Low-tech, unforced and innocent, the Chipping Norton panto lives up to the programme note’s promise to provide “an escape from the disposable pop culture that surrounds our children”.
To most Britons, P.G. Wodehouse is known as the creator of quaint, comic novels starring the blundering upper class twit Bertie Wooster and his astute valet Jeeves. He also contributed lyrics and stories to a wealth of musicals and his step great grandson, the opera singer Hal Cazalet, who as a child slept in a room beneath the Wodehouse archive, tells us he only got to know P.G. Wodehouse’s prose through the song lyrics.
Four women and five men from Aberdeen University’s A Cappella Society Aberpella tell us they thought they were being terribly witty in choosing the title “50 Tones of Grey” as a reference to the shades of the sky and stone of their university city.
Even in times when rehash is more common than originality, the risk with a revival of Burt Bacharach’s late 1960s musical Promises, Promises, in turn based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, is that it feels doubly derivative.
Adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol began around 30 years after his death and proliferated during the 1930s and 40s with a wealth of radio productions, notably one featuring Orson Welles and sponsored by Campbell’s Soup.
For the non-initiate, The Beastie Boys were a group of white New Yorkers who made the leap from punk rock to hip hop. The result was the number 1 hit Licensed to Ill and an opening up to the white suburbs of a previously black musical phenomenon.
After the trauma of Kristallnacht in November 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was persuaded to agree that thousands of Jewish children come to Britain through a rescue effort that became known as the Kindertransport.
In the confusing explosion of activity that is the Edinburgh Fringe, NewsRevue has the huge advantage of being a known brand whose appeal is all the greater when a torrent of unsettling news leaves us craving comic relief and the decades-old formula of satire set to music is still the best of tonics.
In our post-fact world where we drown in other people’s opinions, life as a hard-up, stand-up comedian trying to make a name has got harder. And on the Free Fringe periphery of the Edinburgh Fringe – where artists effectively busk in a tatty room with a few uncomfortable seats and a bucket for contributions as there is no formal entrance free – it has become an even more extreme act of faith.
Northern Ireland’s permanent representation in Brussels periodically brings to the capital of Europe a sample of Northern Irish culture in a spirit of cross-cultural exchange that risks being disrupted in the event of a Brexit.
One of Britain’s biggest pop icons and one of France’s intellectual giants have more in common than you might think.
Requiem pour L., Sadler’s Wells. Review by Julia Pascal.
The title Requiem pour L., if spoken aloud, translates as Requiem for her. Who is the anonymous woman that we see dying onscreen as Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626, is re-scored?