Broadway
Songs from a Hotel Bedroom, Linbury StudioFriday, 05 November 2010
Where has this idea come from that Kurt Weill somehow lost his edge or, worse yet, sold out when he headed Stateside? Have the people who perpetrate this nonsense actually heard the Broadway shows? The diversity of subject matter, the individuality... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Director Des McAnuffTuesday, 14 September 2010
In the 1960s Des McAnuff played guitar and wrote songs to meet girls. Subsequently life became a little more complicated for the multi-talented writer/ director. His long-standing commitment to the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at the other Stratford... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Melody Moore InterviewMonday, 13 September 2010
Melody Moore is well named. Her parents must have had a sixth sense that she would be "melodious". This exciting young American soprano has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. She has established footholds at both San Francisco and Los... Read more... |
theartsdesk MOT: Wicked, Apollo Victoria TheatreFriday, 27 August 2010
Wicked is that rare Broadway musical transplant to London that has recouped its costs - and how. Part paean to female empowerment, part parable of life in Bush-era America or any land on the desperate look-out for an enemy, the show also offers... Read more... |
A Celebration of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Royal Albert HallMonday, 23 August 2010
It may have been the glossy, Labrador-like abandon of John Wilson and his fabulous orchestra, but barely two bars of the Oklahoma! overture had passed before I caught myself grinning and drifting into critical neutral. Richard Rodgers’ scores are... Read more... |
theartsdesk MOT: Chicago, Cambridge TheatreSaturday, 21 August 2010
Chicago, in some ways, remains the great musical theatre surprise success of modern times. Bob Fosse's dissection of sex and violence in the Windy City had a respectable Broadway run back in the 1970s (898 performances in all), featuring a... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Kerry Ellis InterviewFriday, 20 August 2010
Kerry Ellis amassed a legion of adoring fans when she went "green" playing Elphaba in Stephen Schwartz's smash-hit musical both in London and on Broadway. But her pre-eminence as a musical-theatre-diva-cum-rock-chick was secured earlier still when... Read more... |
The Bernstein Project - Mass, Royal Festival HallMonday, 12 July 2010
It's been quite a week for youth and the vernacular in the world of so-called “classical” music. Multiply by four the seven fledgling stage animals currently firing up John Adams’s “earthquake-romance” in London's East End, add an orchestra of 13-to... Read more... |
On Their Toes!, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham HippodromeWednesday, 16 June 2010
Hans van Manen does basic instincts in ballet better than anyone alive. The Dutch choreographer, nearly 78 and far too little exposed in Britain, is a near-contemporary of Kenneth MacMillan, another specialist in sexual relations, but where... Read more... |
Madame Armfeldt pronouncesFriday, 04 June 2010
Angela Lansbury is the wittiest, least self-regarding and most articulate octogenarian actress I've ever come across. That much seems clear from her half-hour interview with Mark Coles on the estimable, if sometimes rather narrow-agenda-ed BBC World... Read more... |
Leonard Bernstein: West Side StoryTuesday, 25 May 2010
Nigel Simeone’s engaging study of Bernstein’s score of West Side Story could almost be entitled “Collaboration: The Manual”, so deftly does it interweave Bernstein’s originality with the contributions of his stellar team-mates. Jerome Robbins... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Composer Alan MenkenSunday, 16 May 2010
For many years the composer who made his name with Little Shop of Horrors abandoned the theatre to work in Hollywood. He returned to Broadway in 2008 with an enlarged songbook for The Little Mermaid, but it closed within a year. Later came the... Read more... |
