An Anatomy of Melancholy. Review by Julia Pascal. This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of theatre that I have ever seen. The Pit is transformed into a laboratory with audience sitting in a circle watching the interplay between science, art, music, psychiatry and clinical analysis, in a concept that links the writings of Shakespeare’s contemporary, John Burton, with Freud and 2022 explorations into the mind.
music
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Review by Barbara Lewis. In our angst-ridden age, the thirst for the tonic of musical theatre seems almost unquenchable. In a production that acknowledges so vividly the follies of the supposedly scholarly elite, the rustics dazzle.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Pavel Kolesnikov/Rosas/the Goldberg Variations. Review by Julia Pascal. The effect of the long solo dance, and the symbiosis with Kolesnikov’s delicate performance, stimulates a multitude of responses: intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic. Or perhaps the work needs no reading at all: it can be experienced just as pure pleasure.
Poetry review – INTERSTELLAR THEME PARK: Charles Rammelkamp accompanies Jack Skelley down a pop-culture memory lane
Prom 41 Wednesday 17 August 2022. Review by Julia Pascal. The star of the evening was Behzod Abduraimov in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1. If you shut your eyes you might think that four hands were playing the piano not two.
Prom 20. Review by Julia Pascal. The night of the male Modernists opened with a tribute to Harrison Birtwistle’s Sonance Severance 2000, a three minute composition which is as huge in its effect as it is brief in its length.
My Fair Lady. English National Opera. Review by Julia Pascal. My Fair Lady, the musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is staged at the English National Opera this summer.
The Excursions of Mr Broucek. Review by Barbara Lewis. The Excursions of Mr Broucek is an opera like no other – or as Wasfi Kani, the founder and power behind the bold, brave and never daunted Grange Park Opera, puts it: “Cosi fan Tutti it isn’t.”
Lillias White Sings Broadway. Review by Barbara Lewis. The pan-damn-demic, as Broadway singer Lillias White puts it, has abated sufficiently for her to bring her considerable presence to cosy, atmospheric venues, including London’s Crazy Coqs.
Gianni Schicchi. Review by Barbara Lewis. Gianni Schicchi, the protagonist of Puccini’s only wholly comic opera, was a 13th-century Italian knight immortalised by Dante in the Circle of Impersonators for pretending to be the rich gentleman Buoso Donati and dictating a testament highly favourable to himself.
Jean Sibelius Life, Music, Silence by Daniel M.Grimley (Reaktion Books). ‘The evening atmosphere wonderful. As always when silence speaks: a secret pull of eternal silence and – life’s song.’ Jean Sibelius, diary entry August 1910
The Human Voice, Charing Cross Theatre. Review by Barbara Lewis. It’s surely a temptation for today’s directors of Poulenc and Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, or The Human Voice in this English version, to transpose it to the world of mobile phones. It’s one director Alejandro Bonatto wisely resists.
By Barbara Lewis • music, plays, theatre, year 2022 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, music, plays, theatre