Coppelia – La Scala Click here for tickets When I was a very little girl, a friend of my mother’s took me to Covent Garden to see my first ballet. You can imagine how impressive it was for this five-year old to enter the red and gold magnificence that was the Royal Opera House. I, who never stopped talking, was struck dumb and stayed that way for the two-hour span, though my mother’s friend kept trying to elicit my opinion during the interval, about the auditorium, the dancers, and the entire experience. Not until we were outside those big glass doors on Floral Street did my tongue loosen and the impressions pour out in a torrent of words so voluble that she could remind me of what I had said for the next 40 years until her death. That was the day I resolved that ballet was going to be part of my life forever. The ballet, I recall even today in precise detail, was not Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, it was Coppelia, the one about the doll-maker whose neighbours invade his workshop and pretend to bring the inanimate dolls to life. Now there is a new production of Coppelia by Alexei Ratmansky, the former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet who, having left Russia in protest following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is currently artist in residence of the New York City Ballet. Ratmansky is the world’s foremost choreographer and any new work by him is worth crossing a continent to see. His Swanilda (the naughty neighbour who leads her friends into Dr Coppelius’ workshop) is Italian star ballerina Nicoletta Manni, with Timofej Andrijashenko as Franz,( who gets caught up in her plan}, and Christian Fagetti as Dr Coppelius. On a romantic note, as if being at the ballet weren't romance enough, Swanilda and Franz became engaged on stage last week when Andrijashenko went down on one knee and proposed, in front of the entire cast and audience. Fortunately, Manni accepted or there could have been a nasty moment at La Scala which has seen so many of them. It goes without saying that the 5-year old who was enthralled by Coppelia totally missed the somewhat creepy plot details where Franz falls under the spell of the beautiful, eerily lifelike doll Coppélia or the rather sinister character of Dr Coppelius. Despite this lapse of appreciation, made up for many times since, the Delibes music is as enchanting as ever and the ballet never fails to turn me back into a ballet-obsessed 5-year old. I hope it has the same effect on you. You have to be a Medici.tv Premium User to watch this but it’s available on a week’s free trial if preferred. The Crucible – National Theatre Click here for tickets Speak of the devil and he appears. A witch hunt is beginning in Salem. Raised to be seen and not heard, a group of young women in a small New England town suddenly find their words have a terrible power. As a climate of fear spreads through the community, private vendettas fuel public accusations and soon the truth itself is on trial. The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people including Arthur Miller, who were accused, on the flimsiest of evidence, of being communists. The Crucible won the Best Play Tony Award in 1953 although Miller didn’t care for the production and the reviews were less than enthusiastic. There was another Broadway production less than a year later which was a tremendous hit but that didn’t save Miller from being questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-AmericanActivities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Now Arthur Miller’s gripping parable of power and its abuse returns to the National Theatre in an urgent new staging by director Lyndsey Turner. The Crucible, constantly revived in English and translation throughout the world, is an unassailable classic of the American theatre. In this production, with a huge cast, Brendan Cowell is John Proctor. Erin Doherty is Abigail. Exhibition Tour—Africa & Byzantium Click here to watch Art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire (circa 330–1453), but less known are the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world. Bringing together a range of masterworks—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, paintings, and religious manuscripts—this exhibition recounts Africa’s central role in international networks of trade and cultural exchange. With artworks rarely or never before seen in public, Africa & Byzantium sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of medieval Africa. This long-overdue exhibition highlights how the continent contributed to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the vibrant multiethnic societies of north and east Africa that shaped the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond. Our guide to this virtual tour of the exhibition about Africa & Byzantium is its curator, Dr. Andrea Myers Achi. She is Associate Curator of Byzantine Art in The Met’s Department of Medieval Art. She certainly knows her stuff but her narration needs a lot of concentration because she speaks so quickly and with so little expression that she’s often hard to follow. I had to go back several times to ensure that I understood her erudite but often hard-to-follow comments. But be patient. This is a wonderful exhibition and this virtual tour is essential viewing as a precursor for anyone who is going to see it in person at the Met. Memorial For Us All - Brian Stokes Mitchell Click here to watch If you are not familiar with Brian Stokes Mitchell, all I can say is that you’re missing one of the gems of the American musical theatre and, arguably, my favourite leading man. Brian Stokes Mitchell is an American actor and singer. A powerful baritone, he has been one of the central leading men of the Broadway theater since the 1990s. He has received numerous accolades including a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and a nomination for a Grammy Award. In 2016 he received the Isabelle Stevenson Award. In this simple-seeming video, accompanied by pianist Tedd Firth, Tony Award-winner Brian Stokes Mitchell, ‘Stokes’, as he is known to his many friends, does something very simple and, at the same time, very difficult. He simply stands against a plain background, with a single microphone, and sings. No props, no set, no costume, no lighting, just a man singing some famous and beautiful songs as a tribute to honor those lost to COVID-19. He offers these songs, #MemorialForUsAll, to provide unity, comfort, and healing. As he says, music unlocks thoughts, feelings, and memories that unite and free us. Pocket Review Rock ‘n’ Roll – Hampstead Theatre This sturdy revival of Tom Stoppard’s play at Hampstead, directed by Nina Raine, takes place between Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, in other words, between 1968 and 1989, in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge. Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), Czech post-Graduate, clashes with his Cambridge tutor, Max (Nathaniel Parker) over their differing views about the mass protests and uprisings which are beginning to take hold in Czechoslovakia. Max is a lifelong Communist, his commitment to the ideology unshaken by the movement for liberalisation which he sees as entirely negative. Jan, obsessed with Western pop, collector of illegal recordings and a great admirer of the legendary Czech group The Plastic People of the Universe, sees in the music and the protests the future for his country. But, as always with Stoppard, before you become too bogged down in the politics and the rhetoric and the long speeches about ideology, the people take over. You always want to get to know his people better and particularly here, even if your interest in Balkan politics is minor, they are all worth knowing. Not just Jan and Max, but also Max’s dying wife, Elinor, (a wonderful Nancy Carroll who in the second act takes on the role of her daughter, Esme) a classics tutor who understands the impact of history. Every character in Rock ‘n’ Roll is written into the play for a specific reason which, if that is your bent, you can actually diagram but, why bother, when each is so individually significant and signals their place in Stoppard’s carefully worked-out pattern. And slowly his point, the central conflict becomes manifest, between communism and socialism, between youth and age, between traditional and contemporary music and therefore between traditional and contemporary values. And because this is a history play and we know how things turned out in what became the Czech Republic, we can evaluate the value of protest and revolution and how they play out in our own time.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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