Get set... go

The last pantomime picture - for a while anyway. This is more or less the full cast just before 'curtain up' on Saturday night.

Of course, if you were at the panto you'll know that we had no curtain. It meant that our stage crew (Graeme & Derek) had to be very quick, very efficient and very quiet at scene changes. I have to say they managed to be all three and did a superb job and, apart from one little glitch on the Friday night, it went incredibly smoothly.

Not like a performance I attended last year at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. A special treat for my birthday - to go the opera. I know it was a great sacrifice for my wife to take me there because she can't stand opera. But I love it. Now, any of you who are familiar with Glasgow will know that we have a perfectly good opera house - the Theatre Royal. But this was in the concert hall. A large stage, certainly, but no curtains and no facilities for flying scenery quickly offstage. Now, you might think this would be a good time to go for a minimalist approach to the set: let the audience use their imaginations and allow the music to set the scene.

But, no. It was a pretty traditional approach to Rigoletto by The Chisinau National Opera in association with the Ukrainian National Opera. The trouble was it took the stage crew about 25 minutes between acts to disassemble one set and then build the next. It could have been very boring - and almost was - except that I kept hearing the sound of electric screwdrivers buzzing away in the darkness, accompanied by cursing and swearing from the stagehands who clearly weren't sure how everything was supposed to fit together. Admittedly it must have been a bit like building a 3-D jigsaw puzzle in the dark. Quite bizarre.

However, not the most bizarre feature of the show.

The award for that has to go to the moment when a fully-grown golden eagle was brought onto the stage. There seemed to me to be absolutely no dramatic, musical or logical reason for this, though in the publicity for the opera it was being hailed as a particular attraction, along with the fact that there would be some nudity involved in the production.

Maybe I was just too near the back of the concert hall to appreciate either. All I can say is I'm glad the singing was quite good.