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Pirates of Penzance – Gilbert and Sullivan Click here for tickets Several of you have asked me to find some Gilbert & Sullivan to lighten your lockdown blues and it turns out that Sasha Regan’s All Male Company of pirates and their winsome lasses are set to bring audiences several nights of joy and laughter this Easter with their inventive take on G &S’s much-loved Pirates of Penzance. This is a very jolly production featuring a shipshape cast singing favourites such as “I am a Pirate King”; “Oh, happy day, with joyous glee” and "A rollicking band of pirates we". It was filmed live at the Palace Theatre in December 2020 and raised the roof. Mar 29-Apr 5 £15 + £3 transaction fee Metropolitan Opera – Love Triangles Click here to watch This week, the Met’s free streams get tangled up in some of opera’s juiciest love triangles. Massenet’s heartbreaking Werther is on offer, Jonas Kaufmann with the additional attraction of the Met debut of soprano Sophie Koch, and here’s also the classic production of Il Trovatore with Luciano Pavarotti and Eva Marton. Bellini’s fiery bel-canto Norma is graced by Sondra Radvanovsky and Joyce DiDonato and there’s a charming L’Elisir d’Amore with Matthew Polenzani and Anna Netrebko. But my pick of the week would be Strauss’s Capriccio with Renee Fleming as Countess Madeleine at the centre of the competition between Flamand (Joseph Kaiser) and Olivier (Russell Braun) With this fabulous music, can she resist either the poet or the composer? Amour – Michel Legrand Click here for tickets This show has had a chequered history but at a time when we all feel stuck behind walls it’s fun to imagine the possibility of walking through them and out into the world and thus making the world a better place. Amour is set in Paris shortly after World War II. It is about a shy, unassuming clerk who develops the ability to walk through walls, and who challenges himself to stick to his moral centre and change others' lives, and his own, as a result. The conventional wisdom is that the French don't understand musical theatre and, certainly, this one would seem to prove the point, but that flies in the face of one of the most successful musicals of all time, Les Miserables by Alain Boublil, Jean-Michel Schoenberg and Herbert Kretzmer, except to note that the only place this international blockbuster was not a success was in Paris. Amour has a beautiful score by Michel Legrand and Didier van Caulweaert, with an English book and lyrics by Jeremy Sams, It is adapted from a short story by Marcel Ayme. It oozes charm, but it’s very lightness and insubstantiality may be the reason why it has never been a critical success despite short runs on Broadway and in London. Livestreamed, three performances only Apr 2/3/4 $20 Barbra - Sing a Song Click here to watch You won’t have seen Barbra Streisand for a while. She performs so rarely that we’ve forgotten what it was that made her a worldwide superstar. Here’s just one medley from a long-forgotten television special to remind us. Here, she sings with a huge orchestra replete with all kinds of odd instruments such as a musical saw and at no point is she overwhelmed by the vast number of musicians. She never misses a note or an intonation. She is completely on top of her material and knows exactly what she wants to do with this song and how she wants to make us feel. She’s simply unique. She’s Barbra. The Merry Family - Rijksmuseum at Home Click here to watch My inbox reflects the pleasure so many of you are taking in discovering online, with the help of expert art historians, the paintings in our galleries and museums. Many of these are works we already know from visits to the museums but, since we didn’t meet the curators, and aren't experts ourselves, we have missed so many of the details of paintings we thought we knew well. The pandemic has brought some of those wonderful curators out of their hiding places and allowed them to display their knowledge and expertise on video. I’ve shared a number of the Frick’s Cocktails with a Curator videos with you but here’s a new addiction. This is Amsterdam’s glorious Rijksmuseum, painting by painting. Not just Rembrandt but also Jan Steen, as explicated by the Rijksmuseum’s Head of Paintings and Sculpture Pieter Roelofs in this short video about The Merry Family. A Midsummer Night's Dream – Shake Festival Click here for tickets Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Luisa Omielan, Robert Hands and Wendy Morgan lead an exciting international cast in a fully rehearsed online reading of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most enchanting play. Both Rebecca Hall and the director of this production, Jenny Hall, are among the many children of the late great theatre director, Peter Hall. All his children are talented, which is not surprising when you think that Rebecca is his daughter from his marriage to the opera singer Maria Ewing and Jenny is his daughter by Leslie Caron. By the way, this live performance can be watched from anywhere in the world. But only on the date specified. Mar 31 at 7.30pm BST – 2.30pm ET £10 Elite Syncopations – Royal Ballet Click here for tickets In 1974, Kenneth MacMillan set out to create ‘something short and light and funny’, and here is the result. This 35-minute ballet is one of the most fun pieces in the Royal Ballet repertory. With music by African-American composer Scott Joplin (the 'King of Ragtime') and the ballet's staging and choreography demonstrating the influence of Black Social Dance styles, there is much to celebrate here about the diverse cultural influences that make ballet what it is today. This video was shot during The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage performance in October 2020, that little window when the Company could perform together on stage, before they, and we, were locked down again. £3 Mar 12-Apr 11 Talking Gods Festival – Greek myths, new plays Click here to watch This is a digital festival of five plays by Ross McGregor which reimagine classic Greek myths to examine vital contemporary issues some of which have become heightened during the pandemic. It has a pretty good cast including Nicolle Smartt in a tale of sisterhood, Persephone. Orpheus delves into the world of mental health, starring Christopher Neels and Charlie Ryall. Pygmalion has Richard Baker and Gabrielle Nellis-Pain and Edward Spence in this intriguing tale of artificial intelligence. Buck Braithwaite and Benjamin Garrison perform Aphrodite, which explores gender identity and acceptance, and the final play in the digital series will be Icarus, starring Adam Elliott and Lucy Ioannou. Apr 5-9 Scaramouche Jones Click here for tickets Shane Richie, star of Eastenders, tries his hand at a one-man drama, a darkly comic play by Justin Butcher about the great clown, following his last performance. It recounts an epic tale of a life shaped by extraordinary misfortunes, from the shores of Trinidad to England by way of slave ships, Italian royalty, and Croatian concentration camps. A witness to pivotal moments of the 20th century, Scaramouche finds himself at the dawn of a new millennium, marking his own centenary and preparing for death.. £15 plus £3 transaction fee Mar 26-Apr 11 I See a Rainbow – Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene Click here to watch As many of you know, this week is Passover and, just as there’s an Irish theatre in New York, so too is there a Yiddish theatre which keeps this ancient culture and language alive. They have sent me this most beguiling video of children singing about a rainbow. Whatever your religion, you can’t fail to be enchanted by it. Ever since it showed up in my inbox I've been playing it over and over again as the best ever cheerer-upper.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
March 2024
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