Briefly… ENO’s Boheme revisited
Like all the great music theatre pieces you only really see and feel their greatness when the acting is honest, true, and sure. In the case of Puccini’s La Boheme youth is a factor, too, and when…
Sir Colin Davis – the mellowing of a firebrand
A few words of reflection on the extraordinary career of one of our most prized musical exports, a man who in his own words graduated from something of a firebrand into a wise man so mellow and…
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…
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…
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…
The elusive Heather Headley
If the comments coming into this site and the buzz around town is anything to go by, Heather Headley – star of the West End’s new hit “The Bodyguard” – is more likely to be found on…
Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012)
Just a word or two about an extraordinary musician and a genuinely lovely man. From his precocious early years at the cutting edge of the musical avant garde to those many and memorable nights where just the man and…
Into the madhouse… “The Changeling” at the Young Vic
The Young Vic’s slogan is “It’s a big world in here”. It’s a changing world, too. This most adaptable of venues wrong foots you with every visit. It’s quite simply a different environment for every show, a…