Theatre
Mary Mazzilli
Beijing International Fringe Festival, virtually unheard of in the UK, closed last Sunday after three weeks’ showcasing the best talent in drama, musical theatre, dance and experimental theatre in China. It was conceived in 2008 as a small local festival using university performance spaces to give voice to young directors and young talent. Back then it comprised a mere 10 productions. This year there were 54 productions in 11 venues around Beijing. They ranged from drama and physical theatre to dance and opera; a few workshops and stage readings were also included in the programme. It Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting and the result – Terrible Advice – receives its world premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.Rubinek subtitles his work “A Dark, Dirty and Dangerous Play” and there are certainly nods to the first two elements, but its dangerousness rather escapes me. It concerns the story of two middle-aged men, now living in what is presumably Los Angeles, who met at college; child-man Jake (Scott Bakula, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard.There’s no doubt that Rock of Ages is absurd, but that hasn’t stopped it being reconfigured for a film that’s in production now. The high-octane cast includes Alec Baldwin, Mary J Blige, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Its Broadway run Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The only time I saw Ginger Rogers in the flesh was by chance in a book store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. She was doing a book signing (Ginger: My Story – a good read) and was well past her dancing years, but she still had a certain allure. And somehow, looking at this legend, the years rolled back and I could visualise her again dancing with Fred Astaire in the best of their 10 musicals together, Top Hat, the hit 1935 RKO movie. It took just over two months to make and grossed more than $3 million. “They’re dancing cheek to cheek again!” blazed the publicity poster at the time.Summer Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult for modern theatregoers – in or beyond Ireland – to understand the extraordinary furore The Playboy of the Western World caused when it was first performed in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Protesters, who believed the play was a slur on the Irish people, gathered at the theatre and drowned out performances with their shouting, and there were even cries of “Kill the author”.JM Synge had committed the cardinal sin of holding up a mirror – albeit a mirror that distorts for comedic effect - to his native land. In a country that was gaining confidence in all things Gaelic ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A new play by Mike Leigh is always an event. So there was a palpable excitement in the air at the Cottesloe Theatre (the smallest and most intimate of the three National Theatre auditoria) when his latest opened last night. With a cast that includes Lesley Manville, a regular collaborator who was also in his 2010 film Another Year, the expectation was that this would be an instant classic.Leigh doesn’t so much disappoint expectations as subvert them. Radically. At first, the main pleasure is one of recognition. Oh yes, you think, I know where we are: it’s 1957 and we are in a nice commuter Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“A simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death.” That was how Kurt Weill described Elmer Rice’s 1929 play, Street Scene, set on the front stoop of a New York brownstone in sweltering summertime. Together with lyricist Langston Hughes, the left-wing poet and writer, Weill turned the drama into a gritty 1947 American opera, setting Rice's book against a score that offered an exhilarating blend of Puccini-esque melody, bright, brassy, impudent jazz, brooding blues and sparkly Broadway showtune. Like the tenement where its struggling characters Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of clandestine development in the now time-honoured fashion. Nothing and everything changes in the work of Mike Leigh (b 1943). However, consumers of his vast oeuvre stretching back to the 1960s will this year have had the chance to do something extremely rare: see a pair of works by Leigh in the theatre.Ecstasy opened at Hampstead Theatre in 1979 and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Arthur Miller is one of those geniuses whose plays are metaphor-rich even when their storytelling is slow. First staged in 1994, Broken Glass is surely his best late-period drama, and this revival, directed by Iqbal Khan, arrives in the West End after originally opening at the Tricycle Theatre last year. This time, the ever-watchable Tara Fitzgerald joins Antony Sher in the cast.Set in Brooklyn in 1938, the play is like a case history from a cabinet in Sigmund Freud’s practice. A middle-aged woman, Sylvia Gellburg, suffers from a sudden and mysterious paralysis of her legs. She is confined to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not like we’re short of operas. Thousands of works spanning over 400 years make up the western operatic repertoire. Of these maybe 100 get a regular airing in contemporary opera houses, with only about 20 making it into the popular consciousness. For the rest, a trip outside the archives is rare indeed, with many scores still vainly awaiting their “modern premiere”. So why then, with so many works to choose from, do directors persist in returning to Bach – who famously never composed an opera – for inspiration? It’s a question that Jonathan Miller’s St Matthew Passion only partially Read more ...
carole.woddis
It all started back on Thursday, 6 April, 1972. In the dining room of the less than salubrious Bush Hotel on the corner of Shepherds Bush Green, in a room that had once been Lionel Blair’s studio, the Bush Theatre was born. Over the course of the next 39 years, the Bush became a byword for small theatrical miracles.On its stamp-sized stage Victoria Wood met the comparatively unknown young Julie Walters. Stephen Poliakoff, Sharman Macdonald, Jonathan Harvey amongst many others made their stage-writing entrance within its modest portals.Forgive me while I get a little bit slushy here. Memories Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back Stephen Poliakoff. With his first new play for 12 years, the master penman has set aside his television excursions into history and memory — most recently Glorious 39 for the BBC — for a haunting, contemporary tale of chance encounters and mysterious city nights. As the title makes clear, the play is a vision of London which is both personal and meditative. For me, it felt like a trip to a world that is surprising yet also familiar.One evening, a young man called Richard (pictured below right) finds his former primary school head, Miss Lambert, sleeping on a bench near St Paul’s Read more ...