- Price:
- £37.50 + £4.75 booking fee
- Rating:
- 2
Reviewed by: newwithhashtags
Summary:
After missing numerous opportunities to buy tickets for The Illusionists after they appeared on Groupon, Amazon and Living Social, we bit the bullet and bought them directly from the Eventim Apollo website (previously Hammersmith Apollo). Kind of wish we hadn’t bothered.
As you can see from the ticket above, the seats right at the very back of the circle still cost a whopping £37.50, and yet they had the audacity to put a £4.75 booking fee on each ticket. Absolutely disgusting, and not something we were at all happy with. However we thought it would be really good so decided it might be worth it…
Over to the show itself, we were pleased there was a screen enlarging what was happening on stage otherwise we would have missed a lot of the finer details. However the most ridiculous thing was that the top quarter was covered by the lighting rig. Someone obviously didn’t think properly about this, and it shows. Unfortunately the finer details were absent throughout the entire show as a couple of the tricks revealed a stray arm in a place it shouldn’t be, or a face which didn’t quite cover itself. I know it was the third show of the day, but I think the show could have been a lot tighter because I began looking for things which could go wrong instead of sitting back and enjoying the show.
The range of acts were alright too, although very clichéd. We found the middle-aged gay guy to really over-do the gay jokes. It got very tiring and felt very 80s, and the same could be said for many of the acts – cutting a person in half and moving the 2 sides of the box away? Seen it. Plunging someone into water and making them pick their way out? Impressive, but not exactly original. Connecting wedding rings together? The oldest trick in the book.
That’s what the problem is; the show isn’t original. It’s dated and unoriginal, and it didn’t show enough of the things which were actually impressive (the Mentalist). There was too much ‘poof I made the egg disappear with my “glorious assistant”‘ and not enough ‘you’re sitting on the word you picked at random from the dictionary, and you didn’t even know it’. The goth guy just didn’t fit into the show at all, and the accompanying music was terrible.
Whilst I wasn’t bored throughout the show, I didn’t feel compelled to watch what was happening on stage. I think quite a few people around felt the same way as I saw a few people playing on their phones throughout the show, and many who didn’t bother applauding at the end. For the price I think this is completely unacceptable. To spend over £40 on a show which was tired and had a restricted view at times is not on. And these were the cheapest seats! If it had been £10 I still would have been disappointed, especially as there was so much hype surrounding the show. So my advice to you would be to not bother, unless you take comfort in seeing the same old tricks you saw when you were a kid (this statement applies to all ages), or you have children who might enjoy the show.