Opera

Maybe the Mayor of London should ban Sweeney Todd? With elections looming do we really need negative propaganda which describes this city as ‘filled with shit’ and ‘not worth what a pig could spit’....

The Mikado has to be Gilbert and Sullivan’s most accessible operetta. And with its princeling-in-disguise and not-quite-innocent heroine as his eventual bride, it’s not so far from pantomime that you...

It’s good news that English National Opera has invested in its first ‘new’ production of Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West in fifty years.  That it’s a less popular work is surprising given...

You could plot it yourself: randy US lieutenant has an affair with an Asian babe in wartime, it means more to her than it does to him, her family shuns her and when he goes back to the States, she’s dumped...

Anyone who remembers the movie Amadeus will be familiar with Mozart’s debts, ill health, rivalry with Salieri and issues with the Masonic brotherhood which appeared to run Vienna like a Sachertorte-munching...

If you saw the header ‘Opera Review’ and thought ‘not for me’, stick with us for a moment. We’ve always thought Carmen was the crossover vehicle for people who don’t think they like opera: it has...

The warehouse in which English National Opera parks its costumes and sets between performances must be the size of Yorkshire. This production of ‘The Magic Flute’ was first directed and designed a quarter...

We’re not ones to tut-tut about moral standards in the London theatre but this is the second show in two nights where the eponymous heroine does cocaine onstage. And you don’t expect that from the...

It’s a weekend night and we’re standing in Heaven cruising the hot bodies on stage and the trendy polysexual crowd below. The only differences from 1987 are that this time we’re not high on a cocktail of...

We have been here before. Many times, it feels: ‘stripped-down’ pub opera featuring the concomitant apparatus of skinny jeans, transfer tattoos, funky tights, DMs, bad haircuts, jazz beards and studentish...