Briefly…Trelawny of the Wells
Following on so swiftly from the stonking revival of A Chorus Line at the Palladium here comes another show business piece about the joys, disappointments, and heartaches of life upon the wicked stage. In the Donmar revival…
Philharmonia Orchestra, Gabetta, Ashkenazy, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in…
A Chorus Line, London Palladium (Review)
Even singular sensations grow older – yet A Chorus Line, which coined the phrase, seems ageless, so sure is it of its place in musical theatre history, so locked now into our theatrical consciousness. It is, no…
Briefly…Six Pictures of Lee Miller/ Lift
A weekend to restore one’s faith in the current evolution of music theatre. Jason Carr and Edward Kemp’s Six Pictures of Lee Miller (RADA) could hardly inhabit a more different place in the ever-changing universe of musicals…
Charpentier “Medea”, English National Opera, London Coliseum (Review)
Hell hath no fury… and in Medea’s case comes so precipitously that even her children must be taken from the room whenever her demons threaten an unscheduled appearance. That is but one of many telling details that…
Kerry Ellis/ Will Stuart at the Pheasantry
So, ok, we know all about Kerry Ellis’s rocky power belt, the vocal laser that carried Elphaba into the stratosphere and dug down and dirty with Meatloaf and bared all, vocally and emotionally speaking, with Queen’s “No-One…
The week in brief
I’m thinking of making this a regular feature – a quick resume of my movements during and impressions of the week just past: I checked briefly into the BBC – and the popular Radio 4 programme “Last…
Tchaikovsky “Eugene Onegin”, Royal Opera House (Review)
We begin where we will end – with Onegin and Tatyana closing the door on the life that was and the life that might have been. It’s one of the great “what ifs” of opera and Kasper…
Verdi “La Traviata”, English National Opera, London Coliseum (Review)
So this is La Traviata laid bare, stripped of all superfluities (some chorus, all ballet, offstage reveries in the final scene), and played out “in secret”, as it were, behind closed curtains. Actually the director Peter Konwitschny…