Blog 25!!! My New Year Antics!!!

Hey everyone,

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!!!

So this is blog 25 and I am no longer 25 years old! My birthday was on sunday which made it a busy old weekend!

So... I last blogged after getting back to London last Thursday. So that night was spent generally catching up with my life in my flat after Christmas in North Wales and also doing lots of work on my summer school West End In Wales in preparation for the launch at the beginning of February!
I'm really excited about it - more so this year than ever! - For those of you who don't know, I run a week long musical theatre summer school once a year in St. Asaph in North Wales to promote youth theatre and give the local talent (and not so local, as last year we had a lovely young girl from Mexico on the course) the chance to work alongside myself, two other west end performers and a fully trained professional faculty to produce an hour long showcase to perform to family and friends and industry folk at the end of the week.
I started it in August 2006 and this year we are celebrating our 5th Birthday, so it's going to be bigger and better than ever! Anyone wanting more information should visit the website, the address for which i will put on my blog once it's been updated with this year's course details on it on the 1st of February.
So yeah, it was good to get a start on all the hard work and preparation while I had some time to kill.

So new year's eve I met my best friend Sal and her fella Olly to drive up to our friends in Hitchin, near Stevenage to have some dinner and drinks and then we all went to another friends house near-by for a bit of a social/party and to bring in the new year!
Get this - we worked out that I must have had about 3 bottles of champagne to myself that night and wasn't drunk at all - and for someone who rarely drinks that is pretty impressive! My friend Craig was annoyed that I stayed so controlled all night so he was encouraging me to do shots of gin from an egg cup he found to make me drunk and embarrass myself - but alas it had no effect! What can i say ladies and gentlemen, I am hardcore...haha - I am so not, I had half a glass of wine a couple of weeks ago and was DRUNK!
I think I got away with new year's eve because i basically ate the most anyone, or anything has ever eaten in the entire history of eating mammals on this planet throughout the course of the evening so it soaked up any nasty booze!!!

I treated us all to a lovely bottle of Champagne - It was a bottle of 1998 Dom Perignion that had it's own box that was given to me from our director of 'Spamalot' 4 year's ago (legendary director Mike Nichols), as an opening night gift! I thought it was a lovely gesture so decided to keep it until I was offered my first lead role, then forgot to drink it when I was offered Troy Bolton in High School Musical, so I then decided I'd drink it on the first day I moved into my first property, then when I moved into my flat there was so much dust and mess everywhere from all the work I was doing I decided it wasn't appropriate timing, so then I saw it in the cupboard before heading up to Hitchin on the weekend and I thought to myself "Evans, (that's what I call myself when I talk seriously to myself) you should celebrate a great 2010 and welcome in an exciting and even better 2011 in style, so stop being such a plonka and drink your bloody champagne!" So we did - and it was lovely!
I secretly toasted to everyone who has ever supported me and those continue to do so in anything and everything I do, therefore if you are reading this now - I toasted to you on my new year's eve! I would like to re-itterate how consistently grateful I am to you all for your continued support and for your kind words and messages on Facebook/Twitter! I am LOVING Twitter by the way - I really like hearing from you all! Get your friends to follow me and get in touch, it's a great invention!

So midnight was lovely, we lit chinese lanterns and watched them float in a very romantic way into the first night sky of 2011, and it was at that precise moment I realised I was the only single person out of about 24 people that were there, and so, I just appreciated my special lantern all by myself! Ha!

We stayed in Hitchin that night and so on New Year's Day we went into the town for a bit of a browse, a coffee and some food, then Sally, Olly and I drove back to Sally's flat in Surrey to get an early night as we were shattered and it was my birthday the next day! So on the morning of my 26th birthday, Sal and I had breakfast then headed to meet friends for coffee before watching 'Love & Other Drugs' at the cinema (which is the 'movie theatre' for all you cool American folk reading this) (& 'the pictures' for the people like my Mum reading this - love her!)
What a great film - highly recommended! I want to get back into watching more films again - I used to watch more on tour but that's 'cause there's nothing really to do during the day when you're in a city you don't know apart from go to the cinema! Love watching good screen actors that inspire me!
Then the evening of my birthday I visited my friend Dom who I worked with on Rocky Horror and we watched a DVD of the film 'Chocolat' - another great film and highly recommended! Nice to see Johnny Depp as a non-quirky character for a change!
So two films in one day was a good start to the whole I wanna see more films thing eh?!?!?!

Then I went home to pack my case for my return to the wonderful city known as Cardiff and to this great apartment where I am sitting writing this now (when I should be learning script!)!

I had a good journey, however, literally as the train passed the 'Welcome To Wales/Croeso I Gymru' sign... it started to snow, which I thought was just typical, but at least it didn't stick around and out-stay it's welcome this time!

So not much else to report really, other than that I am back into the swing of things with Marcaroni and we're doing well considering the bulk of work we have to get through by early February- it's really difficult to not get frustrated when you have to learn so much script every evening! My life is spent carrying piles of overly-highlighted paper around! Non, (who plays 'Oli' in it) and I have developed a phobia for large highlighted paragraphs because that means there's chunks of dialog to memorise - haha!

But it's good to be working through it and to be back swimming at 6am every morning again to work off the STU-HOO-PID amounts of food I ate over the festive period! Why not eh?!?!?!

Anyway, get in touch as always. I feel I have more to say but if I have left anything out, I'll pop it on the FaceBook fanpage! Follow me on Twitter if you don't already - don't be afraid of it, it's simple, just join up and type away!!! I'm MarkHEvans.

Keep smiling folks. Hope you're all well!?! Let me know how your first week of 2011 is going!

Love your lives

Mark

PS One month tomorrow I open in Wicked!!!