19th century
L'Étoile, Royal OperaTuesday, 02 February 2016
Why have all attempts to make French comic opera funny to British audiences fallen so flat, at least since ENO's 1980s Orpheus in the Underworld? That company's La belle Hélène simply curled the toes, while Opera North managed to make a pig's-ear "... Read more... |
We Made It: 'The Revenant' Production Designer Jack FiskTuesday, 26 January 2016
The Revenant's production designer Jack Fisk wasn’t required to build multiple sets for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 1823 wilderness epic. Indelible, however, are the few man-made settlements and structures with which Fisk marked the route of... Read more... |
Roméo et Juliette, BBCSO, Davis, BarbicanSaturday, 23 January 2016
It was another Davis, the late Colin rather than the very alive Andrew, who used to be master of Berlioz's phenomenally inventive opera for orchestra with its novel explanatory prologue and epilogue. I like to think he'd have been looking down... Read more... |
The RevenantFriday, 15 January 2016
Stories have abounded about the epic bouts of punishing location shooting that went into Alejandro González Iñárittu's frontier saga. Seeing the results on screen, you'd have to say that whatever suffering the cast and crew had to endure, it was... Read more... |
The Story of Scottish Art, BBC FourThursday, 14 January 2016
“Finding the Light”, the second episode of this four-part series, took us to the period when Scottish intellectuals led the world in innovative and revolutionary thinking, Edinburgh’s neo-classical architecture in the leafy streets of the New Town... Read more... |
Jericho, ITVFriday, 08 January 2016
Interesting idea – a Western set in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1870s. Jessica Raine, spotted last year as the other Boleyn girl in Wolf Hall and evidently keen to put Call the Midwife as far behind her as possible, stars as Annie Quantain, a... Read more... |
War and Peace, BBC OneMonday, 04 January 2016
So, Andrew Davies has bitten off the big one. It may have come as a surprise to some that the master of adapting the British classics for television hadn’t read Tolstoy’s classic-to-end-all-classics until the BBC mooted the idea of a new screen... Read more... |
Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, BBC OneSaturday, 02 January 2016
Since Benedict Cumberbatch is now one of the world's most in-demand actors, and his sidekick Martin Freeman isn't doing too badly either, getting them on a set together is like trying to get Simon & Garfunkel to do a reunion. Hence Sherlock... Read more... |
In the Heart of the SeaSaturday, 26 December 2015
A host of pictorially arresting, even painterly images can't make a satisfying whole out of In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard's film that doesn't dig very deep, its penetrating title notwitstanding. Howard has always been drawn to unusual realms,... Read more... |
Eugene Onegin, Royal OperaSunday, 20 December 2015
Searing emotional truth has to be at the core of any attempt to stage Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes after Pushkin”. I was among the minority who thought Kasper Holten got it right, with deep knowledge of the original verse-novel, in his first... Read more... |
Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 18 December 2015
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (... Read more... |
The Little Match Girl, Lilian Baylis Studio TheatreThursday, 17 December 2015
I habitually skipped over Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl in my childhood fairy tale compendium because I couldn't bear the sadness (see also: The Happy Prince *sob*). Parents of sensitive children will therefore be relieved to know that... Read more... |
