So after a hectic two weeks in Edinburgh assessing for the MTM:UK Musical Theatre Awards, we have found the winner of the DressCircle.com Award for Best New Musical which has been offered a place in Perfect Pitch.

The winner Tir Nan Og is written by Dave Anderson and is the semi-autobiographical tale of a middle-aged, lost and disappointed human being who sets off on a voyage of discovery as an entertainer on a North Sea ferry and soon finds herself undergoing strange trials and adventures, from the mean streets of the red-light district in Amsterdam to a drifting boat full of slaughtered migrants, and one endlessly dying child.

We hope they will accept the offer and make the trip from Scotland to London for the event.

The full line up of shows in this years Perfect Pitch will appear here in the next few days…..

Last Thursday, the ‘Whatsonstagers’ braved the elements of what Roger casually described as a cool ‘November evening’ (complete with wind and rain, which quite suited the tone of the play), albeit actually in August, to attend another open air Whatsonstage.com Outing. This time it was to Shakespeare’s Globe for a performance of Jack Shepherd’s ‘Holding Fire!’ directed by Mark Rosenblatt.

With our tickets (to top price seats, thankfully undercover), programmes, stickers, Whatsonstage magazines, cushions (thanks to cushion vouchers the Globe kindly provided for us) and the promise of a free drink and Q&A with the writer, director and cast members following the show - we all settled down to watch what was to be an epic story of the Chartist uprisings, which utilised the whole of the Globe’s space with actors turning up in quite unexpected places, occasionally seated next to you encouraging you to join the rebellion!

The Q&A which followed was a big success giving the Whatsonstage group an exclusive opportunity to put their questions to the writer and the director. We were also pleased to be unexpectedly joined by three cast members, including Peter Hamilton Dyer, and they were all immensely pleased that so many of you turned out, with Mark, the director, commenting on how nice it is to have so many people enthuse about the play and theatre itself.

If you have any comments or memories to share, please do add them!

See you for our next Outing on Monday!

We’re down to our last three days in Edinburgh now, and the city is at its busiest. The last weekend of the Fringe sees companies pull out all the stops to try and pack out their audiences, impress the awards judges, and generally go out with a bang. The free-for-all flyering posts on the Royal Mile are burgeoning and have at least doubled in thickness with layers upon layers of posters stuck over whatever was pasted on just minutes before. The crowds have also got bigger, as locals drag themselves out to enjoy a last night or two of fun, and students from all over the country make the trip up, safe in the knowledge that the expense of this soon-to-be lost weekend can be covered by their quickly-approaching loans. Tourists too, throng the streets more than ever, and can be easily spotted by the oversize maps they carry, never quite folding perfectly over the bulge of their oversize cameras slung loosely around their expectant necks. They are also the only group regularly willing not only to watch, but also to pay good money to see a kilted anachronism squeaking out tunes of independence on the criminally-annoying bagpipes. Everyone here makes up their own part of this great yet temporary melting-pot, rubbing shoulders with others they’d never come across, and contributing in their own way, whatsoever it be. Until Monday at least, the grey stone streets will still resound with the many-accented crowd’s seething hubbub, and the shows will go on.

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There are few things sadder than the sight of an artist who survives a flop blaming everyone else involved with hindsight. So it proved in yesterday’s Evening Standard, when Michael Ball turned on the ENO and all responsible for the dire Kismet as if it was nothing to do with him, squire!

The rehearsals were a shambles, he reveals, the ENO is “amateur” when it comes to musicals (hardly a great revelation, that, after Keith Warner’s Pacific Overtures and Jude Kelly’s On the Town), the choreographer walked out, the director “buggered off on a plane” straight after the first night, there was a civil service mentality about hours of work, and so on.

Dear me, why didn’t the poor love do something about all this when he was actually there instead of belly-aching about it after it’s all over? You can understand why, possibly, because he has so much else to think about. For instance, the Proms concert he’s giving this coming Monday.

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I work hard at overcoming my main prejudices — against marrows, anything with Oliver Ford Davies in it, Stephen Sondheim musicals, grotty pub theatres, the Trafalgar Studios, Blanche Marvin — but I draw the line at dog-owners. Not dogs. Their attached humans.

I was running yesterday — well. jogging — on Hampstead Heath when a grisly grey mutt started jumping round my kneecaps as if I was a hot and steaming piece of succulent red meat. I shouted in a friendly fashion towards the owner: “If you can’t control your dog, put the (expletive deleted) thing on a lead.”

As usual, the human moron started effing and blinding back in my direction. “You’re all the bloody same, you joggers,” he snarled, “what’s the matter with you?!”

This reminded me of the time when a doberman went for my throat. “He’s only being friendly,” cooed the fatuous owner. These people presume you know what their dogs are like as well as they do. Well, we don’t, and we don’t want to, either, thank you very much. Power to the people, death to dog-owners (the stupid ones, anyway).

I am glad to say that most theatrical dog-owners on the heath are very well behaved. Notable among them are poet Adrian Mitchell, casting director Gillian Diamond, actor Jason Watkins, actresses Patti Love and Bernice Stegers, critic Rhoda Koenig and playwright David Hare.

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I haven’t been able to update for the last few days for a couple of reasons – the difficulty of finding reliable wireless hotspots in town, and a tenacious virus that has kept me in bed for most of the time when I’d be able to search for them. You really miss out on so much when you’re laid up ill here, due to the copious amount of shows, and the limited time in which to see them. The repeated late nights haven’t helped, and the fact that many pubs open for business at 6 AM, just after the clubs close, means that it’s easy to turn a quick nightcap into the next day’s drinking session. If only the prices were cheaper…

I am now re-approaching my pre-Festival levels of energy and enthusiasm as this bug shifts, so am back in the swing of things. I’m off to see Russell Howard tonight, and Escaping Hamlet and Fuerzabruta tomorrow, so I’ve got a great couple of days to look forward to. Here’s a round-up of the more interesting shows I’ve seen recently.

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There are always several Proms one wants to attend in person — next Monday’s Evening with Michael Ball is quite near the top of my list — but one I simply couldn’t miss was last night’s Albert Hall debut of the much lauded Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.

The kids from the slums and barrios under the dynamic leadership of 26 year-old conductor Gustavo Dudamel (he started in the band when he was eleven) played Shostakovich’s magnificent Tenth as if they knew the whole wicked truth about the world and then launched into Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic dances from West Side Story with a brio that was unbelievable. Was it a political decision, I wonder, to skip the “I Want To Be In America” section?

Then, after some raucous Venezuelan tango music, they all donned patriotic shell-suit jackets and became propagandist symbols of President Chavez’s controversial regime: chavs for Chavez, in fact.

This was my annual night out in Proms supremo Nicholas Kenyon’s box, a treat that will probably terminate next year when Nick’s moved on to the Barbican.

He always has a good set of guests, and pre-show and interval mingling is fraught with chatty pleasures. Last night’s gang included David Hare with his wife Nicole Fahri, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, columnist Martin Kettle, broadcaster Sue McGregor and music-loving Tory MP Edward Garnier.

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Talk of recruits for Falstaff’s army reminds me that the worst kept secret in Stratford this week is the return of David Tennant — BBC TV’s latest Dr Who — to the RSC next year, when he will play Hamlet and Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Which RSC company will that be, then? It’s all terribly confusing at the moment, with Trevor Nunn’s RSC company revving up for the New London, Michael Boyd’s RSC company heading for the Roundhouse with the Histories, Tim Supple’s RSC Asian company touring the world and various other RSC companies doing…oh, I don’t know, the Margaret Attwood play that finishes this weekend in the Swan and the Roald Dahl show for kids in the Civic Hall in November.

I’m not quite sure where Gregory Doran’s RSC company stands in all this. Perhaps he’s handling the David Tennant wing of the RSC company. It all sounds very busy, but such galloping random activity is most unlikely to lead to a final definition of what we, or indeed the public, might choose to think of as the once glorious Royal Shakespeare Company.

Edinburgh, as a comedy destination, can mean many things for performers. It can be a homecoming of sorts, with artists returning to live stand-up, as TV personalities Frank Skinner and Sean Hughes are doing this year; it can be a fun holiday or more trying testing-ground for the swathes of student comics every year; it can simply be another gig for the wearied career journeyman. For many, however, it is the ultimate chance to be noticed, picked up by top promoters, and a springboard to a successful job, bypassing the long slog up to fame through pubs and clubs. Young talent is always on offer, and will be seen by reviewers, as well as punters, who would not normally venture near these unproven hopefuls. Part of the joy of returning to the Fringe year after year is seeing acts develop, become popular, and make it to the big time – I saw Russell Howard four or five years ago, and now he’s a regular on Mock the Week, and remains one of the funniest shows in town.

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When David Warner’s Falstaff arrives in Gloucestershire to recruit his soldiers for the civil war in Henry IV Part Two at Stratford, the ground work had been done on opening night by Julius D’Silva’s bottle-nosed Bardolph, who instructed a segment of the Courtyard audience to get to their feet.

They did so, reluctantly, and the enlisted takers of the king’s shilling included one or two critics: Bulldog Billington of The Guardian and Midshipman Marmion of Associated Newspapers (Mercenary Division). Only Corporal Clapp of The Observer remained rooted to her seat, later explaining to all and sundry in the bar that she was a conscientious objector.

In truth, the whole “audience participation” thing was a bungled effort. This kind of wheeze might work at the Globe, but you can’t suddenly start treating the audience as if they were pantomime fodder in the middle of a right-on, not all that well acted production of a Shakespeare play.

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