Benvenuto Cellini, London Coliseum
Hector Berlioz and Terry Gilliam were undoubtedly made for each other – kindred spirits with wild imaginations, impractical demands, and a touch of anarchy. But Berlioz was a chaotic dramatist at best and in a piece like…
The Life of the Party, Menier Chocolate Factory
I still regard myself as an Andrew Lippa newbe – though now that his recent outing at the St James Theatre has morphed into fully-produced all-singing, all-dancing London show with props and projections and costumes and lights…
A Conversation With CORINNE WINTERS: Life before and after the London ‘Traviata’
In February 2013 Corinne Winters created an absolute sensation in her operatic European debut when Peter Konwitschny’s starkly intense staging of Verdi’s La Traviata arrived at English National Opera. Vocally, physically, dramatically her Violetta (“the whore who…
Dialogues des Carmélites, Royal Opera House
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is a special and very particular opera. There is nothing else quite like it. Just as the drama – set to the composer’s own libretto – teeters between fear and faith so too…
Miss Saigon, Prince Edward Theatre
The heat is on in Saigon – and 25 years after its world premiere Cameron Mackintosh has just turned up the thermostat. Boublil and Schönberg’s celebrated take on Puccini’s Madam Butterfly has always been my favourite of…
Der Rosenkavalier, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
You can count on Richard Jones for challenging our perceptions and turning expectation on its head but the image of the Marschallin rising Venus-like from her bath while showers of water rain down like gold dust on…
The Pajama Game, Shaftesbury Theatre
On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’ songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler…
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…
