A Night with The Man In Black...

Went last night to see The Man In Black (http://www.themaninblack.com.au/ ): Stage show with Tex Perkins doing a very faithful Johnny Cash and Rachael Tidd excels in the June Carter part though with some incredibly eccentric initial note attacks (I don't know enough about the original material to know if this is authentic to June Carter's style) – all of this supported very professionally by The Tennessee Four . Went with a friend of the angel variety who put up with multiple incompetencies from me with unimaginable grace and forgiveness. First I forgot the tickets and had to return to my own abode several suburbs away in peak-hour traffic. This made us half an hour late for dinner which the hotel (Westin Hotel – Allegro Restaurant) coped with with what I can only describe as European aplomb – organising our dining so that we made it to the theatre just as they were about to close the doors. The show I will not say a lot about – the audience were incredibly appreciative, especially of the closing medley – and I will think more before I venture a naive opinion. I liked the repertoire (which included one Leonard Cohen – Bird on a Wire) but Cash himself was not an overly articulate man and tended to play towards the melodramatic end of the human emotional continuum. But the show is more than the sum of its parts. For me the highlight of the evening was a gentle Nick Cave duet (Into Your Arms) we sang on the way home in the car (singing with an angel is not a bad way to end an evening).

All right – for this indulgence and pleasure and happiness I must now do the penance of one page of novel before the end of the day.

http://www.themaninblack.com.au/

LW.