Flowers for Mrs Harris, Crucible Sheffield
You emerge from Flowers for Mrs Harris a little richer, a little lighter, a little more hopeful. Paul Gallico’s enchanting fable is about many things – it’s about new beginnings, rebirth; it’s about aspiration; it’s about the…
Threepenny Opera, National Theatre
John Gay started it, Bertold Brecht politicised it, and right now Dougal Irvine has smartly contemporised it in rhyming couplets. But beggars or buskers aside there’s only one Kurt Weill score – insidiously catchy down to its…
A Conversation With ELAINE PAIGE
Thursday 19th May 2016 11.30am, The Chapel Sydmonton Court The Festival is thrilled to welcome Elaine Paige – actress, singer, producer, radio presenter and mega-star of musical theatre – to stunning Sydmonton Court, the private home of Andrew Lloyd…
Sunset Boulevard, London Coliseum
At a time in musical theatre when you never quite know what you are hearing when the band strikes up, seeing was believing that on the stage of the Coliseum there were strings aplenty, horns, bassoons, trumpets,…
A Conversation With VICTORIA WOOD: New TV drama, ‘Loving Miss Hatto’
In 2007 Gramophone magazine uncovered an extraordinary fraud that rocked the classical music industry. Concert pianist Joyce Hatto – a little-known artist of moderate talent – was suddenly the name on everyone’s lips when a series of…
A Conversation With JAN VOGLER: Dresden Music Festival 2016
TIME is the overriding motto for the 2016 DRESDEN FESTIVAL. Music can play with time in so many interesting ways, music can even suspend time creating frozen moments, moments of stasis where time ceases to exist –…
Boris Godunov, Royal Opera House
As one who grew up listening to what other people did to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov – most notably the gifted gift-wrapper Rimsky-Korsakov – the seven-scene original is doubly startling in its concision and starkness. This is a…
Mrs Henderson Presents, Noel Coward Theatre
The old gags are the best, they say – or just the oldest – and in this hugely enjoyable adaptation of the movie Mrs Henderson Presents they come thick and fast from the mouth of the show’s…
The World Goes Round, St James Studio
The World Goes Round has been, well, going round for 25 years. The John Kander and Fred Ebb catalogue lends itself to a tight-knit review format – Cabaret and Chicago embrace that genre anyway – and the…
L’Etoile, Royal Opera House
It’s a kind of French Mikado. In a distant and exotic kingdom a victim must be found to celebrate the King’s name-day. No little list, no W H Gilbert wit, either, but a handful of delicious tunes,…