The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

Well, the St James is interesting because, of course, Theatres are the kinds of buildings that often have hauntings, and I think it's because they have these very intense emotional histories of romance and tragedy and love and hate, and they really prove to be a kind of lightning rod for the paranormal.

So many historic theatres all have stories of their ghosts, the famous ghost of the Drury Lane Theatre and so on.

At the St. James, I believe there's at least two or three ghosts.

Really? Okay.

So I really have a fondness for the UK.

But, you know, we haven't been there since Drury Lane.

So we're very, very excited.

And I'm specifically excited to be in London again.

I was thinking about this actually when I was getting ready today.

I feel like we've spent sort of like, you know, if you're having a child and you kind of, we sort of like did the first part of raising the child in New York.

And now we did a big like preteen moment of like, you know, in the UK where we did the concerts at Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

And now I feel like the child is growing up and we're taking the big next step of like full, you know, teenagehood with the first production.

He was soon known as a swaggerer and a bully, with whom it was wisest not to quarrel.

One night in 1727, however, he was at play in the Castle Tavern in Drury Lane, when a Mr. Gower and he fell out about a bet.

Onderby threw a decanter at Gower, and Gower returned the fire with a glass.

Swords were drawn, but at the interposition of others, put up again.

But he was so overbearing that his relations would not visit him in Newgate, and his friends, if he had any, would not stir a finger to help him.

His last moments seem to have been spent between laughing at the broad jokes of his personal jailer, who now never left him, one John Hooper, afterwards public executioner, and fits of rage against those who had deserted him in his extremity.

He was further exasperated by a letter from an undertaker in Drury Lane, who, having heard that the major was to die on the following Monday, promised to perform the funeral as cheap and in as decent a manner as any man alive.

Another cause of annoyance was the publication of a broadsheet entitled The Weight of Blood or The Case of Major John Ownby, the writer of which had visited the prisoner ostensibly to offer to suppress the publication, but really as an interviewer to obtain some additional facts for his catchpenny pamphlet.

Hi, my name is Maria Friedman and you're listening to the London Theatre Review.

So the best performance of a show that I've ever been to was at the Drury Lane Theatre back in the 80s, before most of you were born.

And it was of Sweeney Todd, written by the genius Stephen Sondheim.

The reason I loved it the most, the plot was absolutely thrilling and both funny and scary and surprising.