could hear the piano. But Glitter and Be Gay is not a song you whip out in public unless you can sing it note-perfect hanging upside-down over a pool of crocodiles.

Decided I was too tired to finish up, went off to bed. One delight this year is my hotel is a stone’s throw from the Opera House/festival club, so that’s super nice.