Opera

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...

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...