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Frederick Ashton’s Tales of Beatrix Potter – Royal Ballet Click here for tickets Want to see a bunny dance? Of course you do. It’s Easter and here’s the bunny. This is Frederick Ashton’s adorable ballet which he made for a film in 1971, here in a 1992 stage production for the Royal Ballet by Anthony Dowell. Tales of Beatrix Potter brings alive, with rich characterisation and invention, the famous images and stories of Beatrix Potter. Swept up in the ballet's childlike exuberance, the entire cast delivers outstanding portrayals of such colourful figures as Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mr Jeremy Fisher, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and the irrepressible Peter Rabbit. Frederick Ashton's warm and witty, yet demanding, choreography creates a piece of charm and grace for all ages. John Lanchbery's music (incorporating mostly forgotten Victorian melodies) is utterly captivating, inspiring spirited playing from the Royal Ballet Sinfonia conducted by Paul Murphy. Christine Edzard's designs conjure up a lost England of field mice and Berkshire black pigs, of foxgloves and shady groves. St John Passion – Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Click here for tickets Did I say it’s Easter? Well, for more grown-up tastes, here’s Bach’s St. John’s Passion from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Bach’s monumental St John Passion is not just a beautiful piece of music; it is a meditation on suffering and an attempt to make some sense of it. Since our lives have been disrupted by the pandemic, the Passion now speaks to us from a fresh understanding of suffering and ignites in us a personal sense of compassion and empathy. In this co-production by Marquee TV and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, you can bear witness to a new filmed realisation of the Passion. For those who don’t know this remarkable orchestra, their story started more than three decades ago when a group of musicians took a good look at that curious institution we call the orchestra, and decided to start again from scratch. They began by throwing out the rulebook. Put a single conductor in charge? No way. Specialise in repertoire of a particular era? Too restricting. Perfect a work and then move on? Too lazy. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was born. Questioning. Challenging. Trailblazing. This revolutionary way of making music continues to this day. Directed by rockstar cinematographer Grant Gee, the camera focus is on the faces, instruments and emotions to reveal an intimate Passion experience, like never before. Sung by Mark Padmore, the Word is spoken by Nakhane Nakhane. Don't forget to register with Marquee.TV first. The Harlem Renaissance and TransAtlantic Modernism Click here to watch This is a virtual tour of the groundbreaking exhibition - The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism – which is just about to open at the Met, led by the Curator, Dr. Denise M. Murrell. The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, the exhibition will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first art museum survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art. Simon Rattle conducts LSO American music Click here for tickets Join Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra for an All-American concert featuring gorgeous works from Gershwin, a little-known symphony from Roy Harris, and the exciting world premiere of John Adams's new work, ''Frenzy.'' Get a taste of the razzle-dazzle of the Roaring Twenties with fantastically showy Gershwin overtures and a brilliant performance of Gershwin's jazzy ''Piano Concerto in F'' played by award-winning soloist Kirill Gerstein. Plus, hear a rarely performed symphonic epic by American composer Roy Harris before the much-anticipated world premiere of John Adams' latest work. Commissioned by the LSO and dedicated to Sir Simon Rattle, Adams's new ''Frenzy,'' packs a hard-hitting punch in just 18 short minutes. The programme includes: Overture: Strike Up the Band – George Gershwin Overture: Let ‘em Eat Cake - George Gershwin Piano Concerto in F - George Gershwin Symphony No 3 - Roy Harris and the world premiere of Frenzy – John Adams I Heard it Through the Grapevine – Marvin Gaye Click here to watch Marvin Gaye personified soul music. Every song he sang was embued with extreme emotional intensity, nothing held back, nothing hidden. A upbringing full of personal turmoil caused him to be something of a nomad, living in many places, often depressed and, for a while, settling in Belgium. Violence and disunity haunted him and thoughts of suicide rarely left him. His life was ended senselessly in 1984 on the day before his 45th birthday when, trying to intervene in a fight between his parents, he was shot by his father with whom he had always had a troubled relationship. So what made me open my personal Marvin Gaye archive to remember what made him great? What brings him to mind now is that this week a reported treasure trove of recordings, papers, compositions, and other hitherto unknown archive material generated by Marvin Gaye, has surfaced in the house he lived in in Ostend. So far, we know nothing about the contents as the tapes belong to the current owners but the music on them belongs to Gaye’s estate. This is his biggest hit, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, in a live performance from 1968. Other Motown artists recorded this song but this is the one that really captures how a true artist can express deep emotion musically using simple words and chord sequences, in this case the grief that a love has ended. Marvin Gaye was cool. And real. You’ll see. POCKET REVIEWS Plays seem to be coming in pairs at the moment. A few weeks ago I wrote about two plays set in 1936 at the time of The Battle of Cable Street. Last week I reviewed two new plays about the birth of the NHS. This week I saw two plays about star actresses coming to terms with aging. Opening Night – Gielgud Theatre This one is a hot mess. The much vaunted Dutch director Ivo van Hove has adapted and directed the 1977 John Cassavetes’ film about a leading lady buckling under the strain of opening a new play, pummeling it into a musical with songs by Rufus Wainwright. Poor Sheridan Smith, the tattooed lady, is stuck with a role that even Sarah Siddons couldn’t make sense of (more on her later). As she disintegrates, and Sheridan Smith fans will remember that she did exactly that during the West End run of Funny Girl, which is creepy to watch in fictional form, van Hove saddles her with screens, scrims, a huge but underused cast, videographers wandering around on the stage making nonsense of the action, scenes which go nowhere and scenes which seem to belong in another play, live video displayed on a huge screen behind the action, even an overactive ghost. Rufus Wainwright’s songs, the best part of the production, get lost in the melee. After about 10 minutes I lost the desire to work out what was going on. After 20, I lost the will to live. The Divine Mrs S – Hampstead Theatre This one is a lot more fun, not to mention a lot easier to follow. Not surprisingly, the writer April de Angelis has a lot to say in The Divine Mrs S about the paucity of opportunity for female playwrights and much of it is very funny, if also heartfelt. The Mrs S of the title is the unassailable actress of her day, Sarah Siddons. When we meet her on Hampstead’s stage, in Lez Brotherston’s splendid design for Drury Lane, she is, she tells us, “forty…..……two”. Trying to convince us that she is only still acting to support her feckless (unseen) husband and children, we know instinctively that the theatre is the air she breathes and that the extravagant praise she receives from audiences, critics, and censors, is her meat and drink. Sarah Siddons, played with gusto and strength by Rachael Stirling, was, by any measure and by all contemporary reports, a truly great actor, able to shine in roles from milksop wives to a cross-dressing Hamlet. She has been the toast of London all her life, born to the Regency’s most prominent theatre family, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, performing for the Royal Family, one of the highest paid working women in the world. Her brother, John Philip Kemble (Dominic Rowan in a clever and funny performance), who owns the Drury Lane Theatre, is her manager and leading man. She knows exactly how to play the celebrity game, charming and bullying by turn, retaining the love of the fickle London audience including critics and censors, throughout her career. But now she is “forty…..two” and she wants grown-up roles more in keeping with her intelligence and power. She wants to choose her own part and she finds it in a play written by a woman. It opens to great acclaim until it is discovered that the playwright is female. It fails, ticket sales immediately fall off, and the playwright, Joanna Bailey, – Eve Feiler in a career-making performance – never writes another, despite Mrs Siddons’ entrieaties. April de Angelis, a top contemporary female playwright, has turned this true account of theatre life in the Regency into a funny and truthful play, finding all the humour and pathos in a woman who, though successful, is facing age and irrelevance head on and trying to find her way to an uncertain future. So different from the messy finale of Opening Night which Van Hove has given a preposterous happy ending and poor Sheridan Smith and the rest of the company a cheerful song and dance denoument which would be more believable in a Jerry Herman musical, say, Hello Dolly!
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
March 2024
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