Thursday, May 30, 2019
We haven't seen a lot of Smetana's The Bartered Bride in the UK recently. Bohemia's best-loved opera is rapidly becoming one of the repertoire's best-kept secrets, which is a shame because i…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 04:00PMFriday, May 17, 2019
God it's good to have the Linbury back. The reopening of the Royal Opera House's second, smaller space last December after a lengthy redesign brought with it all kinds of possibilities. Repe…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 07:42AMSunday, March 12, 2017
BlurbIs it possible that Kasper Holten, Covent Garden's outgoing director of opera, has directed a Meistersinger about himself It certainly looks a lot like it. This black take on Wagner's s…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 02:18PMThursday, March 9, 2017
'What a very singularly deep young man that deep young man must be' You don't have to look very far in selfie-taking 2017 for an equivalent to the narcissism and aestheticism that are so tho…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 06:42AMTuesday, February 28, 2017
If a sad tale really is best for winter, then we've certainly been blessed this year. For months the news has croaked out its nightly stories, each blacker than the one before, and though bl…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 05:22AMThursday, February 16, 2017
What did you do during the war, Dada Somewhere underneath the relentless punning and the pastiche, the whistle-stop wit and the whirling theoretical debate, there's a seriousness to Tom Stop…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 07:04AMTuesday, November 29, 2016
It couldn't have been better timed. When Gerald Barry started work on his latest project - an operatic take on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - the world was still rotating smoothly on its…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 05:43AMFriday, November 25, 2016
Three sixty-something retired scientists talk to one another in a remote seaside cottage for two hours. It doesn't sound like theatrical gold, but in Lucy Kirkwood's deft hands, an unassumin…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 05:37AMThursday, November 10, 2016
Beautiful, unknowable Lulu - all things to all men, who has never pretended to be anything by what men see in me - is the chameleon-heroine revealed in Berg's musical mirror. But just as she…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 06:17AMWednesday, November 9, 2016
Glass panels, windows and boxes on stage should always be treated with mistrust. There can be no clearer indication of blood to come - a literal trigger warning, a physical spatter alert. Th…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 07:07AMFriday, October 21, 2016
Composed when Shostakovich was just 21 years old, fresh from the conservatoire and still high on the success of his First Symphony, The Nose is a piece of musical rebellion - a fantasy of ab…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 05:26AMThursday, October 20, 2016
You have to get through an awful lot of shell to even glimpse the jewel at the core of The Pearl Fishers. Bizet's opera is much more than just a good duet - the score is glossy with melody, …
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 07:55AMThursday, October 13, 2016
The first thing you hear are the marimbas – music that’s pounded, punched out of the air by hundreds of fists. Later the instruments give us dances and songs, but this musical violence i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:18PMTuesday, October 4, 2016
When Catherine Malfitano's Tosca debuted in 2010, English National Opera finally had a production of Puccini's classic to rival Jonathan Kent's long-serving version up the road at Covent Gar…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 04:39AMSaturday, October 1, 2016
English National Opera has been having a hard time with Don Giovanni lately. First there was Calixto Bieito's groggy, pastel-coloured nightmare who could forget the pistachio leather dentist…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 05:12AMWednesday, September 14, 2016
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:14PMTuesday, September 13, 2016
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:40PMThursday, September 8, 2016
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it’s hard to see how John Wolfson’s wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda g…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:25PMThursday, July 21, 2016
London’s West End may be the envy of the world, but when it comes to musicals the big-hitting theatres might have to up their game a bit if they’re to keep up with the city’s rival off…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:15PMFriday, June 3, 2016
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:52PMFriday, May 27, 2016
Last seen at the National Theatre over 10 years ago, Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera is back in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. But looking at Rufus Norris’s epic-theatre-lit…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:27AMThursday, May 12, 2016
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things – maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age – but, at core, they’re all really about the same subject: storytelling. …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:56AMTuesday, May 10, 2016
Satire, we’re solemnly instructed in Dougal Irvine’s new musical The Buskers Opera, “has to strike a fine balance of entertainment and teaching”. Well yes, but it’s also generally …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:51PMThursday, February 4, 2016
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only C…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:57PMWednesday, December 9, 2015
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – in the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:28AMThursday, November 26, 2015
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene – until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. T…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:55AMSunday, November 8, 2015
Jessica Swale’s Thomas Tallis is the first new play commissioned for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the beginning, hopefully, of the same relationship the Globe itself has always had with…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:19AMWednesday, November 4, 2015
Rosalind’s “working-day world” takes an unexpectedly literal turn in Polly Findlay’s sparky new As You Like It for the National Theatre. An opening sequence, set in a windowless trad…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:32AMFriday, October 30, 2015
Remember back when David Hare was left-wing? I’m not sure that he does.read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:19AMFriday, September 18, 2015
It’s a pleasing serendipity that while Martin McDonagh’s clamorously anticipated Hangmen opened at the Royal Court last night, just a little further west TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:22PMThursday, September 17, 2015
Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:09PM 
