Tickets for A Night at the Movies are now all sold out! Keep an eye on our website in case any extras become available at the last minute, and keep Saturday 19 July free in your diary for our next London concert.
On Saturday 25 January we’ll be joined on stage by the hugely talented London Gay Big Band! They’ll be helping us bring to life a whole host of movie music favourites. Having heard them perform numerous times, most recently with the lovely London Gay Men’s Chorus at their Hallowe’en Ball, we’re delighted to have them join us.
The London Gay Big Band was founded in the summer of 2011 and is a full-size, 20 piece, jazz orchestra made up of talented musicians and vocalists, bringing a fresh vibe to the London music scene.
Since its formation, the Band has gone from strength to strength, performing at a number of high profile events and venues throughout London and beyond, including the Southbank Centre, the main stage at Trafalgar Square for World Pride 2012, main stage at BT London Live in Victoria Park (part of London 2012 Olympics), The Langham Hotel, Hackney Empire, Floridita, Clapham Street Party, The Lord Mayor’s Show & Charing Cross Theatre, among others.
More information and details of their other upcoming shows
Category: Blog Page
5 best bits of the Pinkies Christmas weekender
The now legendary Pink Singers annual weekend away took place a week before Christmas, and was packed with festive delights! After piling on the bus down to Sussex with fellow choir members, the party and workshops started in earnest.
My highlights would have to be:
- The peaceful, picturesque location offering a welcome change to bustling London
- Singing choir songs around the camp fire… even if we were ever so slightly out of tune and time… let’s blame the mulled wine for that
- Learning how to sing well with the brilliant Sam Kenyon, including putting on a country western accent by replacing words with ‘quack’!
- The meticulously organised and delicious Christmas dinner for 70 people, served by elves and reindeer
- The price! How they ever managed to organise such a well-catered weekend on such a small budget is just amazing!
Having the opportunity to get to know so many members of the choir – they are such a genuinely great bunch of crazy people and I’m looking forward to more hilarious, fun nights in 2014!
Photographs by Hsien Chew and Simon Pearson
The best film I’ve never seen and the worst film I’ve ever seen
In the latest of a series of blog posts leading up to our next concert, A Night at the Movies, alto Jess recalls a particularly moving film moment…
I don’t often watch films at home. We all have a far shorter attention span these days, apparently, and when I have other distractions anything longer than The Great Muppet Caper (95 mins) makes me feel I should be doing something useful such as re-arranging the magnetic fridge poetry.
As a result, there are many good films that I’ve simply failed to see. One of the best has surely got to be Apocalypse Now.
Continue reading “The best film I’ve never seen and the worst film I’ve ever seen”
Getting into character for A Night at the Movies
We’re getting a little too excited about our upcoming concert, so much so that this happened:
Can you name all the films we pay tribute to? We can count over twenty…
Got your tickets for A Night at the Movies, yet? If not, hurry – they are selling fast!
Films that mean something: Philadelphia
In the first of a series of blog posts leading up to our next concert, A Night at the Movies, Iain recalls a particularly moving film moment…
I was a 20 year old 1st year medical student when the film “Philadelphia” was released in 1993 and I saw it with my Mum during one of the university holidays – I think it’s probably the only film we’ve seen together in the cinema that features gay characters and it was certainly the first one we’d seen after I had come out earlier that year.
The film tells the story of a senior lawyer, “Andrew Beckett”, played by Tom Hanks, who begins to suffer from AIDS related illness and then battles discrimination from his employers due to this and his subsequently revealed homosexuality.
It was pretty much the first major Hollywood film to tackle HIV/AIDS and to feature a sympathetic portrait of a gay man played by a big film star. The film tackled prejudice against people with HIV/AIDS head on as well as challenging homophobia and yet did not meet with 100% approval from LGBT people. Many of the scenes of affection between Beckett and his lover (Antonio Banderas) were cut from the film owing to sensitivities around mainstream depictions of gay love and the only way we know that the two are actually physically intimate, is a kiss in the final cut of a scene (shot from behind Banderas’s head so that you can’t actually see their lips touch).
There is one incredibly powerful scene, which has always stayed with me. Beckett is meeting with the lawyer representing him when he is distracted by the music playing in the background: it is Maria Callas singing the aria “La Mamma Morta” from the opera Andrea Chenier by Umberto Giordano. Continue reading “Films that mean something: Philadelphia”