Entertainment

I found the quality of the entertainment to be very good.The main shows (Priscilla Queen of the Desert & Burn the Floor) were top notch. Graffiti Classics (a comic string quartet) we had seen last year and were again superb. One of the best was the ship's band that played every night in The Cavern Club who played covers of rock music - their rendition of Freebird with extended guitar solo was always requested by a cheering crowd as an encore. Sadly the Beatles tribute who only played their a few times were a bit disappointing - a lot of the early stuff (everything with the word 'love' in the title) but if you were waiting for classics such as Get Back, Back in the USSR, or Hey Jude, then you'd carry on waiting.

Cirque Dreams was also a great choice and the dinner that went with it was absolutely fine (despite having heard bad reports from other reviews). Being so close to the acrobatics was amazing especially if you consider how much this kind of show would cost you in the 'real' world to be miles away from the action.

Apart from the issues of having to book everything in advance if you didn't want to queue in the hope of standby, the only other issue with the entertainment, was some of the venues just were not suited for the shows. Headliners was great as a more intimate music venue, but we walked out of the magic show as unless you were in the first couple of rows you could not see what was going on.

Of course there is lots of other entertainment on board apart from the shows such as quizzes, karaoke or bingo, and these are pretty much what they say on the tin except for quite a few of them are yet more money making opportunities for the ship. For example the bingo costed $39 to join in which did include some raffle tickets to win a free cruise. Now this is all fine in the sense you are not forced to play, but the format was such when you did part with some cash (as you though, "why not, just the once") you were then under subtle pressure to spend more as the 'jackpot' game was the first to a full house, but you had to do it I only 47 drawn balls, so nobody won and the jackpot prize increased and was held over until tomorrow's game. Similarly the raffle for the free cruise gave you tickets when you joined in the bingo, but it would only be drawn on the session on the last sea day. This would be OK if, but even though you wrote name, address etc on the tickets, you had to actually be there to win, so you either sit though another loud bingo session without playing of spend more money.

The other point about this events and the 'non show' musical entertainment, was that you might find a relatively quiet bar and within a few minutes a musician would turn up and start deafening you. At one point you had a pianist inShakers bar and a guitar vocalist in the Maltings bar both going at the same time and the seating from these two bars merge into one another. Were they competing? The result is cacophony all over the ship and drove you from one place to another so a large proportion of your day was spent wandering about trying to find a place of peace that wasn't jam packed