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dingledsugden · 6 years

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When I was asked if I would like to go to the Grand ball, of course the answer was going to be a resounding YES! Once upon a smile have been running the grand ball every year for a long while now, and everyone I have spoken to that have been previously have said it’s the best night of the year.

I had been talking to the friends that I went with for a quite a while, through our love of all things emmerdale so I was excited to meet them. When I did, straight away it was like I had known them for years. We had the best time getting to know each other and enjoying ourselves.

We got to the hotel and the first port of call was the bar, after 6 hours on a train and another 20 mins in a taxi I was very ready for some refreshments. We then got ready for the ball and then back to the bar we went! The emmerdale stars were starting to filter into the bar with Danny and Daniel wondering in for pre show courage and supportive words from their friends.

After which it was time to go over to where the ball was being held. We walked the red carpet with various stars of Corrie behind us. A very surreal moment. Convening in the foyer, we watched Danny and Daniel walk in with Xander Rossous, the brother of Manchester bombing attack victim Saffie Rossous. They didn’t leave his side, posing for pictures with the press.

Drinks reception was next on the list, a free glass of bubbly when we got there. Shortly after which we ran into Anthony Quinlan (Pete) and his girlfriend. We chatted with him and got a group shot with our group. Next up was Ned Porteous (Joe Tate), Shaun Thomas (Gerry) and Thomas Atkinson (Lachlan White), looking very dapper in their suits, Ned supporting a trademark Joe Tate Smirk!

Shortly afterwards it was time to take our seats at the table. We were greeted by the lovely voices of the Manchester shoe choir singing the hits from ‘The Greatest Showman’ soundtrack. A move which delighted Sally Dexter who was enthusiastically dancing along to ‘This is me’ whilst the emmerdale cast were having a group picture.

Cel Spellman was chosen as the host to replace Vince Miller (Danny’s dad). He had incredibly big shoes to fill but is clearly a natural born entertainer so took the challenge and ran with it. We were treated to a video tape introducing us to Cel being the host and also Danny and Dan, Danny being called ‘Darren Miller the ex emmerdale actor’, a move which was found hilarious in the room.

It was then time to see them on the stage! Looking very dapper and matching in their three piece suits, that would not be out of place on a models catwalk. They thanked Vince for all his hard work over the years and there was a lovely Dad/Son moment with Danny and Vince.

Once upon a smile had previously teased some amazing acts during the night. We certainly had them with the likes of Union J, and Calum Scott. But Danny would certainly have a soft spot for the first entertainer of the night which was Honey G! Everyone in the room was singing back to her. A great party starter. She also had a dance troop in front of her who were fantastic.

Learning how much the charity does to help others never fails to amaze me and this was no different. Hearing about the terrible events of the Manchester bombing and its affects on one family didn’t leave a dry house in the entire ball room. Just one of the many reasons why OUAS is needed up and down the country.

Whilst dinner was being served we were treated to an angel voice from Isobel Steele, singing original songs as well as some covers, with a very proud brother looking on!

Another girl who was helped by the charity, named Amelia, was then welcomed onto the stage where she sang “Dancing on my own’ a cover of Calum Scott’s version. And who should pop up behind her half way through the song but Calum himself. A wonderfully emotional moment for her and everyone watching.

An auction was a point in the night where an incredible sum was raised, the most they have ever raised at the ball with this kind of auction. Some of the prizes included an emmerdale village tour, including mill, which went for £3000! I’ll be interested to see exactly what the total of everything was. Whilst the auction happened, both Danny and Daniel had walked past the table checking we were all good, a lovely moment from the most lovely men.

By this point we had finished our drinks so we needed a refill, a bar was required! Whilst there were bumped into Adam Thomas who assured us he had his plans for the future and we congratulated him on the impending arrival of his daughter as well as his son being the cutest bean.

The dance floor was calling me all night and after we had finished dinner it was time to throw some shapes. Union J were the band that closed the night, some very upbeat songs perfect for dancing too.

Now I get to meeting the delight that is Ryan Hawley. I literally can’t comprehend why he doesn’t see how loved he is. We congratulated him on his British Soap Awards nomination and he just didn’t understand how he deserved it, if I didn’t love him enough already, that just made me love him more. And on the way back from the ladies (the drink has to go somewhere! 😂) we bumped into Danny, one of the main men. He was super kind and we said thank you for a wonderful night. We got pictures and went on our way back to the dance floor for the final part.

I realised this post is very long but there was just so much that happened. Truly was the most fantastic night. If you get the chance to go, do it’s for a wonderful cause and it’s a wonderful night!

#Danny Miller #Daniel Jillings #Ryan Hawley #Adam Thomas #isobel steele #Anthony Quinlan #Ned Porteous #Shaun Thomas #Thomas Atkinson #Calum Scott #Union J #Honey G #Emmerdale #long post

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mastcomm · 4 years

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Review: In ‘Grand Horizons,’ Marriage Is a Long-Running Farce

To call “Grand Horizons” one of the brightest shows to hit Broadway in years is not to tout its intelligence, which flickers. Rather, I mean that it is blindingly lit, no doubt in deference to the theatrical wisdom that defines comedy as what dies in the dark.

And, boy, does “Grand Horizons” want to sell itself as comedy. Not witty comedy with its verbal arabesques, nor intellectual comedy with its Paris Review name-checks, nor meta-comedy with its scrambled plotlines — but the vanilla kind that once dominated commercial theater. It’s not entirely meant as praise to say that this Second Stage production is a big-laugh, blue-joke, bourgeois lark of the type Neil Simon mastered until the times mastered him and the genre petered out.

There’s a reason it did, and perhaps what the playwright Bess Wohl is attempting in “Grand Horizons,” which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a last-ditch act of reclamation: a boulevard comedy for a cul-de-sac age.

She has certainly furnished the play with all the original equipment. For starters, there’s the zingy premise: Over dinner one night, Nancy, a retired librarian approaching 80, turns to Bill, her husband of 50 years, and calmly announces that she wants a divorce. “All right,” he answers, continuing to eat as the audience roars.

That Nancy is played by Jane Alexander, and Bill by James Cromwell — both actors with heavy résumés — suggests something darker may be in store. So does the occasional sound of gunshots seeping through the thin walls of the cookie-cutter house in the retirement community that gives the play its sarcastic title. That noise turns out to be coming from a television next door; it is merely misdirection like “Grand Horizons” as a whole, whose lunge at gravitas is too little, too late.

At least in part, that’s because Wohl and the director, Leigh Silverman, so overplay the sitcom style at the start. Following Nancy’s declaration and Bill’s acquiescence, their sons, Ben and Brian, descend in a flurry of this-isn’t-happening hysteria. Ben (Ben McKenzie) is the stereotypical firstborn, overburdened and bossy; Brian (Michael Urie) the stereotypical baby, overindulged and whiny. Both insist that people so nearly dead as their parents have no business splitting up. “How much else even is there?” Ben sputters.

“Grand Horizons” is filled with thin jokes like that, the kind that do not hesitate to sell character reality up the river in exchange for a chuckle. Ben’s wife, Jess (Ashley Park), is a nonstop satire of touchy-feely therapists as seen less in life than in other plays; she urges her in-laws, who were never physically close, to begin the healing by holding hands. And Brian — especially in Urie’s by now predictable performance — is a tired burlesque of the dithery, narcissistic gay man who turns everything he touches into silly drama. Indeed, he’s a drama teacher, currently directing a school production of “The Crucible” that features 200 students.

The parents are more complexly written — and more compellingly acted — but even so, Nancy’s insistence that, after a loveless marriage, she deserves a chance at authentic joy is as often as not played for dirty-talking-old-lady laughs. Alexander, with her patrician aplomb, does this beautifully; you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a woman who once played Eleanor Roosevelt sing the praises of cunnilingus.

But not everything beautifully done makes sense beyond its immediate context, and often the context seems woefully contrived. Though Bill is a classic sourpuss, Wohl has him enroll in a stand-up comedy class at the recreation center — largely, it seems, to let him tell a great old joke about St. Peter welcoming four nuns to heaven. Cromwell underplays this, and everything else, as if to avoid setting off believability alarms.

Also taking the stand-up class is Carla (Priscilla Lopez), whose free-spiritedness, meant to show up Nancy’s primness, is mostly demonstrated by her wearing a garish scarf. (The costumes are by Linda Cho.) Alas, the scarf is merely a fuchsia herring; Carla is just like everyone else, getting big laughs with cute sex talk.

I could go on — there’s a mortifying scene in which Brian brings home a man for a hookup — but I have to remind myself that Wohl is in fact one of our cleverest playwrights, exploring the outer limits of naturalism in search of new ways of expressing new feelings. Both “Small Mouth Sounds” and “Make Believe,” which are as suggestive and shadowy as “Grand Horizons” is obvious and glary, were on recent Top 10 lists of mine.

Like them, “Grand Horizons” is perfectly structured, mimicking the classic works of stage comedy with a stupendous Act I curtain, a neat Act II surprise and a final beat that would be haunting if the road leading to it were not so littered with extorted laughs. Nor can the production, including that alarming lighting by Jen Schriever, be faulted; Silverman seems to have staged the play exactly as Wohl intended, stopping shy only of a laugh track to get the audience coughing up yuks.

But what is it Wohl really intends? She’s too serious a playwright to be trying to game the market — though “Grand Horizons,” with its pace, pedigree and cast of six, is likely to be performed in regional and amateur theaters for years. Nor do I think it is purely a botch, a mess that got that way by itself. The constraints of its genre are too bizarre not to have been chosen deliberately, just as Wohl deliberately constrained “Small Mouth Sounds” by setting it at a wordless spiritual retreat, and “Make Believe” by using the playacting of children as a medium for dramatizing mistreatment.

“Grand Horizons,” then, may be doing something similar. The genre that Simon buffed to a high polish in works like “Plaza Suite” — a three-part marriage farce that returns to Broadway this spring — was built on cracks in American confidence that by 1968, when the play had its premiere, were beginning to undermine faith in our fundamental institutions. Those cracks having now become chasms, Wohl can use the falseness of Simonesque stage comedy to dramatize the falseness of her real subject, which is not divorce but marriage. Nancy calls it a stray dog, a boa constrictor, a box you can’t claw your way out of: “Don’t respect it because God knows it doesn’t respect you.”

Unfortunately, her realization that she can no longer tell the requisite wifely lies — the ones that say her husband and children are infinitely excusable — comes too late in her life, as too late in the play. “The first part of love is truth,” she concludes.

If only it were the first part of “Grand Horizons” as well. That might have been genuinely funny.

Grand Horizons

Tickets Through March 1 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 212-541-4516, 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

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