Week 294: A musical within a musical

I didn’t do very much last week, which is probably why I haven’t got around to writing this until now. We spent Monday morning travelling back from the festival, I did a lot of laundry on Monday afternoon and Tuesday, and apart from that I’ve been tinkering with some software projects. There are plenty of examples of plays within plays – I can think of three by Shakespeare off the top of my head (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Love’s Labours Lost) – but I don’t know of many musicals within musicals. We went to see the musical adaptation of The Producers at the Garrick Theatre on Wednesday. It was a lot of fun, the staging was clever, and there were some delightful costumes, especially for the pigeons. The film is set around the production of a musical, making the adaptation a musical within a musical. It can’t quite beat the original 1967 film in my affections, and it shares with it a weak plot in the second half, but it’s worth seeing. We found relatively cheap tickets with a…