After years of writing tragedies, Verdi in his old age turned to the majestic girth of Shakespeare’s debauched knight, Sir John Falstaff, for inspiration in what would be his final opera. Conductor James Levine, who returns to the Met Opera after two years of illness, believes it is the greatest comic opera of all –…
The Nose. It must be the most unromantic title for an opera, or a story for that matter, because Shostakovich’s opera started out as a short story by Gogol. It’s an unromantic opera. But it’s clever and crazy and utterly zany. This Russian classic is essentially the magic of making comedy out of absolutely nothing.…
Pushkin’s famous novel was translated by Tchaikovsky into soaring emotions in his opera Eugene Onegin, and this production in the hands of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is pure magic. Netrebko’s letter scene in Scene 2 alone is worth the price of the admission, as the young Tatiana pours out the…
Othello from a military perspective? It sounds like yet another director’s far-fetched take on Shakespeare’s endlessly adaptable plays. In fact, it’s not. The dress may be modern, the bunkers concrete and the guns automatics, but Nicholas Hytner’s brilliant version of Othello at the National Theatre slots right into place with the text. This is a…
There is no small measure of comedy in watching one National Treasure taking a shot at another. Playwright Alan Bennett (of History Boys fame) could well be considered one of Britain’s National Treasures, with his uncanny ability to capture the essence of the English. And one of their favourite pastimes is to visit National Trust…
The lights come up. Tumultuous applause. A full house audience undecided only whether to give a standing ovation or not. It’s a moment when most actors can breathe a sigh of relief. Not John Lithgow, playing the title role in the National Theatre production of The Magistrate, however. No, he has to take a deep…
Leo Tolstoy famously said, in the opening lines of his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That may not be quite true, seeing people laugh with a sense of recognition at the play The Last of the Haussmans. No-one’s family can be quite like…
Curious, isn’t it, that we can understand how a blue sky can make one happy, but find it more difficult to see why five red cars could give one a super good day? For Christopher Boone though, while red cars are good, a yellow car heralds all the gloom of a dark storm cloud. Describing…
A comedy about Stalin? It sounds outrageous, and in fact it is. Dark, bitter, savage, and very clever, Collaborators is a new play by John Hodge about the Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, who was given a poisoned chalice by the regime when asked to write a play celebrating the life of Stalin. The time was…
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