Mainly Opera and Ballet
Christine Keeler is a name to conjure with, but this play is really about Stephen Ward, the fashionable osteopath and portrait painter who committed suicide after the Profumo scandal blew up in 1963. He is portrayed here as a very nasty piece of work, a man who, on behalf of Russian Intelligence, was using Keeler to …
All in all this is a wonderful evening’s entertainment with glorious choreography and dancing aided by delightful sets and costumes, and the House was deservedly full.
Covent Garden has a talent for staging nineteenth century operas in sumptuous productions with excellent singers, and this is another fine example. Gounod’s Faust, with its libretto by Barbier and Carré based on Carré’s earlier play Faust et Marguerite, is loosely fashioned on Goethe’s great work, though it’s hardly Goethe. David McVicar’s production, with its sets by …
This is perhaps the most exceptional production in the Linbury Studio for 2011 — a retelling of Franz Kafka’s strange story Die Verwandlung.
A ship bound for South America in the early 1960s is taking a German diplomat and his wife Liese to a post in Brazil. Steep stairways connect the upper deck of the ship to the hell of 1940s Auschwitz below. Nearly twenty years after the Second World War a guard and a prisoner of the …
A revival of Jonathan Miller’s production of Elixir, set in a diner in small town America, is an excellent way to start the new season. Miller’s production first appeared in early 2010, and the two stars of those performances returned to give us their best: Sarah Tynan as the saucy, sassy Adina, and Andrew Shore as …
Suor Angelica knocked Tabarro right off the stage because of one person — Ermonela Jaho. She was . . . words fail me . . . sublime . . . ethereal.
Porphyria is a disease stemming from a genetic condition and if that was indeed his problem, it points to the utter futility of the treatments meted out to [George III]. These include the appalling practice of blistering, which we see performed on stage.
In April 1968 Soviet tanks rolled into Vaclav Havel’s home-town of Prague, and in 1971 he wrote this play about the difficulty of replacing a dictatorship without getting something worse. In the meantime, Colonel Gaddafi came to power in Libya, a land once controlled by a colonial power like the fictional country of this drama. At the …
