Aria Entertainment’s From Page to Stage platform for new writing in musical theatre is another of those life-lines which refreshes the parts that the West End so rarely reaches – and to see a fledgling musical like…
There’s an old conductor’s adage which suggests that the only way safe to start Strauss’ Don Juan is to start before the applause has died – that way no one hears any imperfections in the upward rush…
So this is the moment where the tables are turned and La Boheme, the opera, takes its cue from Rent, the musical, and Rodolfo the poet’s observation that he has “a few more lines” to finish takes…
Lin-Manuel Miranda is America’s new Poet Laureate. When I first saw his fledgling opus IN THE HEIGHTS on Broadway it struck me that here was the moment where all the existing catergories previously used to define musical theatre…
Shakespeare’s strangest and nastiest play is a kind of black farce where the reckless dash to redemption makes the redemption itself – forgiveness, reconciliation, all is sort of forgiven – seem like an afterthought. Joe Hill-Gibbins is having…
Mark Wigglesworth’s arrival as English National Opera’s new Music Director was never going to be a quiet affair. They probably heard it all the way over at the Kremlin. It wasn’t so much a case of a…
Mahler’s supersonic Seventh – a grand experiment in sensory colouration if ever there was one – needs no special pleading: it is what it is, a one-off, an oddity, a new departure of no fixed destination. But…
If the shoe fits, they say, wear it. But in truth there’s always been a bit of a size differential between Kinky Boots, the modest urban Brit-flick, and the Cyndi Lauper/ Harvey Fierstein musical that it spawned.…
Never in a million years would you guess that Grand Hotel – now brilliantly revived at the Southwark Playhouse – is one of Broadway’s great rescue jobs. That something seemingly so organic, so cohesive, so intricate, could…
The venerable and venerated Philadelphia Orchestra swept into London bearing gifts and mixed messages from Nico Muhly. Actually that was the title of his crowd-pleasing opener for the orchestra – Mixed Messages (UK Premiere) – and for…