Category: Reviews

This 1959 musical, with a dream writing cast for the time of Laurents, Styne and Sondheim, is revived by Ben Occhipinti as the big musical running through the whole of the Pitlochry summer rep season. Based on the memoirs of upmarket stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and set on the burlesque circuit of the 1920s, the… Continue reading Gypsy: A Musical Fable

While Stratford Festival is best known for its reliably watchable Shakespearean productions, the Canadian company is no slouch when it comes to selecting and presenting contemporary plays. The team behind Serving Elizabeth, led by director Kimberley Rampersad, must have faced innumerable problems in bringing this work to the stage, given that it eventually played to a… Continue reading Serving Elizabeth

Exercise might well be good for you, but if you’re cycling on the spot and not getting anywhere, there’s probably a lesson in there. For the cynical reviewer character in Spin Cycles, dually exercising and exorcising with every push at the pedal is both a job and a life choice. It’s a curiously unique spectacle.… Continue reading Spin Cycles

For the longest time, there has existed an air of mystery and fascination with the four Grand Duchesses, daughters of the exiled Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. It was often hypothesised and even warmly romanticised that one or more of the four may have survived in secret, until the confirmation of the DNA… Continue reading OTMA

God Catcher is a musical reworking of the Ovidian version of the Greek myth of Arachne. Eschewing the traditional story of the over-proud weaver of ancient Hypaepa, this instead retells it as the story of a sweet and humble girl, taught to pull the shuttle by her mother and madly entranced by the stories of the… Continue reading God Catcher

There’s a precarious balance between mankind and nature, a fickle and thin line by which the whole of human civilisation resists the endless force of the natural world, which constantly threatens to consume us in our extravagant technological hubris. But when tested by nature in all its greatest majesty, what hope does a lone human… Continue reading Her Green Hell

Since it is well known that art imitates life, it is no surprise that if you search ‘alpha podcast’ on your phone’s relevant app you are going to find more than one listening option called “The Alpha Podcast” or similar. Although there must be other podcasts that do, none of these seem to share the… Continue reading The Alpha Podcast

If the long history of Adam Kay’s enduring popularity can attest to anything, it’s that there’s some serious depths of comedy that can be plumbed from being a doctor and a comedian. It’s into this zone that Stefania Licari, a practising anaesthetist and sometime actress, has stepped into with her show Medico. Of course, while… Continue reading Stefania Licari: Medico

It is easy to live our lives in a place without ever being aware of its particular ecosystem, the special historical context that made it what it is and even shaped the way we lead our lives. In an ambitious, at times lyrical monologue, Jenny Witzel pays homage to Deptford, “a London neighbourhood on the… Continue reading CREEKSHOW

Verdi’s fifth opera may feature the sort of implausibility that gives the genre a bad name, but it also contains such a succession of rich melodies, forceful duets, trios and choruses that make it all worthwhile. The rebel Ernani and Elvira are lovers, but she is also desired by Don Silva and no less than… Continue reading Ernani