Month: November 2022

As has often been the case in the past, Oldham Coliseum kicks off the UK’s panto season—and puts on sale tickets for next year’s Sleeping Beauty—but sadly, this follows closely on the announcement that this historic local venue is to lose its Arts Council funding. This is referred to in perhaps the best gag of… Continue reading Robin Hood

In 2010, Fisherman’s Friends—a group of shanty-singing fishermen from Cornwall—achieved the seemingly impossible by landing a £1 million record deal, storming the album charts and performing on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. It’s the kind of far-fetched rags-to-riches tale that upholds Lord Byron’s famous remark that “truth is stranger than fiction”. Given the heart-warming nature… Continue reading Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical

Remembrance Day, 11 November, is the day I see NEBT’s Cycles of Loss and Love, and what more apt than a return of Wayne Eagling’s Remembrance, which was paired with former English National Ballet Soloist Jenna Lee’s The Four Seasons in 2018 at the Peacock Theatre. Tonight we only get an extract from Eagling’s work,… Continue reading Cycles of Loss and Love: Nocturne / War Women Waiting / Re(Current) / The Four Seasons

As Kevin Landis acknowledges in his introduction to the first book that this reader has seen with a 2023 publication date, the undisputed champion of theatre history is Daniel Rosenthal’s The National Theatre Story. While Landis has less lofty ambitions, he has written an informative and very readable book that takes readers into the heart… Continue reading One Public: New York’s Public Theater in the Era of Oskar Eustis

Vakula loves Oksana, but she teases him that she will only marry him if he gives her the Tsarina’s slippers, so the honest smith kidnaps the devil, the lover of his mother, the witch Solokha, and together they fly to the palace where his unsophisticated charm wins over Her Excellency. Rimsky-Korsakov loved fairy stories from… Continue reading Christmas Eve

Remembrance Day, 11 November, is the day I see NEBT’s Cycles of Loss and Love, and what more apt than a return of Wayne Eagling’s Remembrance, which was paired with former English National Ballet Soloist Jenna Lee’s The Four Seasons in 2018 at the Peacock Theatre. Tonight we only get an extract from Eagling’s work,… Continue reading Cycles of Loss and Love: Nocturne / War Women Waiting / Re(Current) / The Four Seasons

James Wilton Dance is well known to Dance City audiences, but it’s been four years since the company was last here in Newcastle. It was with great pleasure I sat in a well-filled auditorium to watch the new full-length work, The Four Seasons, to Max Richter’s justly acclaimed work, Recomposed. The music reimagines Vivaldi’s The… Continue reading The Four Seasons

Anthony Hewitson was a media baron before the world knew of such folk. A Victorian journalist, he turned newspapers into big business in late 19th century Preston. Over the same period he also kept diaries, detailing his private life, its domestic challenges and tragedies, and his scurrilous opinions about his local contemporaries. It is these… Continue reading The Hewitson Diaries

Denzel Westley-Sanderson directs an all-black production of the wittiest comedy in the English language, something which I don’t think has happened professionally in England since Yvonne Brewster’s production in 1989 for Talawa Theatre. The poster and the programme cover make the same bold statement. There is a large silhouette of a handsome black young man… Continue reading The Importance of Being Earnest

“A star is born” the local Italian newspaper proclaimed in English after the appearance of the little-known 21-year-old Caterina Sala as Adina in the opening production of the 2021 Donizetti Festival in Bergamo. Wow, how right they were. Although just moments from the end of the opera, Sala’s extended aria “Ah! L’eccesso del contento” almost… Continue reading L’elisir d’amore