CHRISTMAS QUIZ 2011 

See below for ANSWERS 

and comments 

 

Thank You... 

...to everyone who took part in the Christmas Quiz. Some of you thought it was fiendish, but at least one person thought it was great fun. A lot of research and possibly some chewing of pencils went on, and the ingenuity of some of the answers was impressive. Perhaps not correct, but impressive nonetheless. 

 

And the winner is Harriet Marks!  Well done Harriet, who scored 35 points and wins the £20 prize! And well done too to Pauline Skerrit  and June Lee, the two runners-up who we thought deserved a special  £5 consolation prize. They scored 33 and 30 points respectively. 

 

The Christmas Quiz is based on the plays and shows that we’ve taken our Group to see in 2011. 

 

Some of the questions are easy but some are not, so we will give a £20 theatre voucher to the entry with most correct answers. We don’t expect anyone to get them all right. We think Question 10 is very difficult, but don’t be deterred! 

 

Don't forget to guess the answer to the EXTRA question at the end as that may be crucial to winning. In the event of a tie, the prize will go to the person with most correct answers first out of the hat! 

 

1.      The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest running play in London. What play, revived this year, held the record before The Mousetrap? 

Blithe Spirit 

Blithe Spirit held the record at 1,997 performances, till The Mousetrap came along and overtook it. We weren't asking for the current second longest running show, but the longest running show before The Mousetrap beat its record. Several people suggested The Woman in Black or Les Miserables (mere beginners at 22 and 25 years respectively) which have now run longer than Blithe Spirit. We didn’t take a group to either of them in 2011, and of course they opened after The Mousetrap which is now in its 60th year! It's unlikely that any show will now take the record from The Mousetrap. See HERE. 

 

2.      This year we gave you the opportunity to see more than one play by the same dramatists. Who were they? And what were the plays? 

a.        William Shakespeare – King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors  

b.        Richard Bean – The Heretic, One Man, Two Guvnors 

c.        Terence Rattigan – Cause Celebre, Flare Path 

d.        Harold Pinter – Moonlight, Betrayal 

e.        Arnold Wesker – Chicken Soup with Barley, The Kitchen 

f.         Ken Ludwig - Lend Me A Tenor , Crazy For You 

Richard Bean’s great success with One Man,Two Guvnors eclipsed his earlier play The Heretic, at the Royal Court. And only one entry spotted the Ken Ludwig musical connection! 

 

3.      One actress appeared in two different plays, at the same theatre.  In one she was a frigid wife; in the second a randy widow. Name the actress and the plays. 

Niamh Cusack – Cause Celebre, The Playboy of the Western World 

There was some confusion between Niamh and Sinead Cusack, but it was the younger sister who played these contrasting roles at the Old Vic. 

 

4.      This play was going to be called Torcello but we know it better as…..? 

Pinter’s Betrayal 

Oh, this one was far too easy! 

 

5.      What group provided the music for One Man, Two Guvnors? 

The Craze 

So was this one! 

 

6.      The movie was called The Way To The Stars but the play it was based on was called….? And who wrote it? 

Flare Path by Terence Rattigan 

And another easy one! 

 

7.       How many new songs did Andrew Lloyd Webber write for The Wizard of Oz? 

There’s a bit of controversy about this one. It was announced that there would be 4 new songs, but different websites give different numbers – and then there was incidental music as well. As this is a Christmas quiz, we accepted any number between 4 and 7. 

 

8.      In two different shows, characters came back from the dead. One caused trouble; the other didn’t. Name the actors and the shows. 

Ruthie Henshall in Blithe Spirit, Richard Fleischman in Ghost, both ghosts that came back to haunt partners. 

One person suggested Lisa Diveney in Moonlight, a ghost whom we’d overlooked, so they got a point for that.  

 

9.      Name the play on which these musicals are based — 

a.      My Fair Lady   Pygmalion 

b.      Juno   Juno and the Paycock 

c.      The Heart’s a Wonder   The Playboy of the Western World 

d.      High Spirits   Blithe Spirit 

e.      New Girl In Town   Anna Christie 

f.      The Boys from Syracuse   The Comedy of Errors 

Eight people got them all right! And I was sure no-one would get The Heart’s a Wonder!! 

 

10.      Two actors who play mother and daughter in the same popular tv series appeared at the Donmar in different plays. Who plays the mother? Who plays the daughter? And what were the Donmar plays? 

The series is Doctor Who. Karen Gillan plays Amy Pond. At the end of the last series, we discovered that Amy’s baby Melody Pond grows up to become River Song, played by Alex Kingston. Karen Gillan was in Inadmissible Evidence, and Alex Kingston was in Luise Miller. 

This was the killer question, but five people got it absolutely right, even the younger actress playing the mother (well, that’s the Doctor Who timescale for you!). 

 

11.      The Pulitzer Prize is a prestigious American literary award. Which Pulitzer prize-winners did we see this year? 

a.        Clybourne Park 

b.        A Delicate Balance 

c.        South Pacific 

d.        Anna Christie 

e.        Driving Miss Daisy 

The Pulitzer Prize is awarded for a specific work, so I’m afraid those who included Arthur Miller didn’t get an extra point, as his play Broken Glass which we saw in 2011 didn’t win the prize. But we were impressed that so many people realised that South Pacific had won. 

 

12.      A dancing daisy turned into a singing violet! Name the two productions in which we saw them. 

The ballet Marguerite and Armand and the opera La Traviata both use the same story, but in the opera, the heroine’s name has been changed to Violetta. 

Oh, this one is so easy (when you know the answer!). Actually, only 6 people got it right, plus one more got it half-right, so it must count as another killer question. You see, a marguerite is an ox-eye daisy….  

(Originally we drafted “an operatic violet” but Mike thought that made the question too easy so he changed it to “a singing violet” and made it a killer question!) 

 

EXTRA! Which show did we sell most tickets for this year, and how many? GUESS! 

Clue! Sometimes we did more than one visit to a show - and sometimes more than one coach. 

We did 3 visits to One Man, Two Guvnors with total tickets sales of 165. 

Other high scorers: King Lear 120, Anna Christie 120, The Wizard of Oz 117, Clybourne Park 114, and Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella 103.