I am back from spending the Easter weekend with my parents in Edinburgh. I had a lovely time, marred only by the fact that I had packed conservatively for the weather and thus had insufficient T-shirts and had to wear a coat on the way home today, and that a sinus infection* kicked off on Wednesday evening, too late for me to grab anything not OTC ( Read more... )

French-Quebecois musical Notre-Dame de Paris made a flying visit to London last week, and
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I am rubbish at writing reviews.

The answer to the poll was (4) Svetlana is also a KGB agent. Svetlana was not a KGB agent, though I'd like to see a production of the London version in which she is, because I think it could work in interesting ways, and at the end we would see her and Molokov shake hands before going off-stage ( Read more... )

Late review is late.... Now over a month ago I went to see the ENO production of Chess with
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I would have paid a chauffeur to drive me the hundred miles to Chichester to see Fiddler on the Roof yesterday*. As I'm not, I had to do it myself. Fortunately the strong reviews of the production didn't let me down and it was excellent. Omid Djalili was terrific as Tevye, Tracy-Ann Oberman moved Golde beyond cliché, and the younger generation ( Read more... )

Few things strike terror and fury into my theatre-going heart like the words "In a new version by [...]" on the website/review/flyer of a a play not originally written in English. New translations, great! Don't use the one from 1905. But new versions? I want to see Ibsen, not someone else's supposedly more exiting text.* I suppose on the plus side ( Read more... )

The member of the audience leaping to the action to save the show is familiar from real life as well as 42nd Street. Singers do, after all, get coughs. The occasional actor will break a leg. If you're lucky, it happens in time for the management to get Thomas Allen fresh off the plane. If you're really lucky you're the student in the audience who ( Read more... )

I am back from a long weekend in Harrogate with my sisters in celebration of the fact that I have a significant birthday approaching.* I am feeling surprisingly less tired than I might have expected, probably helped by the fact that despite the time of year the trains were civilised so the journeys weren't tiring, even if last minute ticket ( Read more... )

I am in Berlin. It is very hot. It is so hot that today I am joining the ranks of people who wear shorts in a city. Since this appears to be 50% of people I've been seeing, I shouldn't feel too conspicuous in my sartorial crime, and it is a small price to pay for hot weather ( Read more... )

There is a crucial difference between Brexit and the plot of Götterdämmerung: though both have the leaders involved throwing their hands in the air and sitting doing nothing but wait until the house burns down around them, while elsewhere a bunch of people make some staggeringly stupid decisions despite the consequences surely being obvious from ( Read more... )