My Night with Reg - Turbine Theatre Click here for tickets My Night with Reg by Kevin Elyot, won the 1995 Olivier Award for Best Comedy and this is a new production directed by Matt Ryan. Set in Guy’s London flat, old friends and new gather to party through the night. This is the summer of 1985 and, for Guy and his circle, the world is about to change forever. AIDs is on the march and it will inevitably touch the lives of this cheerful bunch of friends. This award winning comedy captures the fragility of friendship, happiness and life itself. Inevitably, it is not as funny, nor as shocking, as it was in its first production. We know more now about the AIDS epidemic that we didn’t know then. 16-26 Sept, then On Demand 27 Sept - 23 Oct £10 + £3 transaction fee The Diary of One Who Disappears - Janacek documentary Click here to watch My late friend and colleague Dennis Marks ran the BBC Arts and Music department for many years. He was also a considerable director of arts films. Thanks to my colleagues at Slippedisc.com, I have been reminded of one I had forgotten but which is definitely worth your time and mine. Apart from his most famous operas – Jenufa and The Cunning Little Vixen – I knew very little about the composer Leos Janacek and nothing at all about his song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappears. This is a 2004 documentary film directed by Dennis Marks which fills in many of the gaps and qualifies as a work of art in itself. Towards the end of his life, Janacek fell passionately in love with a much younger woman and the song cycle and all of his later works are thought to have been inspired by her. The tenor Ian Bostridge presents the film, and performs Janacek's song cycle with mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene, Thomas Ades accompanying on piano. Of Mice and Men – Westport Country Playhouse Click here for tickets In Connecticut, the Westport Country Playhouse continues to mine its vault of archived captures with this, their 2008 production of John Steinbeck’s own stage adaptation of his classic novella, Of Mice and Men, directed by Mark Lamos. It is a story about two migrant ranch workers, best friends, who move from place to place, seeking work and the promise of the American dream during the Great Depression. Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences working alongside migrant farm workers as a teenager in the 1910s. One man is intelligent, though uneducated. The other is mentally disabled, and at the time Steinbeck was writing, the 1930s, even less than the period he was writing about, the 1920s, mental illness was unknown or, at least, undiscussed. This was the first sensitive and sympathetic treatment of a defective mind in the dramatic literature and, although it has been criticised for its profanity and racism, it remains a significant milestone. The novella was turned into a play immediately on publication in 1937 and a movie in 1939. Sept. 13-26 $25 Jan Van Eyck – National Gallery Click here to watch This is another of the National Gallery’s 10-minute talks, this one about Van Eyck, from the curator Emma Capron. She manages to get excited, and make me excited, about a red turban. If she can do that with a hat, what else can she get excited about? Water by the Spoonful – Oregon Shakespeare Festival Click here for tickets This fearless, groundbreaking play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes in 2012. It deals with crack addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as the advantages and limits of connecting through the internet. Some scenes take place in online chat rooms, a storytelling device many viewers will experience differently today than when the play first surfaced. A janitor. A software mogul. A college grad. An IRS paper-pusher. Although they live thousands of miles apart, these four people share a secret: They’re recovering addicts who’ve found a safe haven in an online chat room. There, with liberal doses of jokes and bullying, they help each other navigate the broken terrain of their lives. But when an Iraq War veteran’s tragedy spills over into their cyberhome as he struggles to adapt to life when he returns home, everything changes. The play contains vivid descriptions of tragic occurrences from the past, including the violence of the Iraq War. In this 2014 production from The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, worlds virtual and real unfold, challenging notions of family, forgiveness, community, and courage. Through Sept. 25; $15 Ballet Coast to Coast – Jacob’s Pillow Click here to RSVP Jacob’s Pillow, that exemplary dance centre deep in the Berkshires – theirs, not ours – has done a wonderful job this summer, both with live performances in their idyllic Massachusetts setting and, of even more interest to those of us unable to be there in person, online. I hope that next summer Jacob’s Pillow will continue to make their outstanding dance performances available to us in more farflung audiences. This is their final online presentation of their summer season and it promises to be a whopper. Leading artists from Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet take the stage in a Jacob’s Pillow-exclusive programme that highlights the stunning range of ballet in the United States today. It features performances from dancers of each company (Red Angels by Ulysses Dove, Reflections by Justin Peck, Sons de L’ame by Stanton Welch, Home Studies (for the stage) by Helen Pickett) and culminate with them performing together for the first time in Second to Last, a work by Pacific Northwest Ballet’s resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo, inspired by and set to the music of Arvo Pärt. The programme is free to watch but you need to RSVP. On-demand through Sept 23 Me and the Devil - Lantern Theater Click here for tickets Have you ever wanted something so much that you'd make a deal with the Devil? The Lantern Theater Company in Philadelphia is presenting this world premiere of Steve H Broadnax and Charles Dumas’ play with music about the great blues musician Robert Johnson starring Lawrence Stallings. Legend has it that Robert Leroy Johnson struck a deal with the Devil to be the best blues musician who ever lived. In this dramatic play with music, Johnson aims to break that deal as his spirit calls his family, friends, and lovers to bear witness to his superlative talent and fearlessness. On demand now through Oct 17 $20 You’ll Never Walk Alone - 9/11 Memorial Click here to watch This is what made me cry this week. Broadway and Metropolitan Opera star Kelli O'Hara performed this song at New York's 9/11 memorial service at ground zero twenty years after the terrorist attack that destroyed the Twin Towers and broke the heart of New York.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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