Dance: “Tutu”. Review by Primrose MacFay. What fun! A show called “Tutu” threatens serious political attention and then turns out to be quite other, a genre-bending, gender-bending romping rampage through conventions not just of dance but of human, or – one might as well say it – sexual relations.
theatre
Teatro Antica di Taormina. Review by Barbara Lewis. For more than two millennia, Taormina on Sicily’s eastern coast has laid claim to what you could say is the world’s most dramatic theatre in terms of its natural setting between Mount Etna and the sparkling Ionian Sea.
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.
A Grain of Sand. Review by Barbara Lewis. We tell stories when reality becomes unbearable. We may also tell them to remember those who have not lived to tell the tale. Both statements pertain to the one-woman show created by Elias Matar that deftly combines fabulous Palestinian myths with the horrors experienced as children live and die through war in Gaza.
Safe Haven. Review by Barbara Lewis. “Oh enemy, the Kurdish people live on,” is how the Kurdish National Anthem defiantly begins. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the survival of many of them was helped by Operation Safe Haven, an initiative pushed through by then Prime Minister John Major.
Gerry & Sewell. Review by Barbara Lewis. Gerry and Sewell are two friends who have little beyond their loyalty to each other and to their team: Newcastle United. Their one dream is to have the money to buy a season ticket.
Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B. Review by Barbara Lewis. Popular wisdom maintains that the appeal of the traditional whodunnit is in its reassuring message that problems will be solved and justice will be done. But what if there are no easy answers, asks Tendai Humphrey Sitima.
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.
Pension Europa. Review by Barbara Lewis. Austrian-Italian director Martin Gruber and his aktionstheater ensemble have for decades helped audiences to explore what it is to be a human wrestling with the anxieties of the day.
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.
The Wind and The Rain. Finborough Theatre. Review by Barbara Lewis. A wistful story of Edinburgh medical students tussling with exams and affairs of the heart was one of the biggest international hits of the 1930s and a staple of British repertory theatre for decades after.
Cosi fan tutte. Review by Julia Pascal. What is so shocking about this opera written by Mozart in 1790 is how contemporary it is. This co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera was first seen at the Coliseum in 2014.
By Julia Pascal • added recently on London Grip, opera, theatre • Tags: Julia Pascal, opera, theatre