Buttonholed
The Button Jar
by Deborah Whitmarsh-Boyce
Sensible Footwear at the Hen and Chickens Theatre, Highbury until 25th August
Review by Heather Moulson
This intimate venue is a welcome return for me, one I frequented constantly last year for the Camden Fringe. We are greeted with a picture of studied disarray, the setting for The Button Jar, where two women select music on their iPhone. It becomes clear that they are sisters and it swiftly unravels that they are coping with the loss of their mother. Choosing music for a funeral is always contentious, and brief squabbles lead to the appropriate song being agreed.
Read more…Addictive Watching
La Bohème
by Giacomo Puccini, English libretto by Becca Marriott in an adaptation with Adam Spreadbury-Maher
Opera Makers and Arcola Theatre, Grimeborn Festival at the Arcola Theatre, Dalston until 24th August
Review by Heather Moulson
A chaotic set of unwashed plates and takeaway paraphernalia are the giveaway that this adaption of Puccini’s opera has contemporarily setting. Christmas day, and the casually dressed Mark is pining for his lost love Musetta and for their lost Christmas plans. In a smooth baritone, Thom Isherwood sets out Mark’s, and our, journey. He is joined by Ralph, an unsuccessful playwright, played by fine voiced tenor Martins Smaukstelis, and they reflect on their poverty and hide from the landlord. Their situation seems hopeless, yet with underlying humour and optimism, the friends fight back.
Read more…Opera with Teeth
Der Vampyr
by Heinrich August Marschner, arranged by Kelly Lovelady, libretto adapted by Julia Mintzer and Charles Ogilvie
Gothic Opera, part of the Grimeborn Festival at Arcola Theatre, Dalston until 17th August
Review by Patrick Shorrock
This year’s Grimeborn Festival gets off to a splendid start with this revival of Gothic Opera’s production of Marschner’s Der Vampyr. Marschner is described as a missing link between Weber and Wagner, but is a lot closer to the former than the latter. That said, the tartan, the enforced wedding, the lavish coloratura, and big ensembles remind me less of Der Freischütz and more of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which didn’t receive its first performance until seven years after Der Vampyr.
Read more…Sharp Practice
The Barber of Seville
by Gioachino Rossini, libretto by Cesare Sterbini after Pierre Beaumarchais
West Green House Opera, Theatre on the Lawn, Hartley Wintney, until 28th July
Review by Mark Aspen
The whole cast needs to be very sharp in The Barber of Seville, for it is amongst the busiest of operas. Patter songs come thick and fast, and it is foremost a frenetic farce, furiously paced. Rossini intended his Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and it is presented here in Italian, to be pure fun, with none of the darker undertones of Beaumarchais’ plays, which are evident behind the comedy in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, which is effectively its sequel. Even sober-sided Beethoven enjoyed Il Barbiere, although he was sniffy about Rossini’s more serious works.
Director Victoria Newlyn, who also had great fun with Donezetti’s L’elisir d’amore on the lake in 2022, fittingly lets West Green’s production let rip as a rowdy romp, played for laughs.
Read more…Match Set
My Plan For Tomorrow
by George Abbott
Enrose Ramos and Spare the Rod Theatre Company at the Golden Goose Theatre, Camberwell until 3rd August
Review by Heather Moulson
With a voice-over that is Nixon-esque, Piers enters the stage. The environment appears to be a teaching room. He switches off the CD player and addresses us, his pupils on a Jobseekers course. (It seems that’s what we’ve paid for!). We have entered the surreal world of My Plan For Tomorrow, director George Abbott’s well-written play exploring, and questioning, the value of success and failure.
Read more…Piercingly Sublime
Suor Angelica
by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Giovacchino Forzano
West Green House Opera, at the Theatre on the Lawn, Hartley Wintney, 26th July
Review by Mark Aspen
Never was there a composer who could write such tear-jerking melodies as Giacomo Puccini. His tragic sopranos are etched into the opera-goers memory. Somehow, whenever they are spoken of, their names are prefaced with the adjectives “poor little”. Think Cio-Cio San waiting for the faithless Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, the consumptive Mimi in La Bohème dying in Rodolfo’s garret while their friends wait impotently by, Liu in Turandot taking her own life to protect her aged father and save the Prince whom she loves.
But if you need a tissue for these heroines’ fate, you will need a whole box for Angelica in Suor Angelica. Handkerchiefs? I got through my one-for-blow and my one-for-show. However, this is not shallow sentimentality. It is bare emotion rubbed raw.
West Green House Opera’s one-off performance of Suor Angelica was by far the best and most affecting I have seen. At its conclusion the audience were stunned into silence, before it recovered enough to give a long and loud ovation.
Read more…Golden Bough
Under the Greenwood Tree
by Paul Carr, libretto by Euan Tait, after Thomas Hardy
Dorset Opera at the Coade Theatre, Bryanston, Blandford Forum until 27th July
Review by Claire Alexander
From its earliest days under the personal ambition and inspiration of the late Patrick Shelley (then Director of Music at Sherborne School), Dorset Opera Festival (now under the equally inspirational artistic directorship of Roderick Kennedy since 2003) has grown and flourished into one of the UKs most successful summer opera festivals and always supporting young and emerging artists. Somewhat further out of London than more well-known names, and now in the beautiful expansive grounds of Bryanston School near Blandford, for a week every year it brings equally stunning top class opera to Dorset and surrounding counties. This year it proudly celebrates fifty illustrious years – how proud would those earliest musicians be!
Under The Greenwood Tree (from the Thomas Hardy novel of the same title) by Paul Carr has been especially commissioned for this occasion and could not have been better chosen. There was palpable anticipation in the audience as it assembled for this, the World Premiere.
Read more…Bulk Bye
Falstaff
by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Arrigo Boito
West Green House Opera, Theatre on the Lawn, Hartley Wintney, until 21st July
Review by Mark Aspen
What makes a rogue a lovable rogue? If Sir John Falstaff is the epitome of the loveable rogue, maybe we should ask those Elizabethan play-goers who wanted Shakespeare to resurrect him from the dead after Henry IV. Or perhaps we should ask Signor Verdi, who, although not speaking English, loved Shakespeare and is said to have always kept an Italian translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor at his bedside.
Verdi was in his eightieth year when he wrote Falstaff. His first attempt at a comic opera, Un giorno di regno, was when he was in his twenties. Its poor reception disheartened him and tragic opera became his forte for the next six decades. It was his librettist, Arrigo Boito who re-kindled the dormant Shakespeare comedy idea, when he dropped an outline for Falstaff on his desk. Boito knew of Verdi’s bardolatry; there had already been a Macbeth and an Otello, plus Verdi had long toyed with the notion of a King Lear. That would have been quite something.
Read more…In at the Deep End
Red Speedo
by Lucas Hnath
David Adkin and OT Productions, at The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond until 10th August
Review by Harry Zimmerman
Ray lives to swim. He is within touching distance of Olympic glory and a life-changing sponsorship deal. But everything changes when performance-enhancing drugs are discovered in the club’s refrigerator. As tensions run high, Ray’s brother wants them destroyed, his coach wants to call the authorities, his ex-girlfriend doesn’t want to know, and Ray wants the drugs back.
Written by Lucas Hnath, directed by Matthew Dunster and receiving its’ UK premiere at The Orange Tree Theatre, Red Speedo is a taut construct of power, political manoeuvring and moral ambiguities played at the breakneck pace of an Olympic sprint. At its heart, the play tackles the unforgiving weight of success in a world where the only crime is getting caught.
Read more…Sublime Balm for a Hot Evening
Opera Gala Concert
West Green House Opera, at the Theatre on the Lawn, Hartley Wintney, 19th July
Review by Mark Aspen
Gleaming white decorated canvas of the dining pavilions by the glittering lake and Marylyn Abbott’s gardens, swollen with blooms in all their glory, form the setting for the opening event of West Green House Opera’s new season. It is the hottest day of the year (“so far”, add the meteorologists) and there is quite a party atmosphere as the champagne corks pop. And pop they do, as ice-pack sleeves don’t stay frozen long at 32°C. Bacchus smiles out, appropriately, from the programme cover.
It is that same Bacchus that smiles out from the central rondel of the façade of West Green House, which forms the backdrop in the Theatre on the Lawn, itself a generously proportioned pavilion, sans upstage wall, affording a view across the sheltered greensward towards the handsome house.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 