I should be grateful the day didn’t start with a fire alarm until 8am, pretty good! Out of spite, and maybe because all this holidaying is starting to catch up with me, I slept in for another hour. We don’t have anything booked til 2:30, so I guess sometimes when you’re on holiday, you’re allowed to have a bit of a, well, holiday.
As usual, down to Pret for a coffee and a tasty breakfast. It was also time to figure out what to do with the morning. It’s absolutely beautiful weather, but the sleep in has left it a bit late to pop over to regent’s park, so instead we’re on a shopping mission. So why not put on our Sydney thinking hat, and head to the nearest Westfield?
The quickest way was by bus, so that’s another mode of transport to tick off the list. One thing I learned, when a double decker bus “leans” to allow easy access for passengers to get on or off, you really feel it on the top deck. As a bonus, it was a fully electric bus – very quiet, but also super comfortable. An eco-conscious start to the day 🙂


We didn’t stay too long at Westfield – Perry didn’t find something he was looking for, and we had a show to get to. So after finding our way to White City tube we caught the (very very warm!) Central Line , changed at Notting Hill Gate for the District & Circle line back to Gloucester Road. (Why so much detail? Because years from now, nerdy future-me will no doubt want to know 🙂 ). That was only a 5 minute stop to pick up jackets for later tonight, as we had two shows quite close to each other, time-wise.
So, straight back on to the tube, to Embankment, which wasn’t the closest station to the Novello Theatre but apparently offered the fastest way to get there. As we got on the train yet again we could well have been singing “Mamma Mia, here we go again!” Because Mamma Mia was indeed where we were going. Again. We’d seen it in Sydney before but not here. The theatre itself is quite beautiful.



The show is (breaking the trend) not a tragic love story, but rather a somewhat odd premise of a young lady not knowing who her father is so she invites all three possible contenders to her upcoming wedding. I guess in the Mamma Mia universe, DNA tests simply don’t exist. It could have made for a very short show.
From what I remember of Sydney, I’m sure this one’s set was much simpler, most scenery was just the taverna where they live, there wasn’t really anything else of note. Still, it mostly worked well. I guess for a ‘jukebox’ musical like this one you’re not going have deep Macbeth-like levels of character introspection, no Olivier-like performances where an actor almost disappears and all you see is the character itself writ large on the stage. For this show, some (most?) of the performances verged on caricature rather than character – and sorry to single out the “Australian” (definitely not Australian) character with his appalling accent and all his mugging and gurning for the audience – I now really understand what they mean about an actor “chewing the scenery”. But, it’s an ABBA show, could it really be taken very seriously?
It was still very entertaining, the singers could sing, though a number of the songs had this weird kind of loud/soft dynamic from verse to chorus which didn’t make any sense, unless you always love to turn the volume up to 11 when the chorus of your favourite song comes on, then this is the show for you. Little things like that aside, it is valuable to take a moment to remember, here’s a big musical playing all over the world, where all the lead characters are female, and some (gasp) middle aged women at that. It’s refreshing, and it’s important.
Immediately after the show finished we were on to the next. This time, walking over a bridge to Waterloo for the Jubilee Line to North Greenwich, then to the O2 – more commonly known back in the day as The Millennium Dome.
The Jubilee Line is a more fancy train line with doors all along the platform so you can’t fall down on the tracks. It was also super-super crowded but we made it to North Greenwich, after which is a very short walk to the O2, and then a slightly longer walk inside the O2 (it’s huge!) looking for our destination: Mamma Mia The Party.




Yes, two ABBA shows in the one day – indeed two Mamma Mia shows in one day, but both very different. Mamma Mia The Party is a theatre restaurant. I think this is the first one I’ve been to. The room itself was enormous, there were probably 100 tables or more. The show had a storyline about as substantial as the deliciously light Prosecco/elderflower cocktail server on arrival. Boy meets girl, girls dad hates boy, every body breaks up but oh gosh they all get back together again by the end. Plus a side-chick for comic relief. Sorry if that’s too many spoilers. It was though, purposely conducted and extremely effective at shoe-horning as many ABBA songs in as possible – I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? The performers were fine, you know you’re not going to get someone fresh off Broadway, so it’s OK. Everyone put in a lot of energy, including the waitstaff who were sometimes involved in the numbers and if not, encouraging people to clap and/or sing along. You were also more than welcome to take photos, just no video-ing,







There was also a very helpful bit just in case you’d forgotten the words to Ring Ring.



And a fun part where people were encouraged to wave their serviettes around (the breeze it created was kinda welcome too)

It was all quite light and fluffy (to be expected) – but took a genuinely surprising turn when they summoned up the great witch Hecate, everything went dark, and we had a trapeze artist rise out a fountain dripping wet… I don’t remember an ABBA song like that, still, it sure did bring an unexpected twist to the show so gotta be happy with that.




They didn’t forget the Restaraunt side of Theatre Restaurant by any means. It was a set menu – a deliciously fresh Greek salad to start with, followed by some beautifully cooked beef and lamb with zucchini and onions, and a perfect slice of lemon cake to finish. All the food was great, couldn’t fault it at all. The other winner was ‘White Sangria’ which was bright orange, thanks to all the apricot pulp in it, it was absolutely delicious and I feel absolutely zero shame in the fact that we worked our way through two jugs of the stuff.
The show, which let us in at exactly 6:30, finished on the dot at 10:00pm, and even the show was over the venue continues to host an ABBA disco for an hour or two after that. Apparently. As fun as it was watching everybody’s nanna dance badly after one too many Prosecco’s, it was time to leave and head home. This time the maps app told us change from the Jubilee Line to the District & Circle line at Westminster, and (nerd alert, yet again) Westminster station has the most most amazing huge kind of void where the escalators and things go, it’s so off but so enormous it somehow ends up being kinda beautiful. It might only be a strange nerd thing, but here’s a picture just in case.

More things to do tomorrow as we count down our last few London days…