London Coliseum
Kerem Hasan
There is a scene in the second act of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking in which the man condemned to death, Joseph De Rocher, with his spiritual advisor Sister Helen Prejean in tow, have a devastating interaction with his mother. A final, inconsolable goodbye before De Rocher is processed for his impending execution. As an opera conductor, I find myself maintaining a fine balance between keeping a practical, level-headed overview of the elements under my leadership; the balance of the orchestra, the way the stage is connecting with the music, the singers’ cues, Read more ...
David Nice
Britten’s Albert Herring is one of the great 20th century comic operas; only Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest draw such whole-hearted laughter. If it’s never been performed in the London Coliseum before, that’s because it’s a chamber opera with a 14-piece ensemble in the pit. This clever compromise shouldn’t be going to Lowry, Salford for its third and fourth performances but touring the country in much smaller houses.Even so, it works at ENO’s London home, just as Britten’s other portmanteau operas, The Rape of Lucretia, devastating in Graham Vick’s Read more ...
David Nice
“Safe” is a word used far too often in ENO’s bizarre new version of a programme, full of uncredited articles, at least two of which look as if they’re AI generated. Everything intimacy director Haruko Karoda, Niamh O’Sullivan (Carmen) and John Findon (Don José) say makes sense, but the context is worrying. What’s a Carmen without real danger? Revival director Jamie Manton has toned down Calixto Bieito’s once-semi-controversal production, and it shows.O’Sullivan has emerged as a marvellous singer-actor, with a singular, beautiful and at times sensual mezzo instrument. She makes Carmen real: Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When you go to the prince’s ball, would you prefer a night of sobriety or excess? Julia Burbach’s new production of Rossini’s Cinderella (La Cenerentola) for English National Opera frankly errs on the side of theatrical over-indulgence. The stage-business treats arrive thick and fast like trays of richly seasoned canapés, from the scurrying kids in mouse costumes who act as the mastermind Alidoro’s hi-tech little helpers to the all-male chorus togged out in an assortment of scarlet-to-pink period outfits as Prince Ramiro’s ancestral ghosts. I never quite discovered why those hard-working Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In 2012, an eight-hour long version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby arrived in London at the Noel Coward Theatre. Rather than risk offending the novel’s devotees by missing any detail out, the Elevator Repair Service theatre company had decided that they would stick their necks out and offer a theatrical marathon, narrating the book in its entirety.The gamble paid off: when Gatz played on Broadway, the New York Times declared it to be “the most remarkable achievement in theatre not only of this year but of this decade.” In London, the Guardian Read more ...
Mary, Queen of Scots, English National Opera review - heroic effort for an overcooked history lesson
David Nice
Genius doesn't always tally with equal opportunities, to paraphrase Doris Lessing. Opera houses have a duty to put on new works by women composers; sometimes an instant classic emerges. But to revive a music drama that hardly made waves back in 1977? Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has some strong invention, and whizzes you through historical bullet points so quickly that there’s no chance to get bored. But does it deserve a company giving it their all?It certainly deserved better dressing-up than it gets from designer-director Stewart Laing. This looks like one of those black-box Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously simple Figaro for English National Opera. A white box and a row of doors supply the only set to speak of for a production less interested in the entrenched tensions of upstairs-downstairs than the shifting alliances and fragile coalitions of a household in flux. Gender, money, status – even survival – all take their turn as the axis dividing a more than usually eccentric cast of characters in a contemporary staging whose interest – and wit – is all in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
No new production of a beloved old ballet can please everyone, and there is none more beloved, or more frequently produced, than The Nutcracker. English National Ballet has staked its identity on performing Tchaikovsky’s last, most hummable and most festive ballet every Christmas since 1950, turning out a fresh reading every few years. This is quite feasible given that so little of the original 1892 production remains (the two pas de deux, the plot outline and the music, basically), leaving everything else up for grabs – a gift for designers and choreographers. The constant is Read more ...
David Nice
“Comedy is a serious thing,” quoth David Garrick. Gilbert and Sullivan knew it, and so does Mike Leigh, having bequeathed to ENO a clear and unfussy Pirates of Penzance. It does renewed honour to Victorian genius in Sarah Tipple’s freshly-cast revival. Most striking of all, perhaps, is how seriously conductor Natalie Murray Beale takes each musically rich number, vindicating Sullivan’s reputation as more than just a tunesmith to match Gilbert’s endlessly sharp and funny words.Fusion between pit and singers often attains perfection. William Morgan (pictured below with Isabelle Peters) as Read more ...
David Nice
Sparkling Italian comic opera might have been just the tonic at this time. Trouble is, the bar was set so high recently by Wexford Festival Opera’s Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali, aka Viva la Mamma, that this better known, less malleable if more romantic Donizetti comedy came across as flat, one-dimensional and not very funny (I laughed out loud once; maybe I need to get out less). Which is a shame, because the singers deserved better.They already faced three big problems. First, the spaces at the Coliseum – too big an auditorium for an intimate comedy, albeit with a major role for Read more ...
David Nice
At first, you wonder if the peculiar voice of Henry James’s maybe unreliable narrator can be preserved in this production. Surely the outcome is known if we first meet the Governess in an insane asylum bed? Yet whether she was mad or maddened during the course of terrifying events 30 years earlier remains crucially unclear. Between them director/designer Isabella Bywater, soprano Ailish Tynan and conductor Duncan Ward deliver all the frissons in Britten’s concentrated masterpiece.Bywater shows she knows the novella and the opera equally well in possibly the most intelligent programme essay I' Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini elevated the operatic tearjerker to tragic status in three masterpieces: La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Suor Angelica, rivalling the other two in intensity despite its brevity. Its special atmosphere works best as the central part of a trilogy (Il Trittico) between a dark melodrama and a pacy comedy. The jury’s still out on whether it works on its own, so disappointingly undernourished is Annilese Miskimmon’s production.For a start, Puccini’s delicate evocation of a cloister towards sunset in springtime, with crepuscular birdsong, doesn’t tally with the grim picture of pregnant girls Read more ...