Wicked weekend in Brisneyland

Leaving Seb and Marie behind, as well as Shane and Jason, who had cooked us a delish dinner and stayed over on Friday night, Steve and I high-tailed it yesterday morning bright eyed and bushy-tailed and by 8.30am we were on the road, driving along the edge of the great caldera of Wollumbin, on or way to Brisbane. Prior to the floods, we would have told you we were heading up to see a matinee of Wicked followed by an evening performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, but alas, the floods have postponed JC S'star until June.

An uneventful and seamless drive into the city (I'm much better about entering the city than I was last year) and we were checked in at the Skyline Apartments near Fortitude Valley and on our way back into the city where I wanted to visit a big second-hand bookshop I had discovered on the web. Waiting at the train station was a student of mine from the early 1990s, Keith, who was in town to watch the Indigenous Games tat were being held at the Gold Coast later that day. So we caught up with him while we travelled the one stop into the city and promised we'd stay in touch.

Found the Archives Fine Bookshop and O_M_G! I could have stalked the aisles for hours but this wasn't possible, so managed to find some fantastic old Australian natural history books and placed this location firmly on my Brisbane map for next time.

We walked across the bridge over the still muddy looking Brisbane River to Southbank, had lunch and then on to see Wicked. A young guy who had performed with Steve when he was even younger, David Harris, was now the male lead of the show, Fiyero, which gave the performance a little more zing than usual. Our seats had been some of the cheaper seats, at the front, but towards the side, but they were actually quite good as we were very close to the action and quite a lot happens on stage right as it happens. We enjoyed the show so much (we had seen it a number of times previously) that we decided to hang around and enter the lottery that is held a couple of hours prior to each performance where you have a chance to get up to two front row seats for $35.00 each (not bad when such seats would normally put you back close to $200.00).

As luck would have it, my name was pulled, along with a dozen or so others, so we were off to the theatre again. And again, we enjoyed the performance a great deal, and there's something a bit spesh about being guided down to your front row seats by the usher. We got to see both women who perform the role of Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, but all the other leads were played by the hmmm whatever the term is for the 'correct actor', lol. Bert Newton received applause both performances for just walking on stage, and good old Maggie Kirkpatrick (aka The Freak from Prisoner, and who was in the same classes as my mum at high school) was commandingly wicked.

So, now I've seen Wicked 6 times, Steve 5, and of course my brother Brett, just a few over 100!