June 4th, 2006

:: The Lion King

The Lion King

The Lion King Broadway musical would have to be one of the best shows that I have ever seen. At first I was quite apprehensive of the conversion of a Disney animation into a Broadway musical. It has already drawn rave reviews for its dazzling special effects, staging, and the inspired music by Tim Rice, Elton John & Hans Zimmer. Its magical performance by a cast that used masks and puppetry combined with live acting conveyed the atmosphere of The Lion King flawlessly.

The Lion King @ Regal Theatre

This production broke new ground in theatrical technology, attempting to bring to the stage such vast and sweeping elements as the rolling African savannah and the famous wildebeest stampede in which Mufasa is killed by his brother Scar. Far from shrinking from the challenge or toning down the scale of the film, the director Julie Taymor succeeded in reproducing the film’s vastness through ingenious staging techniques and experimental methods.

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:: Melbourne Holiday Wrap Up

Flinders Station @ Night

Melbourne city is a very beautiful place. The amount of artistic buildings that are within the CBD are abundant and they vary from the Old Victorian style architecture to the modern day abstract sky scrapers.   

We pretty much spent the entire trip doing shopping… shopping and more shopping. Friday night we managed to catch up with some of our old family friends from Zambia and Melbourne. It was really good to see all of the people that we grew up with having time to reminisce about the old times. It was great meeting up with Nikoli, Sohani, Rajeevi and Praveeni (excuse the spelling mistakes) for dinner. All of you have grown up so much and its been so long since we have seen each other! You guys definitely have to keep in touch and hopefully we’ll see you at the wedding!

Saturday morning we caught up with some other friends from Melbourne and later that day we went to Queen Victoria Markets… all I can say is MY GOSH… if you ever go you have to try the Dutch Pancakes!!! They are absolutely to die for! There’s heaps of bootleg clothing for sale in the markets and if you’re after nice affordable leather that’s the place to go!

 

Dutch Pancakes

 

Later on we check into the Novotel St. Kilda which is situated right on the beach front. We had a beach view room that was very cosy. Saturday night we checked went out for dinner with Ash, Grete and Tristan. The restaurant was called The River and was located on The South Bank. The view and the food was amazing. We had a table located upstairs right next to a window and we could see the entire river view. Later on we headed out to a pub for some drinks and I took the opportunity to take some photos of the city landscapes. Check out the photo galleries later and feel free to leave some comments.

Luna Park

On Sunday we checked out Luna Park and the Sunday Markets located on the beach front. Here’s an interesting useless fact… part of the terms and conditions of being able to have a stall at the markets is that you need to be the person that created the item that you are selling… They had everything that you would see at a market, and some interesting things like jewellery that had been formed from cutlery like forks and spoons! We got so caught up in the shopping that we had to rush to the Regal Theatre to see The Lion King that night.

All in all it was a shopping fiasco and I’d have to say it would’ve been nice to have stayed another week so that we could take in more of the sights. I would definitely recommend checking it out…