Scaled-down Herring, Big Catch on Humour
Albert Herring
by Benjamin Britten,libretto by Eric Crozier
English National Opera at the London Coliseum until 16th October, then at The Lowry, Salford until 22nd October
Review by Helen Astrid
English National Opera has entered its twin-city era, moving part of its operations to Salford while maintaining a reduced programme at London’s Coliseum. Its first joint venture, Antony McDonald’s semi-staged production of Britten’s chamber opera Albert Herring, opened on 13th October in a slimmed-down format.
ENO has long been a champion of Britten’s work – it famously premiered Peter Grimes in 1945 – yet this marks its first performance of Albert Herring. The choice seems a bid to reach new and broader audiences, with economy central to its approach. For a chamber opera, however, it verges on grand-opera scale, running to 140 minutes excluding the interval.
Read more…Top Down
Top Hat
by Irving Berlin, adaptation by Matthew White and Howard Jacques
Kenny Wax and Jonathan Church for Chichester Festival Theatre Productions at the New Wimbledon Theatre until 18th October and then on tour until 11th April 2026
Review by Patrick Shorrock
Chichester Theatre’s musicals tend to be outstandingly good and often transfer from the south coast. Recent examples include Crazy for You, South Pacific, and Oliver! (the last of which is still a West End hit). If this version of Top Hat isn’t quite at that level, it’s still a damn good show and makes for an enjoyable evening.
Read more…On a Hi
Sixtieth Anniversary in Music
Donovan at Richmond Theatre, 12th October
Review by Vince Francis
Its good to see a job through, isn’t it? On the 12th September, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Donovan, an influential musician who embarked on his career in the 1960s. The objective or our meeting was to promote the short European tour Donovan was embarking on, celebrating his sixty years of work in the business, and which was to culminate in in a week of activities in London, including film screenings, book and album signings and the concert at Richmond Theatre on the 12th October, where I found myself in the front row, in possession of a back-stage pass for the after show reception. All of which has a certain pleasing roundness to it, I feel.
A pleasingly wider range of ages than I expected formed the enthusiastic and vocal sell-out audience to this celebration, some of whom had travelled considerable distance for the sole purpose. One chap I spoke to, originally from Arkansas, interrupted his own tour of European cities, on vacation in this instance, and had flown in from Prague that morning having secured a ticket.
Read more…Resplendent Restaging
Turandot
by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni
Instant Opera at the Courtyard Amphitheatre at the TownHouse, Kingston until 12th October
Review by Richard Copeman
Instant Opera revived its ambitious production, sung in Italian, of Puccini’s final (unfinished) opera, Turandot, in a new venue, designed by Grafton Architects, which has won several prestigious architectural awards for its clean and open format. The Courtyard, an auditorium in the Town House at Kingston University, offers a large performance space for the chorus and soloists, especially with the 38-piece orchestra behind the acting area. The steeply stepped arena with hard seating on three sides gave excellent sightlines and clear surtitles were projected onto a large screen, together with images of the moon and various backgrounds, including devastated cities. Writing in the programme, Instant Opera’s artistic director and producer, Nicholas George explained his concept of a post-apocalyptic dystopian society set in 2184,. This imagined a cruel, medieval type society not dissimilar to the original Gozzi Chinese setting. The first difference I noticed was the comedia del arte trio of ministers being in paramilitary costume.
Read more…Soft Enchantment
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by Benjamin Britten, libretto by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears after William Shakespeare
Glyndebourne Productions at Glyndebourne Festival Theatre until 29th October
Review by Susan Furnell
The lights threw us into near-pitch darkness for what seemed like an eternity; not a sound was heard from the audience. Then a moon appeared somewhere above the stage, and lighting slowly amplified, revealing through mist the magical forest, bathed in an eerie purple glow, swaying with the opening cello glissandi, the sounds of another world entirely: the fairy world of Oberon and Titania.
Peter Hall’s enchanted forest and indeed the whole production, revived by Lynne Hockney the original choreographer, still casts its spell forty years on. I’d never seen it before and was utterly captivated.
Read more…Enjoyable Drama – But Time For a Change?
Carmen
by Georges Bizet, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, translated Christopher Cowell
The English National Opera at the London Coliseum until 14th October
Review by Michael Rowlands
I always try to chat to the person next to me when I am out alone and my neighbour, on this evening, had never been to an opera before. It had been recommended by a friend, who had seen a previous revival of Carmen. I envied her seeing this magnificent opera for the first time. We chuckled over the warning that there was male nudity, as it says in the programme, “a symbolic addition representing raw masculinity, vulnerability and death” at the beginning of Act Three. In the event, we needn’t have worried, as he was barely visible in the dark gloom, and it was as unshocking as the end of Act One of Hair. Smoking and sex was not too much of a problem either.
Read more…Style with Guile
Death on the Nile
by Agatha Christie, adapted by Ken Ludwig
Fiery Angel at Richmond Theatre until 11th October, then on tour until 23rd May 2026
Review by Polly Davies
A very happy audience left Richmond Theatre at the end of the entertaining and eventful Death on the Nile last night. Stylish and eventful, Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of the well-known Agatha Christie novel keeps the essential elements of Christie’s story, but with a clever prequel, and a degree of simplification. Lucy Bailey’s nicely paced direction builds up the tension from a gentle love story to a murder, with lots of excitement in between. There are thrills a plenty as grudges are revealed, guns are shot, relationships form, and fraud is suspected. If you are like me and had forgotten the denouement it was a genuine mystery.
Read more…Rapturous
Patience
by W. S. Gilbert, music by Sir Arthur Sullivan
HLO Musical Company at the Hampton Hill.Theatre, until 4th October
Review by Polly Davies
I thoroughly enjoyed this production of this perennial favourite at the Hampton Hill Theatre last night. I’d forgotten how sharp Gilbert and Sullivan’s satire could be. Written to poke fun at the fashionable worship of the aesthetic movement in the 19th Century, it doesn’t miss a trick. There are lovesick maidens, simpering poets and rejected lovers apiece. I doubt anyone would get away with making this much fun of Gen Z’s idols and their fans, even with a similarly deft touch, without falling foul of cancel culture.
The arrival of a somewhat dubious poet, in fact only feigning aestheticism to gain admiration, leads the local ladies to desert their military boyfriends as they fall under the spell of the craze for aestheticism and in particular the dream of romantic love. Self- indulgent and infatuated, they fall in love with this newly arrived and self-declared poet. Local girl Patience is the only one to resist his charms, but her curiosity to understand this phenomenon leads her ultimately to fall under its spell. The appearance of a local poet and the ladies’ intense but fickle grant of affection keeps the audience laughing throughout. All this enlivened by the Gilbert and Sullivan’s usual wit and tongue twisting lyrics, and Lee Dewsnap’s superb musical accompaniment.
Read more…Gold Plated Behemoth
Les Vêpres siciliennes
by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Eugene Scribe and Charles Duveyrier after Le Duc D’Albe
The Royal Ballet and Opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden until 6th October
Review by Michael Rowlands
This operatic French-Italian mongrel, The Sicilian Vespers, is on it’s third outing at The Royal Opera House and in this revival a third change of cast, with the lovely Lebanese-Canadian Verdi specialist Joyce El-Khouri singing Helene, replacing Marina Rebka. Valentyn Dytiuk replaced Soek Jong Baek as Henri, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo sang Jean Procida and Guy de Montfort was sung by Quinn Kelsey who was in the original casting.
The bloodlines of this 1855 behemoth are genetically far apart. Verdi at the top of his form, after La Traviata (1852), Rigoletto (1851), and Il Travatore (1853), produces a wonderful Verdian score that, presumably deliberately, does not have the fully composed-through music of his successes but, at times, reaches as high as any of his work. The other bloodline is, to us, and probably to Verdi too, an outdated operatic straitjacket that was just the genre Verdi was reacting against. Napoleon III was heading a prosperous, rapidly industrialising country, that had opera at its cultural heart, so big was better. Meyerbeer was the man to beat, which meant a five act grand opera, usually based of a quasi-historical event (in this opera a revolt on 30th March 1282 in Palermo), with opposing sides, and with a personal family, duty or love conflict. It was to have a ballet after the interval, and one that also has dramatic spectacle.
Read more…Coddled
The Elixir of Love
by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Felice Romani, after Eugene Scribe
English Touring Opera at The Hackney Empire, 27th September, then on tour until 22nd November
Review by Mark Aspen
Surely, we know were are in for a fun evening when at his first appearance Nemorino is wearing a cod piece. No, not that sort of codpiece, (sorry to disappoint) but a big-head fish costume, his advertising gimmick for his struggling seaside fish-and-chip stall.
And in follow the ensemble, some in sandwich-boards with ads for the ailing attractions of a seaside resort now neglected by erstwhile visitors. The soul of this pre-loved English seaside town is accurately captured in April Dalton’s nostalgic set. Its well-structured promenade and pier entrance speak of the shunning of these wonderful places, old friends cast aside as now being infra-dig. Yet here is the art-deco theatre, its faded bill boards pointing towards a past dipping of the toe in the water of culture, in its long past production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Read more…
