Poetry review – VOX WAH WAH: Mat Riches enjoys browsing this short, guitar-themed collection by Hilary Menos
music
Allegra. Review by Julia Pascal. This seemingly frothy play with music is a vehicle for Dame Maureen Lipman. She plays Allegra, a woman with a pathological desire to burst into song. Allegra is motivated to brighten the mood of those around her, even at the most inappropriate moments.
Shantify. Review by Barbara Lewis. For anyone who thought the modern wave of enthusiasm for fishing songs had crested with the lockdown singing postman, “Shantify”, uttered in an awed stage whisper, is here to prove them wrong.
A Sunday of Sondheim. Review by Barbara Lewis. Max Eade, nominally the director, who tells us he is really just the organiser, says he wanted this small-scale performance in the intimate space of the Union Theatre to be imperfect; a matter of “scribbles on a page”.
Jo The Little Woman Musical. Review by Barbara Lewis. Jo The Little Women Musical is about pursuing your passion no matter what. It’s a mantra the show’s three writers have lived by. They met as theatre school students in California three decades ago when they first began work on turning Louise May Alcott’s classic into a musical.
Prom 55. Review by Julia Pascal. Nelsons led his orchestra in such a way as to suggest that this was also the premiere for Stravinsky, Gershwin and Ravel.
Poetry review – LET HIM BRING A SHRUBBE: Edmund Prestwich takes a close and appreciative look at Katharine Towers’ collection which draws on the life & music of composer Gerald Finzi
Trouble in Tahiti. Review by Barbara Lewis. Opera typically is the medium for extraordinary emotion on a grand scale. The great straddler of genres Bernstein makes it the vehicle to explore the depressing ordinariness of the countless millions who can’t find their way back to the extraordinary emotion they once felt.
Annie Get Your Gun. Review by Barbara Lewis. Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” is the perfect opening for a show and especially for the inaugural show at the Lavender Theatre on Epsom Downs.
Candide, WNO. Review by Barbara Lewis. Too messy, too long, too anti-Semitic, too misogynistic: there are many reasons to avoid Bernstein’s Candide. And yet, director James Bonas and the Welsh National Opera bravely make a powerful case for staging this attack on the depravity of those in power and the futility of war.
Poetry review – HAIL SISTERS OF THE REVOLUTION: Kelly Davis admires Caroline Gilfillan’s tribute to a 1970s band of freedom fighters
Dido and Aeneas. Review by Barbara Lewis. Singer and director Marcio da Silva opens his version of Purcell’s only fully sung opera with a request that the audience vote on who takes the role of Dido. It felt at first like a gimmick, at odds with high tragedy, and yet it takes on a serious purpose: we, like the gods, or the fates, or Purcell’s witches, are the arbitrary deciders of one human’s destiny.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, music, opera, performance, theatre • Tags: Barbara Lewis, music, opera, performance, theatre