fairytales
La bella dormente nel bosco/L'enfant et les sortilèges, Royal College of Music review - pure theatrical magicWednesday, 15 March 2023
Childhood fantasies and adult fears – sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. And it’s one that director Liam Steel walks with unerring precision in his ravishing new double-bill for the Royal College of Music: an overflowing toybox of invention... Read more... |
Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - magical stories by candlelightMonday, 19 December 2022
Do you remember how the 1001 Nights ends? You know how it starts: Scheherazade has been married to a king who kills his brides the day after he marries them. She tells him a story so good that he simply has to know what happens next, and she... Read more... |
Hex, National Theatre review - 12 months after being sent to sleep by Covid, Rufus Norris's show is backWednesday, 07 December 2022
Hovering way, way above us, three aptly named high fairies, in voluminous chiffon, open a show that may not be airy in the metaphorical sense, but invites us to cast our eyes upwards continually – no bad thing to do in the bleak midwinter of 2022.... Read more... |
The Golden Cockerel, English Touring Opera review - no crowing over this henhouseMonday, 07 March 2022
A plea to anyone who was seeing Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera for the first time at the Hackney Empire: please don’t give up on ever seeing or listening to it again, as some I spoke to afterwards said they just had. I promise you, the fault lies in... Read more... |
Lucie Elven: The Weak Spot review - a cryptic modern fableTuesday, 23 November 2021
For most of us, fluttering our eyelids to convince a loved one to cook dinner is harmless meddling. Complimenting our boss on their new coat before asking for a promotion is necessary cunning. For the characters in Lucie Elven’s debut novel The Weak... Read more... |
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Duke of York's Theatre review - pure theatrical magicSaturday, 06 November 2021
This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his... Read more... |
The Magician's Elephant, Royal Shakespeare Theatre review - family musical doesn't fully deliverSaturday, 30 October 2021
Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill. There are so many things to go wrong, so few ways to get things right and, never far away, the dissenters... Read more... |
Frozen, Theatre Royal Drury Lane review - twinkling spectacle with a sincere drama at its heartThursday, 09 September 2021
Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, British Youth Opera review - chaotic rewrite of a classic opera misses the markWednesday, 11 August 2021
It’s hard to know where to start with this chaotic Hansel and Gretel, and not just because Humperdinck’s opera has been cut, spliced and re-stitched with a brand-new libretto, new characters and multi-track, multi-option audio. The restless,... Read more... |
Dream, RSC online review - gaming version unleashes revolutionary potentialWednesday, 17 March 2021
Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued by misperception? For my money, I would argue A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most people encounter it at school age because of the ease with which it can be dressed up as a light comedy involving fairies. Yet... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, Scottish Opera online - bewitching feast for ears but not eyesFriday, 12 February 2021
Christmas isn’t just for Christmas, Daisy Evans’s bargain-basement fir-trees-and-tinsel production of Humperdinck’s evergreen masterpiece seems to be telling us. Filmed in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal last December, the February online premiere doesn’t... Read more... |
The Secret Garden review - blooming charmingSunday, 25 October 2020
With Netflix releasing Rebecca on Wednesday, who’d have thought that a kid’s film would be this week’s best adaptation about an estate haunted by the memory of the deceased lady of the manor? Written and directed by the team behind Channel 4’s... Read more... |
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