What's Good on the Internet This Week? There is good news this morning for all of us who work in entertainment. Today, Monday July 6th, 2020, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced an allocation of a £1.57 billion, yes, billion, rescue package “to help cultural, arts, and heritage institutions weather the impact of coronavirus”. This is about theatre jobs and buildings. It is a direct result of the organising efforts of individual theatre workers themselves, who, together with their once and future employers and supporters, have been writing, signing petitions, making speeches, pressuring the government relentlessly and making clear both their plight and their determination not to be ignored. It seems to have paid off. I suspect that until this groundswell happened from the inside, the government had no idea of the scale of the problems and the extent of the solidarity of the workers. At the same time, in some ways just as importantly, Netflix has given £500,000 to SOLT (the Society of London Theatre) to provide individual grants of up to £1000 for individual theatre workers and freelancers with nowhere else to turn. More than 80% of those who work in entertainment are out of work and these two pieces of news will keep us warm until we find out how the government money is to be spent. Nick Cordero I read with sadness this morning of the death of Broadway musical actor Nick Cordero. He has died of Covid-19 at the age of 41. He was nominated for a Tony for his performance in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Throughout his terrible illness, his wife, Amanda Kloots, has chosen to share information about his condition on social media. This death, of a supremely talented member of our theatre world, has hit us all hard. I never met him but followed his career and watched again today this number from Bullets Over Broadway. A personal tragedy for his wife and family, Nick Cordero’s death, and that of other show business friends, is a loss for us all. Just look what he could do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDtA0Krpcyr60&v=tA0Krpcyr60&feature=emb_rel_end Opera Italia https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sjdmp/opera-italia-1-beginnings I missed this glorious series when it aired on the BBC and only caught up with it this week when I was chasing a different programme. Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera, hosts three programmes on the history of opera. He brings not only his charm and knowledge but also the gravitas and musicianship that comes with the job. He brings to life the composers, the places, and the individuals who developed the form from Monteverdi who invented it, to Puccini. I couldn’t tear myself away. If you love opera, you won’t be able to either. Cinderella – July 8-10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBrNgyqPxkI&feature=youtu.be Ballet in the round still looks peculiar to an eye accustomed to seeing it head on but sometimes it works. This Christopher Wheeldon production from last year fills the enormous playing area of the Royal Albert Hall with 130 dancers, puppets, projections, Prokofiev’s music, and colourful designs by Julian Crouch. The twirling guests at Cinderella’s ball provides a spectacle of movement and colour to please those of us who are a bit jaded with the succession of two-person plays on Zoom. The casting is the best the English National Ballet can offer and their best can be pretty damn good with Alina Cojocaru as Cinderella and Tamara Rojo herself as the Wicked Stepmother. The Prince is Isaac Hernandez. Take particular note of Natasha Katz’s lighting design in this production – it’s what makes this ballet in the round work visually. That, and 130 dancers on stage at the same time. The Deep Blue Sea - July 9-16 -National Theatre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw68DjwzexU&list=PLJgBmjHpqgs5yAmjGVeaA6Zus60ijnmF0 In 1956 John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger hit London with the force of a hurricane, and the ‘Angry Young Man’ plays had arrived. The Royal Court, then the crucible of new dramatic writing, led the way to this invasion and it was quite some time before the playwrights who had been swept out of the way in the onslaught could be seen as other than old-fashioned and no longer fit for purpose. Perhaps the greatest casualty of this bloodless coup was Terence Rattigan, only now being rediscovered and regaining what I consider to be his rightful place in dramatic literature. Rattigan was, I believe, a truly important writer, and history is only now giving his plays the respect and admiration they deserve. The Deep Blue Sea is, I think, the greatest of them but was unfortunate enough to be set in that period immediately after the war that the theatrical intelligentsia badly wanted to forget. Amongst its other attributes, it has a woman at its centre, one of the finest female roles written in the 20th century. She is Hester, respectable wife of a High Court judge who loves her but has lost her to Freddie, a dashing younger man, a former pilot and war ace. Hester’s sexual obsession has caused her to leave her husband and move with Freddie into a sordid cold water flat. A long war of deprivation, longing and loss has made women of Hester’s age and station especially vulnerable, something that Rattigan understood and sympathised with. This National Theatre production, directed by Carrie Cracknell, starring Helen McCrory as Hester and Tom Burke as the careless and uncaring Freddie, also has a splendid performance from Peter Sullivan as Hester’s abandoned husband. Hester Collyer is a role that every dramatic actress wants to play, as all male actors want to play Hamlet. Helen McCrory more than justifies her place in the pantheon of great Hesters. Remember Victor Borge? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyLSplHi9y0 Many American professional musicians will tell you that they first became interested in classical music by watching Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts on Sunday afternoons on CBS. But there’s another musician who grabbed the attention of children everywhere with his fall-down-funny performances at about the same time. As a child I screamed with laughter at Victor Borge, a Danish pianist with a dry, laconic style. His comedy takes a moment to hit and then it does and you smile all the way. Gentle, with perfect timing, it was his television performances that first made me listen to the music and gave me a lifelong love for the piano. If I had one complaint, even then, it was that he never played any piece to the end. He was, in fact, a great pianist, up there with the best, but he always managed to interrupt himself to make us laugh. Now almost forgotten, I found this Victor Borge special on the internet, checked it out, and got hooked all over again. The technical quality is terrible, the content is just as fresh and wonderful as ever. I hope you enjoy it as much as the 10-year old me did. A Curated Look at Paintings of Remembrance - National Gallery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4uMCnH03zE&feature=emb_rel_end I’m loving the little lectures from art historians and curators from the galleries and museums we can’t visit at the moment, particularly those from the Frick Museum in New York and the National Gallery in London. These experts clearly love the paintings they work with every day, regard them as dear friends, and miss them even more than we do. It is so obvious that they relish the opportunity of sharing them with us. Here’s a young curator at the National Gallery with a short talk about works from different periods which share the theme of remembering. Romeo And Juliet – Royal Ballet - July 10-23 https://www.roh.org.uk/tickets-and-events/romeo-and-juliet-stream-details 43 curtain calls and 40 minutes of applause greeted the Covent Garden premiere of Kenneth Macmillan’s masterpiece in 1965 and it didn’t hurt that the leading roles were taken by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. But the work stands up even without the participation of the icons of ballet and Prokofiev’s music still stirs the blood of current Royal Ballet audiences. Once the hysteria of the opening season had died down we discovered that there was much more to this Romeo & Juliet than that famous pas de deux. Matthew Ball is no Nureyev, of course, nobody is, but his precision of footwork and joyous elevation puts him in my top tier of male dancers and the delightful Yasmine Naghdi has the requisite delicacy for Juliet’s solos. First Do No Harm – Old Vic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKGHWwOp5qk This is the latest in a series of monologues curated by Lolita Chakrabarti for the Old Vic, collectively titled The Greatest Wealth – In Celebration of the NHS. This one is by the Booker Prize-winning author Bernadine Evaristo and might be of particular interest to American readers and viewers as the concept of a National Health Service, free at the point of delivery to everyone in the UK, is difficult to grasp in a country where health is a commercial commodity, available only to those who can afford it. First Do No Harm is performed by Olivier Award winner Sharon D. Clarke and is concerned with what the NHS does for every citizen, even, or especially, at this time when it is needed more than ever. There is one of these monologues for each decade that the NHS has been in existence. They are all available from the Old Vic YouTube website. The series is directed by Adrian Lester. Wiener Cello Ensemble
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10Aasl6BTPA8r9Z7f_D2-7DNC0ADzzLF2/view I keep saying I’m tired of Ravel’s Bolero (I can’t count how many I’ve been sent) and have announced that I wouldn’t include even one more in this newsletter but this one, sent by a friend in Edinburgh, simply refused to be left out. You’ll see why.
1 Comment
|
AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|