Rags revisited
It managed 18 previews and just four performances on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in 1986 and what I wouldn’t have given to have seen the great Teresa Stratas in the central (very central) role of…
A sneak preview of Goodall and Hart’s “Bend It Like Beckham – the Musical”
It is the afternoon of Friday 2 May in the none too prepossessing upstairs studio of the Dominion Theatre and I am one of a privileged few invited to a workshop reading of the West End bound…
A View from the Bridge, Young Vic
These days it almost goes without saying that something extraordinary is happening at the Young Vic. There hasn’t been a show I have seen there over the last two years that didn’t challenge and excite my theatrical…
Elgar The Apostles, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Chorus, Davis, Barbican Hall
Sir Adrian Boult laid the foundations for its revival, more recently Sir Mark Elder found astonishing illumination within it, and now a third knight of the realm – Sir Andrew Davis (the latest recipient of the Elgar…
Elgar “The Dream of Gerontius”, Davis, Barbican
Some performances evolve so naturally, so inevitably, that they feel – bespoke. Andrew Davis has a long history with both the BBC Symphony Orchestra (who gave him his first big break) and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius…
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Savoy Theatre
The “fantasy” Riviera conjured by designer Peter McKintosh for the West End premiere of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – the Musical is pretty much an extension of the Savoy Theatre’s shining Art Deco auditorium, its sleek angular segments…
I Can’t Sing! London Palladium
The names have been changed to protect the guilty but half the fun of I Can’t Sing! – the so-called X-Factor musical – lies in the relentless spoofing of a show we love to hate and a…
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera House
Die Frau ohne Schatten is an opera awash with high-flown symbolism and dubious, if not downright dodgy, sub-Freudian psychology. It peddles ludicrous notions about the inherent conflict between spiritual and physical love, frowning at the sex that…
The A-Z of Mrs P, Southwark Playhouse
The most ambitious musicals spring from the most unlikely sources – you need go no further than Stephen Sondheim to establish that – but turning those musicals from novelty into living, breathing, involving experiences requires very special…
London Philharmonic, Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
Vasily Petrenko used his baton like a piratical rapier to galvanise the London Philharmonic violins in their flourishes of derring-do at the start of Berlioz’ Overture Le Corsaire. And the brilliance was in the quicksilver contrasts, the…
