Opera

Are standards slipping at English National Opera? It’s one thing to rent the place out to Michael Grade in a slack period and smile and pretend to be nice when he casts Katherine Jenkins in a leading...

With the possible exception of my own heterosexual betrothal one heady night in Malta in 1976, I can think of few projects more certifiably doomed to failure than The Dowager’s Oyster. As a succession of...

No, not that Norma, this Norma. We’ll be reporting on Glenn Close’s return to Paramount at ENO early in April. Thirty years ago I played the gay character Sparger in Kennedy’s Children. Some nights,...

How charming is Barnes? And how posh – even the flats above Londis have chandeliers. Nothing but waves of goodness and gentility, then, as we find the OSO arts and performance space carved from the back...

If you enjoyed the ITV Sound of Music 'live' - or even if like me you thought Kara Tointon wasn't really up to it and the whole production felt a bit clunky - you may have been struck by how both...

French and Saunders did a wonderful sketch, with Sarah Walker and Carl Davis, in which the pair spoofed opera divas self-consciously ‘doing comedy’ and sang a piece by Kylie Minogue. There’s a...

If you’ve never seen traditional opera – as opposed to the mucked-about-with stuff in pubs we also love - or never been to Covent Garden, Richard Eyre’s grandiose, beautiful-to-look-at, lush La Traviata...

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...