London Day 9 – National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, Wicked

10/20/2015

National Gallery

I finished both the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery today. The guy working the audioguide booth yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery was super nice; there was no way I was gonna finish in one day, so at the end of the day (got booted out of the museum yesterday), when I went to return the audioguide, he said if I returned today, he’d wrote a note to his colleagues not to charge me for the second day! How nice is that! So I went up to the audioguide booth today. He wasn’t working there, so I explained the situation to the lady. She said this was unconventional, but I asked her to look for the note. She asked the name of the guy, but I didn’t catch his name. She asked me to describe him, and I said, “Blond. Longish hair to this (point toward shoulder).” She said, “Ah. The pretty one.” Haha he so is! But I wasn’t about to describe him like that to her!

Continuation of National Portrait Gallery portraits:

John Keats

Charles Darwin may be a famous scientist, but he was very soft-spoken and disliked arguing with his peers. He had a friend (an aristocrat) who was his champion. Their contemporaries called Darwin's friend The Bulldog for fighting Darwin's fights for him.

Charles Darwin

Queen Victoria had this statue of her beloved husband commissioned after he died:

Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's most trusted adviser and father-figure

Queen Victoria

This painting is of the three Bronte sisters and was painted by their brother. The column in the middle of the sisters was him, but he painted himself out of the picture (you can still kind of see an outline of it):

The painting was discovered folded up in an attic several generations after the Brontes had died. The National Portrait Gallery deliberately chose not to restore it and to leave the painting in the way it was found.

Charlotte Bronte

George Eliot

Robert Baden-Powell, the father of Boy Scouts:

Shakespeare

Sir Francis Drake

There's a street named Garrick in the West End as well as a theatre named after him.

David Garrick

I really liked the Portrait Gallery because it has so many iconic paintings that you always see on posters and stuff, from Henry VIII to Horatio Nelson. The one thing I didn't like was that it's a portrait gallery, so you only get to see the artists' portraits. They don't show you the paintings the artists' are famous for...you have to go to the National Gallery for that. I remembered some names and happened to see their paintings in the National Gallery, so it was nice tying everything in. The National Gallery concentrates a lot more on Italian art, though there are some English paintings and a whole section for Impressionists like Monet and Renoir. It has paintings by Titian too, commissioned to go to Philip of Spain. Somehow the paintings never arrived there and are in England. Like everything else.

Trafalgar Square

I found this little gem:

Midget!

Van Gogh

Monet's Water Lilies

Monet

Monet

Manet

National Gallery

National Gallery

As usual, I got kicked out of the National Gallery at closing time. I came out to see this beautiful view:

View of Big Ben from National Gallery

The tour guide mentioned yesterday that China's Prime Minister is coming this week; we walked on Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace yesterday and all the Union Jack flags were replaced (alternatively) with the Chinese flag. I passed by 10 Downing Street today and there's a gigantic Chinese flag near it. As I walked past 10 Downing, I arrived just in time to see the police open the gates and a Mercedes drove past the gate and into traffic--the back windows were tinted so I couldn't see who it was, but the chauffeur was Chinese. 

Yao Ming's here too. The tour guide joked that the way the UK seduces foreign powers is for the queen to show up in a carriage to pick them up from the airport. 

Security guard escorting someone into the Mercedes inside 10 Downing

Waitrose is selling Heston Blumenthal Christmas cakes! Dang, it's expensive!

I went to see Wicked at the Apollo Victoria theatre tonight. Loved this shirt!

The couple I sat next to last night for Faranelli said Gypsy was really good, so I went to go buy the tickets today. I bought the cheap one (half-price ticket office can't discount it because the theatre won't allow it), though based on tonight's Wicked performance, I won't be able to see Imelda Staunton all that well ;( Though the Wicked theatre is massive! I don't recall a theatre bigger than this one! The lady next to me was panicking from vertigo, we were so high up. Her husband, children and her are here on Switzerland's half-term holiday. She says Geneva's show tickets are triple the price of London and there's no orchestra--they just play a CD!!! WTF! So they come here for plays too. They're seeing Les Mis, Lion King, Phantom, Book of Mormon and Wicked tonight. The mother wasn't very happy about the seats. We all moved down about 10 rows during intermission. Since the theatre's so big, there were quite a few empty seats. And lots of kids.

Wicked Theatre

Since this venue is so big, the lighting and stage production was a lot better than SF’s. But this version tends to segue into a song by saying the first line instead of singing it. Fiyero wasn’t quite so dashing, and I don’t know, maybe I’m too used to the CD, but the music was…different. Angel will not like this version, that’s for sure. The mother said Miss Saigon’s her favorite musical—she’s seen it 3 times already, the first time with Eva Solonga as the original lead. But she saw it this week in London and was disappointed because like Phantom and Wicked, the music was rearranged/off. Some of the lyrics were even changed! I did notice this production of Wicked added a few more talking scenes to explain things better and they switched one of the lyrics in the beginning to describe Elphaba: “She’s a tosser!”

And on the walk back, I noticed this in front of the Horse Cavalry Museum (which is next to 10 Downing...UK's really going all out for this shindig, aren't they?):