WHAT'S WORTH WATCHING ON THE INTERNET THIS WEEK? 17 weeks and counting. 17 weeks since the theatres were closed and writing theatre reviews became redundant. 17 weeks since we all realized we had nowhere to go at night and we’d better find something else to do with our evenings or we’d be the wrong side of sane in short order. As some of you know, I was an arts producer for 30 years so my first port of call was my screen. No, not television, as there hasn’t been much to see on broadcast TV since the advent of cable. I graduated to Netflix, better, but not much. And then I learned to surf. What I found was an unimaginable feast of theatre, ballet, music, jazz, cabaret, documentary, and opera. Nearly all free and available at the click of a key. This, I had to share, and this blog/column/newsletter/digest (someone put me out of my misery and give it a name) is the result. Not theatre reviews anymore but a weekly Internet guide to the arts. To be able to hear jazzers, long dead but still playing on YouTube, to compare Kevin Kline and Andrew Scott taking on the same Noel Coward role in two generations, to listen to Barbara Cook or Luciano Pavarotti, to experience a ballet from Sydney or New York, to revel in a concert from one of the great orchestras of the world. That’s what we have right now and, despite the universal fear and misery of closed theatres and concert halls, and worse, unlike any generation before ours, we are lucky to have it. To my delight, I discovered that the modest few hundred who read my theatre reviews every week had grown to nearly a thousand and they, you, are everywhere. Every day, my inbox fills with comments from far flung places because you are reading this in Singapore and New Zealand as well as in London and New York. The internet is everywhere and so are readers who love the arts. So now I’ve got delusions of grandeur. What, I ask myself, and you, if we were to keep this going beyond coronavirus? I don’t know anything about arts marketing and social media but if you do, or know anybody who does, it might be worth extending the reach of this to many more arts lovers who are currently and, for the foreseeable future, bound to their home screens. If you can think of a marketing professional who might take this on, please let me know. 17 weeks and counting. We might just need this blog for a long time to come. Love Noel: The Songs and Letters of Noel Coward: A Performance on Screen https://irishrep.org/show/irish-rep-online-2020/love-noel-2/ Two of my favourite people are back in the ‘Noel Coward business’. This week, Aug 11-15, two cabaret greats, KT Sullivan and Steve Ross, are performing a streamed version of their Irish Rep pastiche about Noel Coward’s life and work. Fortunately, Coward left us his wit along with his songs and letters and both Sullivan and Ross are experts at reproducing it. The wit, that is. There will be six performances in which these two fabulous singers will give us 15 of Coward’s songs, quite a lot of his famous repartee, and read out letters to some of his good friends, including Gertrude Lawrence, Elaine Stritch and Greta Garbo. You’ll need reservations available from the website above. Rachel Marriner’s Recovering Misogynist – Aug 12-26 https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm&ogbl#inbox/FMfcgxwJXCHGZwqKrXfvqfQzwpQFHHJH From the predictable – let’s face it, we know what we’re getting with a cabaret performance of Noel Coward’s songs by recognised interpreters of his work – to something completely different, an experiment in digital theatre delivery read by the writer, Rachel Mariner, with images by Fourth Culture Films Ltd and Twoflix, and footage of Harvard Law School musical theatre West Law Story and The Malfeased Falcon. I have no idea what this is but it sounds intriguing as it bounds through Bluebeard, Mary Beard, Evangelical Christians, Occupy activists, lawyers in Washington, moms in Cambridge, the possibility of justice and you, the audience, as a kind of jury. Tickets are ‘Pay what you feel’, anything from £2.50 up, from the website. Aug 12-26. When you book you’ll be sent the link. It sounds weird, I like that. Young Stars of Ballet – Indianapolis City Ballet https://allarts.org/programs/young-stars-of-ballet/ This is enchanting, a documentary giving a glimpse of the lives of the young kids who are heading for the major ballet companies before they get there. Here is the work and the joy involved in the preparation for a very hard life, which is what they’re working toward. The commentary is a bit overdone but the interviews with the professionals who are guiding them along the way are sometimes eye-opening, and nothing beats the up-close view of morning class and the revelation, which isn’t a revelation at all when you think about it, that there’s no Swan Queen without this back-breaking, gravity-defying, pain-ignoring, endless slog in the practice and rehearsal rooms. There’s no substitute, no short cut. These are not infant prodigies, they’re young, very young, dancers from all over the world, on their way to a career in ballet. My favourite shot is of an 11-year, having completed an incredibly difficult solo variation, grinning at the applause and displaying a mouth full of braces. A Killer Party - Murder Mystery Musical https://www.todaytix.com/x/nyc/shows/22186-a-killer-party#noscroll?utm_source=email This sounds like fun for lovers of whodunnits, a new, online musical with nine 6-8 minute episodes, produced entirely during quarantine by more than 40 Broadway professionals. When theatre director Varthur McArthur invites his troupe to read his new “immersive murder mystery dinner party” script, the evening doesn’t go as planned. Or does it? The cast includes Laura Osnes, Jeremy Jordan, Alex Newell, and stars from Hamilton, Mean Girls, Waitress, Aladdin, and Wicked. A full-season pass, meaning access to all episodes, is $12.99 and ticket holders have access to the full series. Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak Live in Concert https://metstarslive.brightcove-services.com/?utm_source=820HighNotesAtHomeW22V2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2021_stream&utm_content=version_A This coming Sunday, August 16, at 1:30pm EDT, which is 6.30pm BST, tenor Roberto Alagna and his wife, soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, will be performing live from an outdoor terrace in Eze on the French Riviera. Is it very English of me to add, if the weather holds? It is hoped that, as the sun sets over the Mediterranean, the pair will sing a programme of romantic arias, duets, and songs. They will run from Madama Butterfly through Cavalleria Rusticana, Otello, L’Elisir d’Amore, even The Merry Widow. This is part of the new Metropolitan Opera series of live concerts of great stars of opera in beautiful locations around the world. The first was Jonas Kaufmann in Bavaria, then came Renee Fleming in Washington DC and this Sunday’s from the South of France will be the third. Because these concerts are live, and presumably very expensive to set up, there is a charge of $20, which doesn’t seem to me excessive for concerts of this calibre of singers. I just hope that the ticket money will go to some of the Met’s workers, the singers and musicians and technicians who are currently unemployed and not being paid because of the pandemic. I don’t object to paying for these concerts but I’d like to think whatever bounty there is, is being spread around. Metropolitan Opera Nightly Stream https://www.metopera.org/user-information/nightly-met-opera-streams/ If you don’t want to pay $20 to hear these two – Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak – or you want to audition them before you buy, you can find them on Tuesday, Aug 11th, starring in Bizet’s Carmen as part of the Met Opera’s Nightly Stream. This stream, in which the Met is releasing a different opera each evening at 7.30pm EDT (12.30am BST) and subsequently available for 24-hours so we can hear them in Europe at a more reasonable hour, is free and contains some of the greatest operas and artists available on the internet. In addition to Carmen, this week also includes Luciano Pavarotti in Rigoletto, Karita Mattila in Manon Lescaut, and the gorgeous Tristan und Isolde from 2008, with Deborah Voigt. Unlike the live concert series, these are all fully staged productions from the stage of the Met. What a treat. And they’re all free. Barbara Cook in Melbourne. https://youtu.be/a8U5L4J3bHc Words like ‘iconic’ and ‘legendary’ are so overused that I tend not to read any further when they crop up in a description of a performer or a performance but, just occasionally, the words are justified. Barbara Cook, when her musical theatre career ended, (and there are several contrasting stories about how and why that happened which I’ll tell you some other time) became, arguably, one of the greatest cabaret singers to grace a stage since cabaret began. Her limpid soprano could stop your heart and every line she sang had thought and meaning behind it. Her phrasing was impeccable. Sometimes she made you wait for a lyric but, when it came, it meant more than any other time you’d heard it. And every concert was different. Even if you knew her performance style and had heard her many times before, she was still surprising, every song. This concert, taped in Melbourne, Australia, in 1995, was sent to me by a friend who is also a Cook aficionado and, although the technical quality isn’t great, the singing is. She was 68 when she gave this concert and the voice was in better shape than ever. Barbara Cook died three years ago this week, in August 2017, at the age of 89, but we still have this. And at a time when the entire State of Victoria is locked down again because of coronavirus, it’s good to remember the beautiful city of Melbourne as it was and will be again, a place of welcome for the world’s greatest artists. Howard – Disney+ https://www.disneyplus.com/video/f4bac471-bb34-4f50-9b58-2efa2e169a28 If you still have your Disney+ subscription that you bought to watch Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, here’s another reason to keep it, an excellent film about the lyricist Howard Ashman who died of AIDs at the time of his biggest successes. He was the lyricist for Little Shop of Horrors, for The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. He died without knowing that he’d won, with his writing partner Alan Menken, another Oscar for his Aladdin lyrics. This is a lyrical film about his life and, in a wider context, about Hollywood and how Disney revived it with their animated films. Yes, it is self-serving in that there were other Hollywood successes in the same era but it could be reasonably claimed, and it is, here, that it was Howard Ashman and Alan Menken who give Disney, and by extension, Hollywood, a new lease on life. As he said himself, “The last great place to do Broadway musicals is in animation.” Howard Ashman was a major talent, a real loss to musical theatre and film, and this film shows why. A Stroll Through the Bronx – New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/arts/design/bronx-virtual-tour.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200805&instance_id=20988&nl=the-morning®i_id=6331304&segment_id=35289&te=1&user_id=83027c41d3f05329fc02574088fc83e7 This is another of those quirky online walks through the streets of New York with the architecture critic of the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman. I really like these little tours because they force me to see the city I love in ways I could never have imagined. New York is my second home and these tours make me look at it anew. This one is about the Bronx, the most unlovely of all the five boroughs, with Eric W. Sanderson, a conservation ecologist. Apparently, the Bronx was once a forest. Who knew? The original inhabitants, the Lenape tribe, knew, I expect.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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