The Rest of June

OPERA
At the Guildhall School of Music & Drama there was a pairing of Martinu and  Rossini one-act comic operas. I love these Guildhall opera evenings – always value and often a treat. I wasn’t mad keen on the music of the Martinu though I liked the production and performances (particularly Nicky Spence). The Rossini, an [...]

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Sweet Charity / Oh What A Lovely War

I’ve been going to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s end-of-year musicals for ages as they’re as good or better as anything in the West End, but this was my first time at the Royal Academy of Music’s end-of-year shows - and it certainly won’t be my last.
Sweet Charity is typically Broadway and boasts some fantastic [...]

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The King & I

I’m a sucker for musicals but the reviews of this lowered my expectations, which may be why I enjoyed it so much!
Far from being lost in the vast space, I thought director Jeremy Sams and designer Robert Jones has performed a miracle in balancing the spectacle with the intimate and, as they did with the [...]

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Been So Long

I was so looking forward to this after its writer / director Che Walker’s terrific Frontline at Shakespeare’s Globe last summer. It was just days after the superb Kursk at the same venue and before the show the place was buzzing.
This is a musical set in a bar in decline with only 4 customers and a barman. [...]

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All’s Well That Ends Well

An excellent production of a difficult Shakespeare play. The fantasy gothic setting somehow brings out an other-worldliness in this somewhat implausible tale and I was spellbound. The verse speaking is particularly good so you get more than on the page, as you should with Shakespeare.
Marianne Elliott, the current director-who-can-do-no-wrong, has assembled a spectacularly good company including [...]

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Mincemeat

This is a fascinating story and there’s much to admire in Cardboard Citizens (an excellent professional theatre company working with homeless people) ambitious site specific production, which unfolds in six large rooms in an atmospheric disused building in Shoreditch (close to the site of Shakespeare’s Curtain Theatre).
Based on the true story of a dead body [...]

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England People Very Nice

This controversial play divides people (including my group of nine) but I’m clearly in the ‘love it’ camp.
In a present day detention camp for asylum seekers, the ‘residents’ are putting on a play about the waves of immigation into London’s Spitalfields from the Huegenots through the Irish and Jews to Bangla Deshi’s and beyond. In a [...]

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The Cherry Orchard

Not as successful as the other Bridge Project offering, A Winter’s Tale, but largely because it isn’t as good a play and Checkov is no Shakespeare.
Tom Stoppard’s translation wasn’t as witty as I’d been led to believe and it didn’t seem to add or change anything and it turned out to be the most depressing production [...]

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When The Rain Stops Falling

This is a fine new play at the Almeida. It spans 80 years (30 in the future) of four generations of a British family and three generations of an Australian family who connect in 1988 when a son follows in his father’s footsteps and arrives at the Murray River estuary, which also features in an ever present [...]

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Kursk

The studio theatre at the Young Vic has been turned into a British submarine and you stand or sit within or above it as the story of how it tracks the ill-fated Russian submarine Kursk plays out. I stood on the gallery looking down at the control rooms, mess, cabins, dormitories and bathrooms. 
It’s an extraordinary [...]

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