The only downer over the weekend was that the opening of the Old Vic’s Cinderella on Sunday lunchtime was postponed because of Sandi Toksvig’s chest infection. Until then, it was merriment all the way, starting with the Whatsonstage awards nominations party at the Cafe de Paris on Friday and the two-part Nicholas Nickleby at the Gielgud on Saturday.

Elaine Paige and Michael Ball graced our party with charm and good humour, and other guest announcers, Roger Lloyd Pack and John Gordon Sinclair, opening this week in Dealer’s Choice and Absurd Person Singular respectively, were no less affable, if a bit lower key. When Lloyd Pack and our own Roger Foss went on stage together, I thought the day’s rogering had already gone too far. Imagine if they’d summoned Elena Roger from the floor to join them…

The Cafe de Paris is a great venue for such a shindig, and we had a guest list to match, from Janie Dee to Peter Straker, Caroline O’Connor to baritonal tenor John Rawnsley, Nicolas Kent to Leanne Jones. The place was as densely packed with colourful characters as Nicholas Nickleby itself…

As Saturday was such a terrible day, inside a theatre was a good place to be. My Dickens of a guest was the art historian Anna Gruetzner Robins who commented most favourably on the stylish modifications and refurbishments that the saintly (but still wicked) Cameron Mackintosh has completed on the theatre.

Not only was Cameron’s mother in the Press day throng. His younger brother Nicky had laid on the really fine sandwiches for the overweight but somehow undernourished critics, some of whom fell upon them with unseemly haste. One or two even smuggled a handful back in after the first interval, not a cool rule to follow.

In the ninety minute gap between the two parts, most of us repaired to the adjacent hostelries and Chinese restaurants. I led a small select troupe to the excellent new Chinese Experience on Shaftesbury Avenue, while Nicky Mackintosh and his mother repaired to Ming’s opposite the Palace Theatre stage door. Producer Duncan Weldon and his party patronised a favourite chopstick and chow place in Lisle Street.
 
One old friend, veteran showbiz reporter and former Associated Newspapers executive Roderick Gilchrist, went Christmas shopping. What did he buy? A cashmere sweater for himself in Austin Reed! Talk about a self-centred, self-regarding Scrooge!

In the second part, the buffet table groaned with Christmas pies, some of which, again, were smuggled by the incorrigible freeloaders back into the stalls. Which all helped the day go with a rare old swing and — as red wine was also on offer in plastic beakers — a bit of a swig.

Imagine our distress on vacating the stalls to learn that the Press seats at Cinderella on the morrow were cancelled as Sandi Toksvig had been sent home by her doctors. Poor love has obviously been too stretched writing BBC radio scripts, recording them, and dashing about to corporate dinner engagements, as we learned from her Sunday Telegraph diary yesterday.

But the critics weren’t bemoaning the loss of Sandi. They lamented the loss of the free Sunday morning brunch on offer before the matinee in a new Waterloo brasserie. What a disaster: we all had to stay at home and cook our own Sunday lunch.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.