"But shall we make the welkin dance indeed?"

(Twelfth Night, Act II, scene iii, line 56)
.
Let's start off with...
.
.
The Play of the Week: "Shun-Kin" at the Barbican Center...in Barbican.
.
I will only write three sentences about this show....apart from this one.
.
1) The show was entirely in Japanese with subtitles on either side of the theatre.
.
2) The show was almost two hours long without an intermission.
.
3) This was the single greatest piece of theatre I have ever seen in my entire life, basing my judgment off everything I've ever learned at Playwrights Horizons and my own personal tastes, combining that with the unbelievable ways the show was able to affect me on nearly every visceral level with tremendous power and skill, along with the fact that it kept me 100% engaged throughout the entire production by stunning and innovative stage images, sounds, and conventions, even though I had no idea what was being said.
.
If you look closely, you'll see it's still only three sentences.
.
.
Now...to the performance for RADA.
.

.

There are absoutely no words to describe this week other than exhausting, tedious, lengthy, tiring, physically-demanding, mentally-demanding, taxing...

.

Okay...there are several words to describe this week. Let's run through the highlights, shall we?

.

Darrin, our dance teacher, had gone utterly insane since last week and I'm convinced that while trying to choreograph the dances for the show, he didn't say a single complete or intelligible statement. Such is the mind of a choreographer.

.

Andrew, our singing teacher, kept giving us the same weird note about singing a particular part of our group song that made us feel like he wanted us to haunt the audience because he sounded like a ghost whenever he showed us how he wanted us to do it.

.

We pulled a 12-hour studio day the day before the actual performance and we didn't get a running order until the morning of.

.

The day of, we ran the show once through with incredible scrutiny over each part, correcting any slight thing that needed to be corrected.

.

Everyone had to perform the entire show in dress clothes and dress shoes, and we had to dance a hardcore galliard and lavolta at the end, which made us all sweat like pedophiles on Dateline NBC.
.

.
It's over now. We have a mental reprieve for a few days before we need to do our next performance in three weeks. Now, our main task is to forget everything we had to memorize in the past four weeks so that we have some mind-room for King John, Loves Labours Lost, and our scene studies.

.

.
The plan was to kill off the occupied brain cells at the Old Red Lion.
.

.
Nathaniel's girlfriend and Maggie's NY roommate were in town, so we decided to show them a good London time.

.

There was much rejoicing...

.

.
...a lot of rejoicing.
.

.

Halfway through the night, we decided to try to link up with our other RADA chums, but that plan essentially failed miserably. We ended up at a pub/club called The Water Rat. There was a cover charge to get in (which sucked), it was loud (which sucked), and the bartender couldn't make the drink I ordered if I drew him a fucking diagram of it (which sucked as well).

.

3 out of 4 bartenders couldn't get my fucking drink order right Friday night and I just want to see if it was a difficult order or if British bartenders are fucking stupid. This is what I ordered, verbatim:

.

"Double rum and Coke, 1/2 Morgan Spiced, 1/2 Malibu."
.

Is this neurosurgery or something? You put ice in a glass. You put a shot of Morgan Spiced in that glass. You put a shot of Malibu in the same glass. You fill the aforementioned glass with Coke, remembering to stop when the soda reaches the top of the glass. Apart from the one correct drink, this is what I received over the course of the night.

.

[A double rum and Coke w/ 2 shots of Morgan Spiced in it.]

.

[A double rum and Coke w/ 1 shot of Morgan Spiced and 2 shots of Captain Morgan Regular.]

.

And my favorite...

.

[A Coke in a double-glass, a separate shot of Morgan Spiced, and a separate shot of Malibu (as if he wanted to see me make it myself).] This debacle was courtesy of the Water Rat bartending staff...and it was the only drink I ordered there for the rest of the night. God help me if I ordered another drink; who knows what the fuck they would have given me.

.

.
It's times like that where I really miss the States.

.

Also, just to show you how classy a place called "The Water Rat" is, here's something I found while there.

.

.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is an upside-down pint glass jammed down the toilet. Who thought this was a good idea? What were they trying to accomplish by doing this? Did they realize the error of there ways after doing it, but could not rectify their stupidity because they had already peed on the glass?

.

Who knows...I try not to think about it.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Seriously though, it's a shot of Malibu and a shot of Morgan Spiced in a glass of Coca Cola...how can you fuck that up as hard as they did and in three different ways?

.

Not only was I left uncompensated for their consistant dumbfuckery, but the drinks got more and more expensive the more they fucked it up. The Water Rat Clusterfuck (as I have named that 3-glass monstrosity) cost me close to 20 USD!

.

Kids...if you're reading this and you want to go to bartending school, don't go to th UK for it. It will turn you into a retarded person.