Show me the sea and I’m in there. Even a high wind and higher waves couldn’t keep me out of the fairly warm waters of the English Channel at St Leonard’s-on-Sea yesterday.

Mind you, I had to drag myself away from showbiz columnist Baz Bamigboye’s lunch party in the splendid Edwardian villa he and his wife Trish Evans have occupied (escaping their Camden Town bolthole) these past few years.

My only companions in the briny were two delightfully intrepid children of Baz’s Soho hairdresser, Daniel, but, boy, did we have fun. Dangerous fun, admittedly. As we trudged off the beach after an exhilarating ten minutes or so, a chap turned up to raise a red flag, suggesting the conditions were not necessarily ideal for recreational dippers.

This reminded me of the time, many years ago, when we — or rather, I — went swimming at Gay Head in Martha’s Vineyard, New England. The water was grey and choppy but I still didn’t really understand why I was the lone bather.

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A fair-sized audience sat through Hello, Dolly! in a constant drizzle of rain last night in Regent’s Park, but the actors only left the stage for ten minutes in the first act while the stage management team mopped up the surface damp.

Anyone who saw Carole Channing in the role will be surprised by Samantha Spiro’s guileful, snappy performance as Dolly Levi; she’s not all that loud, she’s funny and she’s not remotely bonkers.

Spiro may not sing as well (who could?) as Barbra Streisand in the movie, but she’s far more plausible as the merry meddling little widow who animates a day trip from Yonkers to Manhattan with her infectious love of dancing and show tunes.

What I most love about Timothy Sheader’s production is its neatness and elegance. Equal credit to choreographer Stephen Mear whose work here is every bit as good as on last season’s Gigi. The galloping waiters in their red jackets are a corporate treat.

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My life as a reviewer came pleasingly full circle when my son was married in Liverpool at the weekend and the celebrations spilled through the city from the registry office to the Hope Street Hotel, the Racquet Club, the Albert Dock and Mathew Street.

Mathew Street was the home of the Cavern Club, where the Beatles played nearly three hundred dates between 1961 and 1964. And next door, at Number 18, Ken Campbell launched the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool with Illuminatus, one of his two great epic cycles, in November 1976.

The theatre site is not marked, and I couldn’t work out whether I spent that historic first day of performances in what is now a souvenir shop or Vivienne Westwood. But the atmosphere still hangs about the place, and many people I spoke to testified that Peter O’Halligan, the poet who found the old warehouse for Ken, is still around and thriving.

The Cavern has been rebuilt exactly as it was — a wonderful below gound warren of bricks, arches and cubicles focussed on the tiniest of imaginable  stages — just across the alley from the original site.

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The trouble with leaving the Edinburgh Festival is that, although you’re glad to be home, you start missing it, too. Mind you, I’m still recovering form the shock of seeing Princes Street dug up for the new trams that won’t even be running until 2011.

If Scotland was Germany, this work would have been finished months ago, and no-one would have allowed it to deface the annual festival. But Edinburgh, like most British cities, is now in a permanent state of road works hideousness.

Still, Sunday lunch in the Doric Tavern remains a special pleasure. And there’s a really wonderful new restaurant called The Dogs where the Hanover Wine Bar used to be. It’s very crowded and you have to book, so I’m not spoiling it by giving away the secret.

How do you deal with all the flyers in your face? Avoid the Royal Mile, that’s how. My favourite walk this year was along Cowgate and then up Forrester Road to Bedlam and Greyfriars’ Bobby. It was then a mere hop to Gilded Balloon and Pleasance Dome.

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I had a great time in Edinburgh, but it’s good to burst out of the bubble and come home.

Nine days away is a long time if you’re not near a beach, your wife or your own bed. And there’s a mountain of mail and other chores to deal with, not least preparations for my son’s wedding in Liverpool this weekend.

Among the mail is a letter from Maria Dafneros, the stunning young lady in the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend, who took me to a cubicle and stroked my skin in the meekly controversial fringe production Internal.

She apologises for being “too forward” in the cabin…”but I felt like taking the risk for something more personal.” How did she have my address? She asked for it after we danced in the forced intimacy of her little show (five actors, five punters).   
 
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Something extraordinary happened last night in the George Square Theatre: a review I had written of a non-existent musical was improvised on the spot as an hour-long, hilarious entertainment by the brilliant Showstoppers.

It featured a lascivious film director called Spatchcock and his blonde dipsomaniac bird of prey, Tipsy Hardon. As performed by Adam Meggido and Pippa Evans, this duo, vaguely resembling Alfred Hitchcock and his The Birds star Tippi Hedren, were beast and beauty, locked in a lustful tango, except that Tipsy dislikes the idea of slavery, human or animal. (more…)

Musicals are written in all sorts of ways. There’s even going to be one tonight based on a review I’ve written of a non-existent original.

But the likeable Radio One disc jockey Scott Mills has initiated an even more extraordinary method: Scott Mills the Musical has been interactively written with his own listeners after he perpetrated a hoax that he would appear in Edinburgh as a string of showbiz divas.

Instead, he appears as David Hasselhoff, the Baywatch hunk, and a complete nonentity - found in the radio station’s Search for a Scott - plays the DJ. (more…)

I was chatting with Lionel Blair and Clarke Peters yesterday afternoon - not a combination of showbiz luminaries I ever anticipated coming across - when Kate Copstick, editor of the Erotic Review, assailed us from the rear and threatened to take a photograph. What she would then have done with it, had she done so, I can’t imagine. There’s nothing much erotic about me and Lionel, though Clarke still cuts a pretty figure.

He is such a completely nice man, Clarke. He even pretended he didn’t know that I didn’t think much of the Denise van Outen show he’s just directed and started to ask what I thought of it. So there I was, in the middle of the Pleasance Courtyard, giving him notes of a slightly more extended nature than my tart paragraphs on Whatsonstage.com’s Festival website. (more…)

Since sitting painfully through the one-on-one blind date and encounter group show Internal, I’ve discovered that all sorts of things are happening in the cubicles.

I was offered a sip of liqueur, some touchy-feely caresses and an invitation to leave my address. Others have been given a topless eyeful and a detailed conversation about sexual preferences.

Joining in, like breaking up, is hard to do for most theatre audiences. The director Richard Eyre always says that one of his life’s regrets is turning down the chance to have sex on stage with the Living Theatre when they came to London in the late 1960s. (more…)

The weather is holding for the first weekend, and Simon Stephens made it to Edinburgh immediately after the opening of his brilliant Pornography at the Tricycle on Thursday night.

More or less twelve hours after Pornography opened, Simon’s in the Traverse for the Friday morning premiere of Sea Wall, a short piece he wrote for the Bush last year while the theatre was without electricity.

By the time I hit the Traverse, Simon’s all done and dusted and chewing the fat at the bar with Bush director Josie Rourke and his agent, Mel Kenyon. A bevy of critics have spent all day watching press shows.

They have not been joined by Stephen Daldry, who’s been on the beach eight miles away at Portobello. (more…)