After the long day at Highclere yesterday, we had a bit of a laze-in and had a smoothie/juice brekkie at Joe and the Juice (a Copenhagen-based coffee shop), which has become our go-to in the morning. I navigated the tube system and went with Linda and Hope to drop them off at the Churchill War Rooms museum…

We had planned to go right at opening time, but a quick check of the website said you needed an entrance ticket (even though it’s free) in an effort to control the crowds. Fair enough. Our entry time was 11:40am. We arrived and discovered that not only did nobody check to see if we were there at the right time, nobody checked tickets at all. People were free just to come in whenever, with or without a ticket. That’s bad. The place was so packed, you couldn’t see nor read much about anything. At least some of the statues were elevated so you could still see those.

…but for any exhibit that was lower down, good luck actually seeing it. One of my main reasons to visit was to see the Rosetta Stone. Here it is.

Then I headed across the street to M&M World, which I don’t really “get” - but hey, everyone has their ‘thing’ and some folks are really into M&Ms.

From there, I headed into SOHO, a famous district full of restaurants and shopping.

I knew we’d be back in this area the next day, so I didn’t spend much time looking into shops and things, but I did want to grab a quick lunch. I found a chicken sandwich place called “Coqfighters” (I love a good punny name) and a quick glance at their menu said they have a Nashville Hot chicken sandwich. I had my doubts, but I was willing to try it.

It’s a crispy chicken breast with jalapeño slaw and spicy mayo. It’s very, very, very good.
But it’s not a Nashville Hot chicken sandwich. Not every spicy chicken sandwich qualifies as “Nashville Hot” - that’s a specific thing and it goes like this:

The chicken pieces are marinated in a concoction of buttermilk, pickle brine, and hot sauce for several hours. Then they’re dunked in flour, then back into the mixture, then back in the flour again. That’s the first key: the chicken is already spicy before it’s even cooked. Then once it’s fried, it gets drizzled (or soaked, depending on taste) with a fiery brew of cayenne pepper, butter, and lard. No, really. And it’s freaking amazing. It’s also very, very hot.

It was still a really good sammich, though, and the fries were off the charts good, so I didn’t mind that it wasn’t what it claimed to be.

Back to the hotel for a quick rest, then off to an early dinner before our first theatre show. We booked a table at Joe Allen, the London counterpart of one of Rob’s fave NYC restaurants. The food was tasty and I had to try the Cheeseburger Spring Roll appetizer.

Then we walked from the restaurant to the Playhouse Theatre by way of the Victoria Embankment. It was really nice.

We got to the theatre a half hour before curtain and joined the queue outside. I had our tickets screenshotted on my phone so I wouldn’t need a wifi or cell signal to pull up the email. That’s when I noticed that the charger hadn’t connected properly and my phone was less than 10% battery. I had enough juice left to pull up the screenshots, though, so everything was fine. We already knew how to get back to the hotel on the tube, so I wouldn’t need the phone anymore, anyway. The nice attendant scanned the tickets and…. everything went south. The tickets were for the next day. We had two nights of shows and somehow got our timing flip-flopped. We were at the Playhouse Theatre to see Cabaret, which was supposed to be for tomorrow and we had less than a half hour to get to the Bridge Theatre for Guys&Dolls, which we were supposed to be at tonight. I tried to pull up how to get to the other theatre from where we were, but I knew that the walk from the London Bridge station to the Bridge Theatre was around 15 minutes and we had to actually get there first. I didn’t know which tube lines to take to get there and my phone was pretty much useless. Getting from here to there in less than a half hour was going to be impossible.

Amazingly, a really nice young woman behind us in line heard what was happening and she called an Uber for us and even got out of the queue to walk us over to where the Uber was parked. I said that it would get charged to her if she used her app and she said, “I’m a child-sitter for a billionaire. It’s his card, no worries!” We hopped in the Uber and managed to get to the theatre just in time for the show.

I’ve seen Guys&Dolls before, but it was at Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, so it was a bit of a low-budget affair. Still fun, though!
This production is wildly innovative, with a third of the audience down on the floor with the actors and a stage that raises and lowers in sections to create different scenes (and so you can see the actors above the audience on the floor).

There are two pairs of love stories in the show. The main one is Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown - they get the good songs and the main storyline and both were fantastic. The secondary love story, however, stole the show. It’s Nathan and Adelaide, engaged for 14 years but never married. Adelaide is usually played as a ditzy blond who’s too naive to see that Nathan’s never going to marry her. In this production, though, Adelaide is played as a sassy black woman who isn’t ditzy at all. She just really loves Nathan and she’s willing to wait, but not for much longer. And lawd have mercy, gurl can SANG.

Her fiancé Nathan was supposed to be played by Daniel Mays, the one ‘big name’ in the cast, but he was off the night we saw it and the part was played by his understudy, Mark Oxtoby. In the pic below, the regular is on the left and the understudy on the right.

I don’t know how well Daniel Mays plays the part (the reviews were very good, though), but I can’t imagine it being played better than Mark Oxtoby’s performance that we saw. He stole the stage every time he was on it and in the scenes where he and Adelaide were together, it was some amazing chemistry between the two. So even though we nearly had a disastrous evening of missed opportunity, it ended up being a fantastic night.

That was yesterday (at the time of this writing) and now it’s today. I’m putting both days into one post, since we have to be up at an ungodly hour tomorrow and I won’t have time after tonight’s show to post anything.

We headed back into SOHO this morning and did a bit of browsing at the iconic Liberty store.

It’s a beautiful store full of really expensive things.
Speaking of beautiful stores full of expensive things, we went back to Harrods. This time I made sure to check out the food markets and they were everything I’d heard and more.

We had some tea and scones at the café before Rob headed off to another store and I headed back to Camden Town to see if it was less crowded than last time. It was. That made it nice, and easier to people-watch.

And then back to the hotel, where I’m hurrying to finish this so we can head back to Joe Allen, walk through the park, and then to see Cabaret on the correct night.

OH, if you’d like a teaser trailer for the Guys&Dolls show we saw, this is how it looked.

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