Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Benvenuti a Napoli cries the huge corny poster of the blue bay and ominous Vesuvius that looms over Neil Irish’s sets for Così fan tutte. However, we’re no longer in the Enlightenment city of cynical male experiments in female psychology where Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1790 first took place. Now, in the 1950s stage of post-1945 America’s forever wars, Naples-posted US Marines Guglielmo and Ferrando meet up with long-distance sweethearts Fiordiligi and Dorabella after a transatlantic flight. Elizabeth Karani’s multi-tasking Despina serves as runway signaller as the arriving passengers Read more ...
Gary Naylor
About two hours into this big, brash Beetlejuice, the door to Hell opens up, and I felt a sudden desire to rush the stage, dash through and take my chances. Well, perhaps not on press night, when it's poor form to leave before the end.Reflecting further (and this is one of those shows in which something is always happening, but everything is said at least twice, so you can take a time out) I realised that I was breaking one of my Golden Rules. This is a musical adaptation of an 80s blockbuster movie and has a wild-eyed, leering man with green hair as its marketing image, so what did I expect Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Yesterday I travelled through a sweltering London in shorts and sandals to go and hear Schubert’s Winterreise, about a bleak journey through a frozen landscape. It was quite the disjuncture, and a strange piece of seasonal programming. But I was glad to hear veteran baritone Thomas Hampson in fine voice in the Schubert, accompanied by Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova, even if the second half of Kurt Weill and Astor Piazzolla was less fulfilling.Singers eschewing the traditional pianist for the more unusual (in the classical concert hall) sounds of the accordion is all the rage at the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
With impeccable timing, the Orange Tree in Richmond has scheduled a one-act play that’s exactly what a beleaguered public needs: 75 minutes of mind-bendingly ludicrous physical comedy in the form of Peter Shaffer’s 1965 hit, Black Comedy. It's still a lethal weapon.Farce was a theatrical staple at that time, regularly broadcast on primetime television from the Whitehall Theatre. A pants-down Brian Rix in flamboyant underwear invaded the nation’s living rooms long before serious dramas with suggestive sex scenes were allowed in. So Shaffer was working fertile soil. (Spoiler alert if you have Read more ...
James Saynor
Steve Martin famously said that writing about music was like trying to dance architecture, so maybe making a movie about painting is like – I don’t know – trying to chant ceramics. But this Britain-New Zealand co-production has a go at following in the footsteps of films such as The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991), both of which got us more than half-interested in the deeply mundane and scarily intense business of daubing paint.It tells of the very extended process by which supermodel Kate Moss was limned by postwar portraiture colossus Lucian Freud in 2001. So Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong ended his second season as the Hallé’s principal conductor with a blockbuster – and one from what may be seen as his personal zone of expertise: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.Blockbuster in the sense that it’s a huge undertaking logistically, with a very large orchestra required, and that it’s a very big work. Blockbuster also almost literally – the finale requires an enormous Thor-like hammer to be wielded, at least twice, to create a thud akin to that of an axe at the base of a tree.Should it be three thumps, or just two? Mahler changed his mind about that, and editors and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The psychological masterstroke of this quietly devastating work is to portray it from the point of view of an elderly woman who is convinced that she should not be in an old people’s home. Like the vast majority of us, Joan – played with spiky elegance by Linda Bassett – cannot see why she should relinquish her independence to be surrounded by people who seem, in different ways, to be losing their minds. On Rosana Vize’s rigorously naturalistic set – with its formulaic framed paintings and armchairs set in a forlorn semi-circle – we watch Joan’s initial encounters with the home’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a small Appalachian village, where people say “Y’all” and prospectors are still searching for silver in the mountains, Barbara Allen wants more than the humdrum life of a Trad wife (as I suppose you would call it these days). Already a bit of a rebel, she has a suitor, the dim, fighty Marvin, but there’s something just there, she knows, if only she could see it.She’s right, of course, else we wouldn’t have a show, and that something is Witch Boy John, part of a coven of sex-mad spirits whose hedonistic lifestyle has become dulled by its accompanying alienation. He wants to feel joy and Read more ...
David Nice
A libertine who deserves punishment makes a good/bad start when a male director decides he really has tried to rape Donna Anna, and doesn't just enjoy post-coital badinage with her. Tom Creed thankfully begs to differ from, say, Kasper Holten – hard to believe that Don Giovanni is due for revival in the coming Royal Opera season – or Ole Anders Tandberg at the Royal Swedish Opera (toilets à la Bieito, whose ENO Giovanni was a horrible mess - there's only one, and only briefly, on the Lismore stage). The era of "she wanted it really" is over, and Creed's good folk are vocally the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.The clue is in the title of course. Prospero, like a wizardy Leonard Bernstein, conjuring a storm to shipwreck his usurper brother, Antonio, Duke of Milan and shipwreck, amongst others, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“La bohème, Tosca, Butterfly: you just know where you are with them, don’t you?” If the bar-chat at the opening night of the Opera Holland Park 30th anniversary season was anything to go by then La fanciulla del West still has its work cut out to make it onto the podium of Puccini all-stars. But the composer’s Western not-quite-tragedy (three cheers for a heroine still live and very much kicking by the final curtain) has a delicious score flecked rich with melodic gold, and just enough celluloid silliness to keep things entertaining.Anyone who still remembers Opera Holland Park’s most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nottingham is broiling. With sun heat. And with humanity. The pubs overspill beyond the pavement, into the road, as hordes of Nottingham Forest fans prepare for the final game of the season, sinking gallons of carbonated amber liquid. Unrelated, in Old Market Square a sizeable gaggle of the ill-informed and ham-faced, waving England flags, face off against a counter-demonstration, divided by ranks of fluorescent police. And every available venue is hosting Dot To Dot, a festival showcasing fresh musical talent.Begun in 2005, Dot To Dot is a multi-venue affair, like Camden Crawl or The Great Read more ...